has grown up.  We wish accounts that shall be true, whether they bring collateral profit or not.  The primitive function has developed its demand for mere exercise.  This theoretic curiosity seems to be the characteristically human differentia, and humanism recognizes its enormous scope.  A true idea now means not only one that prepares us for an actual perception.  It means also one that might prepare us for a merely possible perception, or one that, if spoken, would suggest possible perceptions to others, or suggest actual perceptions which the speaker cannot share.  The ensemble of perceptions thus thought of as either actual or possible form a system which it is obviously advantageous to us to get into a stable and consistent shape; and here it is that the common-sense notion of permanent beings finds triumphant use.  Beings acting outside of the thinker explain, not only his actual perceptions, past and future, but his possible perceptions and those of every one else.  Accordingly they gratify our theoretic need in a supremely beautiful way.  We pass from our immediate actual through them into the foreign and the potential, and back again into the future actual, accounting for innumerable particulars by a single cause.  As in those circular panoramas, where a real foreground of dirt, grass, bushes, rocks and a broken-down cannon is enveloped by a canvas picture of sky and earth and of a raging battle, continuing the foreground so cunningly that the spectator can detect no joint; so these conceptual objects, added to our present perceptual reality, fuse with it into the whole universe of our belief.  In spite of all berkeleyan criticism, we do not doubt that they are really there.  Tho our discovery of any one of them may only date from now, we unhesitatingly say that it not only is, but was there, if, by so saying, the past appears connected more consistently with what we feel the present to be.  This is historic truth.  Moses wrote the Pentateuch, we think, because if he didn’t, all our religious habits will have to be undone.  Julius Caesar was real, or we can never listen to history again.  Trilobites were once alive, or all our thought about the strata is at sea.  Radium, discovered only yesterday, must always have existed, or its analogy with other natural elements, which are permanent, fails.  In all this, it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting on another so as to yield the most satisfactory total state of mind.  That state of mind, we say, sees truth, and the content of its deliverances we believe.

Of course, if you take the satisfactoriness concretely, as something felt by you now, and if, by truth, you mean truth taken abstractly and verified in the long run, you cannot make them equate, for it is notorious that the temporarily satisfactory is often false.  Yet at each and every concrete moment, truth for each man is what that man ‘troweth’ at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself; and similarly, abstract truth, truth verified by the long run, and abstract satisfactoriness, long-run satisfactoriness, coincide.  If, in short, we compare concrete with concrete and abstract with abstract, the true and the satisfactory do mean the same thing.  I suspect that a certain muddling of matters hereabouts is what makes the general philosophic public so impervious to humanism’s claims.