beings dealing with reality is, as they
maintain, something much more readily comprehensible than is the
idealistic theory of a divine insight. Truth and error are characters
that belong to our assertions for reasons which need no overarching
heavenly insight to make them clear. In brief, as the {139}
pragmatists tell us, the story of the nature of truth and of error is
this:

An assertion, a judgment, is always an active attitude of a man,
whereby, at the moment when he makes this assertion he directs the
course of his further activities. To say "My best way out of the woods
lies in that direction" is, for a wanderer lost in the forest, simply
to point out a rule or plan of action and to expect certain results
from following out that plan. This illustration of the man in the
woods is due to James. An analogous principle, according to
pragmatism, holds for any assertion. To judge is to expect some
concrete consequence to follow from some form of activity. An
assertion has meaning only in so far as it refers to some object that
can be defined in empirical terms and that can be subjected to further
direct or indirect tests, whereby its relations to our own activities
can become determinate. Thus, then, a judgment, an opinion, if it
means anything concrete, is always an appeal to more or less
accessible human experience--and is not, as I have been asserting, an
appeal to an overarching higher insight. When you make any significant
assertion, you appeal to whatever concrete human observations,
experiments, or other findings of data, actual or possible, can
furnish the test that the opinion calls for. If I assert: "It will
rain to-morrow," the assertion is to be verified or refuted by the
experience of men just as they live, from moment to moment.

{140}

It remains to define, a little more precisely, wherein consists this
empirical verification or refutation for which a human opinion calls.
An opinion is a definite one, as has just been said, because it guides
the will of the person who holds the opinion to some definite course
of action. An opinion then, if sincere and significant, has
_consequences,_ leads to deeds, modifies conduct, and is thus the
source of the experiences which one gets as a result of holding that
opinion and of acting upon it. In brief, an opinion has what the
pragmatists love to call its _"workings."_ Now when the workings of a
given opinion, the empirical results to which, through our actions, i