Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can
imagine a rationalist to talk as follows:
"Truth is not made," he will say; "it absolutely obtains, being a
unique relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots
straight over the head of experience, and hits its reality every
time. Our belief that yon thing on the wall is a clock is true
already, altho no one in the whole history of the world should
verify it. The bare quality of standing in that transcendent
relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether
or not there be verification. You pragmatists put the cart before
the horse in making truth's being reside in verification-processes.
These are merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways of
ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has
possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like
all essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they
partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It can't be analyzed away into
pragmatic consequences."
The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact
to which we have already paid so much attention. In our world,
namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and
similarly associated, one verification serves for others of its
kind, and one great use of knowing things is to be led not so much
to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them.
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