of their objects to us.  Their objects are, indeed, not important at all times.  I may on another occasion have no use for the house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be practically irrelevant, and had better remain latent.  Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious.  We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference.  Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and our belief in it grows active.  You can say of it then either that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ’it is true because it is useful.’  Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified.  True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience.  True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.

From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to.  Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of A leading that is worth while.  When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that thought’s guidance into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous connexion with them.  This is a vague enough statement, but I beg you to retain it, for it is essential.

Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities.  One bit of it can warn us to get ready for another bit, can ‘intend’ or be ‘significant of’ that remoter object.  The object’s advent is the significance’s verification.  Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but eventual verification, is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on our part.  Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience:  they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions.

By ‘realities’ or ‘objects’ here, we mean either things of common sense, sensibly present, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places, distances, kinds, activities.  Following our mental image of a house along the cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the image’s full verification.  Such simply and fully verified leadings are certainly the originals and prototypes of the truth-process.  Experience offers indeed other forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable as being primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another.