Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall.  You and I consider it to be a ‘clock,’ altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one.  We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify.  If truths mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such unverified truths as this abortive?  No, for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the truths we live by.  Indirect as well as direct verifications pass muster.  Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we can go without eye-witnessing.  Just as we here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there, because it works to do so, everything we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, so we assume that thing to be a clock.  We use it as a clock, regulating the length of our lecture by it.  The verification of the assumption here means its leading to no frustration or contradiction.  VerifiABILITY of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification.  For one truth-process completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of nascency.  They turn us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system.  Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.  But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever.  You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another.  We trade on each other’s truth.  But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure.

Another great reason—­beside economy of time—­for waiving complete verification in the usual business of life is that all things exist in kinds and not singly.  Our world is found once for all to have that peculiarity.  So that when we have once directly verified our ideas about one specimen of a kind, we consider ourselves free to apply them to other specimens without verification.  A mind that habitually discerns the kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the kind immediately, without pausing to verify, will be a ‘true’ mind in ninety-nine out of a hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct fitting everything it meets, and getting no refutation.

Indirectly or only potentially verifying processes may thus be true as well as full verification-processes.  They work as true processes would work, give us the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the same reasons.  All this on the common-sense level of, matters of fact, which we are alone considering.