Note 75 — XII WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS BY PRACTICAL
Reading edition
"Eternal truth" is one of the most ambiguous phrases that philosophers trip over. It may mean eternally in existence; or that a statement which is ever true is always true (if it is true a fly is buzzing, it is eternally true that just now a fly buzzed); or it may mean that some truths, in so far as wholly conceptual, are irrelevant to any particular time determination, since they are non-existential in import—e.g., the truth of geometry dialectically taken—that is, without asking whether any particular existence exemplifies them.