t
leads, agree with the expectations of the one who holds the opinion,
the opinion is to be called true. Or, in the now well-known phrase,
"An idea (or opinion) is true if it works." To use the repeated
example of Professor Moore, an opinion that a certain toothache is due
to a condition present in a given tooth is true, when an operation
performed upon that tooth, and performed as a consequence of that
opinion, and with the expectation of curing the toothache works as
expected. For the operation is itself one of the workings of the
opinion in question.

To assert an opinion, then, is not to appeal to an essentially
superior insight, but is to appeal to the workings that follow from
this opinion when you act upon it in concrete life. No other sort of
truth is knowable.

{141}

A consequence of these views, often insisted upon by pragmatists, is
that truth is relative to the various "concrete situations" which
arise; so that absolute or final truth is indefinable by us mortals.
Hence an opinion may be true for a given purpose, or in one situation
(because in that situation its workings prove to be as expected),
although it is relatively false when applied to some other situation,
or to some wider range of experience. Absolute truth is as
unobservable by us in our experience as is absolute position or
absolute motion in the physical world. Every truth is definable with
reference to somebody's intentions, actions, and successes or
failures. These things change from person to person, from time to
time, from plan to plan. What is true from the point of view of my
plans need not be so from your point of view. The workings of an
opinion vary in their significance with the expectations of those
concerned. Truth absolute is at best a mere ideal, which for us throws
no light upon the nature of the real world.

Thus, at a stroke, pragmatism, as understood by its chief
representatives at the present time, is supposed to make naught of the
subtle, and, as the pragmatists say, airy and fantastic considerations
upon which my sketch of a philosophical idealism at the last lecture
depended. Truth, they insist, is a perfectly human and for us mortals
not in the least a supernatural affair. We test it as we can, by
following the experienced workings to which our {142} ideas lead. If
these workings are what we meant them to be, our opinions are just in
so far proven true. If no human and empirical tests of the workings of
an opinion