The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of Cain and Abel.  The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored.  Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true.  As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings.  That past time itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with everything that’s present.  True as the present is, the past was also.

Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading—­ leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important.  True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini.  They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.  They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking.  The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere, which somebody’s ideas have copied.

Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word agreement.  He treats it altogether practically.  He lets it cover any process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided only it run prosperously.  It is only thus that ‘scientific’ ideas, flying as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their realities.  It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of ether, atoms or electrons, but we mustn’t think so literally.  The term ‘energy’ doesn’t even pretend to stand for anything ‘objective.’  It is only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a simple formula.

Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical level.  We must find a theory that will work; and that means something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences.  It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly.  To ‘work’ means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis.  Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is.  Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons.  We choose the kind of theory to which