Meanwhile what actually does count for true to any individual trower, whether he be philosopher or common man, is always a result of his APPERCEPTIONS.  If a novel experience, conceptual or sensible, contradict too emphatically our pre-existent system of beliefs, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is treated as false.  Only when the older and the newer experiences are congruous enough to mutually apperceive and modify each other, does what we treat as an advance in truth result.  In no case, however, need truth consist in a relation between our experiences and something archetypal or trans-experiential.  Should we ever reach absolutely terminal experiences, experiences in which we all agreed, which were superseded by no revised continuations, these would not be true, they would be real, they would simply be, and be indeed the angles, corners, and linchpins of all reality, on which the truth of everything else would be stayed.  Only such other things as led to these by satisfactory conjunctions would be ‘true.’  Satisfactory connection of some sort with such termini is all that the word ‘truth’ means.  On the common-stage of thought sense-presentations serve as such termini.  Our ideas and concepts and scientific theories pass for true only so far as they harmoniously lead back to the world of sense.

I hope that many humanists will endorse this attempt of mine to trace the more essential features of that way of viewing things.  I feel almost certain that Messrs. Dewey and Schiller will do so.  If the attackers will also take some slight account of it, it may be that discussion will be a little less wide of the mark than it has hitherto been.

VI

A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH

[Footnote:  Reprint from the Journal of Philosophy, July 18,1907.]

My failure in making converts to my conception of truth seems, if I may judge by what I hear in conversation, almost complete.  An ordinary philosopher would feel disheartened, and a common choleric sinner would curse God and die, after such a reception.  But instead of taking counsel of despair, I make bold to vary my statements, in the faint hope that repeated droppings may wear upon the stone, and that my formulas may seem less obscure if surrounded by something more of a ‘mass’ whereby to apperceive them.

For fear of compromising other pragmatists, whoe’er they be, I will speak of the conception which I am trying to make intelligible, as my own conception.  I first published it in the year 1885, in the first article reprinted in the present book.  Essential theses of this article were independently supported in 1893 and 1895 by Professor D. S. Miller [Footnote:  Philosophical Review, vol. ii, p. 408, and Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 533.] and were repeated by me in a presidential address on ’The knowing of things together’ [Footnote:  The relevant