You are sure to get truth if you can but
name the kind rightly, for your mental relations hold good of
everything of that kind without exception. If you then,
nevertheless, failed to get truth concretely, you would say that you
had classed your real objects wrongly.
In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of
leading. We relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the
end great systems of logical and mathematical truth, under the
respective terms of which the sensible facts of experience
eventually arrange themselves, so that our eternal truths hold good
of realities also. This marriage of fact and theory is endlessly
fertile. What we say is here already true in advance of special
verification, IF WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS RIGHTLY. Our ready-
made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from
the very structure of our thinking. We can no more play fast and
loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with our
sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently,
whether or not we like the results. The rules of addition apply to
our debts as rigorously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of
pi, the ratio of the circumference to its diameter, is predetermined
ideally now, tho no one may have computed it.
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