380 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts, and Letters. 
Tlie truth which is conceived of thought can not, of course, be 
absolute. Xt is, after 1 all, the mind’s impression of agreement 
between a picture which it forms, and an external reality, which 
may be posed as the original of the picture, blow this original 
itself is far from being, certainly known. What appears to be 
reality may not deserve to do so. In such a case what I regard 
as matched by external reality will merely be matched by what 
wrongly seems to me to be reality. Blearing in mind the pos¬ 
sibility of such a mistake, X redefine the truth of thought as a 
being-matched by supposed' reality outside of thought. 
Such truth is all that language contemplates. XXo doubt, in 
thinking, we desire and strive to be correct; but in speaking we 
endeavor only to reveal what actually is in our minds, correct 
or incorrect. The lie, as not a use of speech, but plainly an 
abuse, may be set aside as utterly nan-linguistic. The aim of 
speech is communication—a begetting in another mind of a 
counterpart to what is in one’s own—a reproduction of the mo¬ 
mentary mental self. In the case of a lie the should-be parent 
thought is childless, but charged with bastard offspring. The 
liar is mentally a self-made cuckold. On the other hand, the 
issue of error is legitimate. The statement unintentionally 
false is to the full degree linguistic. Brother Jasper’s a The sun 
do move” is; as truly and properly language as any utterance 
more acceptable to science. Truth, then, so far as it concerns 
the language student, is subjective truth. Accordingly, in a 
sense more extended than that employed on p. 360, it may be 
said that sentences deal with thought alone—never directly with 
extra-mental fact.* 
*It is obvious that my “truth” of thought is merely a substitute for 
that element of “existence,” which is often regarded as part of what is 
meant by an affirmative assertion. Thus “The rose is red” is com¬ 
monly paraphrased by “The rose exists red,” “The red rose exists” or 
“There exists such a thing as a red rose.” 
In such an interpretation, it seems to me that existence is synony¬ 
mous with reality, being thinkable either of my thought itself (or a 
part thereof) or of that external status of which my thought is the 
internal correlative. Now the reality of my own mental act appears to 
me unimportant, for reasons given above. I can hardly feel it worth 
my while to vouch for it, that I am actually thinking the whole or any 
part of my thought. If then I do vouch for any reality, it seems to me 
it must be the reality of that to which my thought is correlated, namely 
some fragment of an outer universe or status. Accordingly the “exist- 
