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We may now glance at some special types of knowing, so as to see
better whether the humanistic account fits. On the mathematical and
logical types we need not enlarge further, nor need we return at
much length to the case of our descriptive knowledge of the course
of nature. So far as this involves anticipation, tho that MAY mean
copying, it need, as we saw, mean little more than ‘getting ready’
in advance. But with many distant and future objects, our practical
relations are to the last degree potential and remote. In no sense
can we now get ready for the arrest of the earth’s revolution by the
tidal brake, for instance; and with the past, tho we suppose
ourselves to know it truly, we have no practical relations at all.
It is obvious that, altho interests strictly practical have been the
original starting-point of our search for true
phenomenal descriptions, yet an intrinsic interest in the bare
describing function 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.