Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/319

THE EXPERIMENTAL THEOBY OF KNOWLEDGE. 305 determinable relations exist among the elements. The smell will present itself indifferently as a condition of the organism or as a trait of some other object, the rose ; or, in exceptional cases, to be referred exclusively to the organism, as initiator of the operations indicated by the odour and terminated in the rose, while as defining the goal of operations and fulfil- ment of meaning it is a property of the object. To smells as themselves objects of cognition, many other traits and relations similarly attach themselves all having reference,, sooner or later, to the more effective and judicious use of odours as cognitionally significant of other things. In this reflective determination of things with reference to their specifically meaning other things, experiences of ful- filment, disappointment and going astray inevitably play an important and recurrent rSle. They also are realistic facts, related in realistic ways to the things that intend to mean other things and to the things intended. When these fulfil- ments and refusals are reflected upon in the determinate rela- tions in which they stand to their relevant meanings, they obtain a quality which is quite lacking to them in their immediate occurrence as just fulfilments or disappointments ; viz., the property of affording assurance and correction of confirming and refuting. Truth and falsity are not pro- perties of any experience or thing, in and of itself or in its first intention ; but of things where the problem of assurance con- sciously enters in. Truth and falsity present themselves as sig- nificant facts only in situations in which specific meanings and their already experienced fulfilments and non-fulfilments are inten- tionally compared and contrasted with reference to the question of the worth, as to reliability of meaning, of the given meaning or class of meanings. Like knowledge itself, truth is an experi- enced relation of characteristic quality of things, and it has no meaning outside of such relation, any more than such ad- jectives as comfortable applied to a lodging, correct applied to speech, persuasive applied to an orator, etc., have worth apart from the specific things to which they are applied. It would be a great gain for logic and epistemology, if we would always translate the noun ' truth ' back into the adjective ' true,' and this back into the adverb ' truly '. l So far as this type of reflexion supervenes, we have know- 1 It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of meaning with a specific promise, undertaking or intention expressed by a cognitional thing which underlies, so far as I can see, the criticisms passed upon the experimental or pragmatic view of truth. It is the same failure which is responsible for the wholly at large view of truth which charac- terises the absolutists.