The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer:  True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify.  False ideas are those that we cannot.  That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.

This thesis is what I have to defend.  The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.  Truth happens to an idea.  It becomes true, is made true by events.  Its verity is in fact an event, a process:  the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-FICATION.  Its validity is the process of its valid-ATION.

But what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically mean?  They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea.  It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula—­just such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas ‘agree’ with reality.  They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while-such feeling being among our potentialities—­that the original ideas remain in agreement.  The connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory.  This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea’s verification.  Such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain.

Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a ‘stunt’ self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons.

The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious.  We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful.  Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty.  The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions.  If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself.  The true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful.  The practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical importance