Truth, in general or in the abstract, is a just name for an experienced relation among the things of experience that sort of relation in which intents are retrospectively viewed from the standpoint of the fullfilment which they secure through their own natural operation or incitement. Thus the experimental theory explains directly and simply the absolutistic tendency to translate concrete true things into the general relationship, Truth, and then to hypostatize this abstraction into identity with real being, Truth per se and in se, of which all transitory things and events-that is, all experienced realities -are only shadowy futile approximations. This type of relationship is central for man’s will, for man’s conscious endeavor. To select, to conserve, to extend, to propagate those meanings which the course of events has generated, to note their peculiarities, to be in advance on the alert for them, to search for them anxiously, to substitute them for meanings that eat up our energy in vain, defines the aim of rational effort and the goal of legitimate ambition. The absolutistic theory is the transfer of this moral or voluntary law of selective action into a quasi-physical (that is, metaphysical) law of indiscriminate being. Identify metaphysical being with significant excellent being-that is, with those relationships of things which, in our moments of deepest insight and largest survey, we would continue and reproduce-and the experimentalist, rather than the absolutist, is he who has a right to proclaim the supremacy of Truth, and the superiority of the life devoted to Truth for its own sake over that of ” mere ” activity. But to read back into an order of things which exists without the participation of our reflection and aim, the quality which defines the purpose of our thought and endeavor is at one and the same stroke to mythologize reality and to deprive the life of thoughtful endeavor of its ground for being.

—John Dewey.