we are already partial; we follow ‘elegance’ or ‘economy.’  Clerk Maxwell somewhere says it would be “poor scientific taste” to choose the more complicated of two equally well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree with him.  Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most imperious claimant.

I have led you through a very sandy desert.  But now, if I may be allowed so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut.  Our rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a momentous philosophical alternative.

Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they pay.  They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification.  Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue them.  Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.

Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us.  I can imagine a rationalist to talk as follows: 

“Truth is not made,” he will say; “it absolutely obtains, being a unique relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the head of experience, and hits its reality every time.  Our belief that yon thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in the whole history of the world should verify it.  The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not there be verification.  You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truth’s being reside in verification-processes.  These are merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous quality.  The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures.  Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy.  It can’t be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences.”

The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to which we have already paid so much attention.  In our world, namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated, one verification serves for others of its kind, and one great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them.  The quality of truth,