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, it 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.
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 are accessible to us, the opinion remains in so far meaningless. If concrete tests lead to workings that disappoint our human expectations, our opinions are in so far false. Moreover (and upon this all the pragmatists lay great stress), truth is for us a temporal affair. It changes, it flows, it grows, it decays. It can be made eternal only by tying ourselves, for a given purpose, to abstract ideas which we arbitrarily require to remain, like mathematical definitions, unchanged. Even such ideas have no sense apart from the uses to which they can be put. Concrete truth grows or diminishes as our successes in controlling our experience, through acting upon our beliefs, wax or wane. Truth is subject to all the processes of the evolution of our concrete lives. The eternal is nothing that can be for us a live presence. What we deal with is, like ourselves, fluent, subject to growth and decay, dynamic, and never static. The pragmatist recoils with a certain mixture of horror and amusement from the conception of an all-inclusive divine insight. That, he says, would be something static. Its world of absolute reality would be a "block universe" and itself merely an aspect of a part, or perhaps the whole, of just this block. Its supposed truth would be static like itself, and therefore dead.
But does pragmatism forbid us to have religious insight? No; James, in ways which you have repeatedly heard me mention, insists that pragmatism leaves open ample room for what he thinks to be the best sort of religion, namely, for a religion suited to what he calls the "dramatic temper" of mind. Truth, so far as we men can attain to it, has indeed to be human enough. But nothing forbids us to entertain the belief that there are superhuman and supernatural realities, forms of being, living and spiritual personalities, or superpersonalities, as various and lofty as you please, provided only that they be such as to make whatever evidence of their being is accessible to us capable of definition in a human and empirical way. The truth, namely, of our belief about such beings, has to be tested by us in terms of our own concrete religious experience. Such beliefs, like others, must "work" in order to be true. That is, these beliefs, however they arise, must lead to conduct; and the results of this conduct must tend to our religious comfort, to our unity of feeling, to our peace, or power, or saintliness, or other form of spiritual perfection. The fruits of the spirit are the empirical tests of a religious doctrine; and, apart from those uprushes of faith from the subconscious whereof we have spoken in previous lectures, there are for James no other tests of the truth of religious convictions than these. The truth of religion consists in its successful "workings."
Hence, however, religion depends upon an [{144}] ever-renewed testing of its opinions through a carrying of them out in life. Insight would be barren were it not quickened and applied through our will. To James, as we already know, reason, as such, seems to be of little use in religion. But action, resolute living, testing of your faith through your works and through its own workings, this is religion--an endlessly restless and dramatic process, never an union with any absolute attainment of the goal.