Objective reference, I say then, is an incident
of the fact that so much of our experience
comes as an insufficient and consists of
process and transition. Our fields of experience
have no more definite boundaries than have
our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by
a _more_ that continuously develops, and that
continuously supersedes them as life proceeds.
The relations, generally speaking, are as real
here as the terms are, and the only complaint
of the transcendentalist's with which I could
at all sympathize would be his charge that, by
first making knowledge consist in external
relations as I have done, and by then confessing
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that nine-tenths of the time these are
not actually but only virtually there, I have
knocked the solid bottom out of the whole
business, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge
for the genuine thing. Only the admission,
such a critic might say, that our ideas are
self-transcendent and 'true' already, in advance
of the experiences that are to terminate
them, can bring solidity back to knowledge
in a world like this, in which transitions and
terminations are only by exception fulfilled.
This seems to me an excellent place for
applying the pragmatic method.
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