The quality of truth, obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then,
the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their
indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification.
Truth ante rem means only verifiability, then; or else it is a case
of the stock rationalist trick of treating the NAME of a concrete
phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it
behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach quotes
somewhere an epigram of Lessing's:
Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz,
"Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt,
Das meiste Geld besitzen?"
Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something
distinct from the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It
antedates them; the facts become only a sort of secondary
coincidence with the rich man's essential nature.
In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth
is but a name for concrete processes that certain men's lives play a
part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller
and Carnegie, but not in the rest of us.
Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes,
as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc.
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