When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker
had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but
we understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the
world's previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for
the actors in them. They are not so for one who knows the later
revelations of the story.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having
powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all
pragmatist notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the
future. Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be
MADE, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of
verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along
contributing their quota.
I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out
of previous truths. Men's beliefs at any time are so much experience
funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the
world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's
funding operations.
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