4. Pragmatism has very distinctly a connection with religion, because it explains, and to some extent justifies, the faith-attitude or will to believe, and those who study the psychology of religion cannot but be impressed with the pragmatic nature of this atti tude. If the whole of a man's personality goes to the making of the truth he accepts, it is clear that his beliefs are not matters of "pure reason," and that his passional and volitional nature must contribute to them and cannot validly be excluded. His religion also is ultimately a vital attitude which rests on his interests and on his choices between alternatives which are real for him. It is not however asserted that his mere willing to believe is a proof of the truth of what he wishes to believe, any more than a will to disbelieve justifies disbelief. His will to believe merely recognizes that choice is necessary and implies risk, and puts him in a posi tion to obtain verification (or disproof). The pragmatic claim for religion, therefore, is that to those who will take the first step and will to believe an encouraging amount of the appropriate verifi cations accrues. It is further pointed out that this procedure is quite consonant with the practice of science with regard to its axioms. Originally these are always postulates which have to be assumed before they can be proved, and thus in a way "make" the evidence which confirms them. Scientific and religious verifi cation therefore, though superficially distinct, are alike in kind.
The pragmatic doctrine o f truth, which it is now possible to outline, results from a convergence of the above lines of argument. Because truth is a value and vitally valuable, and all meaning depends on its context and its relation to us, there cannot be any abstract "absolute" truth disconnected from all human purposes.
Because all truth is primarily a claim which may turn out to be false, it has to be tested. To test it is to try to distinguish between truth and falsity, and to answer the question—What renders the claim of a judgment to be true, really true? Now such testing, though it varies greatly in different departments of knowledge, is always effected by the consequences to which the claim leads when acted on. Only if they are "good" is the claim validated and the reasoning judged to be "right": only if they are tested does the theory of truth become intelligible and that of error explicable. If, therefore, a logic fails to employ the pragmatic test, it is doomed to remain purely formal, and the possibility of applying its doctrines to actual knowing, and their real validity, remain in doubt. By applying the pragmatic test on the other hand, it is possible to describe how truths are developed and errors corrected, and how in general old truths are adjusted to new situations. This "making of truth" is conceived as making for greater satisfaction and greater control of experience. It renders the truth of any time relative to the knowledge of the time, and precludes the notion of any rigid, static or incorrigible truth. Thus truth is continually being made and re-made. If the new truth seems to be such that our cognitive purposes would have been better served by it than they were by the truth we had at the time, it is antedated and said to have been "true all along." If an old truth is improved upon, it is revalued as "false." To this double process there is no actual end, but ideally an "absolute" truth (or system of truths) would be a truth which would be adequate to every purpose.