4. Possibly all this seems too obvious for mention. But there is often a virtual conspiracy in philosophy, not to mention obvious things nor to dwell upon them: otherwise remote speculations might be brought to a sudden halt. The point of these commonplaces resides in the push they may give anyone to engage in a search for _distinctive features in the act of inference_. The search may perhaps be best initiated by noting the seeming inconsistency between what has been said about inference as an art and inference as a natural, unpremeditated occurrence. The obvious function of spontaneous inference is to bring before an agent absent considerations to which he may respond as he otherwise responds to the stimulating force of the given situation. To infer rain is to enable one to behave _now_ as given conditions would not otherwise enable him to conduct himself. This instigation to behave toward the remote in space or time is the primary trait of the inferential act; descriptively speaking, the act consists in taking up an attitude of response to an absent thing as if it were present. But just because the thing is absent, the attitude taken may be either irrelevant and positively harmful or extremely pertinent and advantageous. We may infer rain when rain is not going to happen, and acting upon the inference be worse off than if there had been no inference. Or we may make preparations, which we would not otherwise have made; the rain may come, and the inference save our lives--as the ark saved Noah. Inference brings, in short, truth and falsity into the world, just as definitely as the circulation of the blood brings its distinctive consequences, both advantages and liabilities into the world, or as the existence of banking brings with it consequences of business extension and of bankruptcy not previously existent. If the reader objects to the introduction of the terms "truth" and "falsity", I am perfectly willing to leave the choice of words to him, provided the fact is recognized that through inference men are capable of a kind of success and exposed to a kind of failure not otherwise possible: dependent upon the fact that inference takes absent things as being in a certain real continuum with present things, so that our attitude toward the latter is bound up with our reaction to the former as parts of the same situation. And in any event, I wish to protest against a possible objection to the introduction of the terms "false" and "true." It may be said that inference is not responsible for the occurrence of errors and truths, because these accompany simple apprehensions where there is no inference: as when I see a snake which isn't there--or any other case which may appear to the objector to afford an illustration of his point. The objection illustrates my point. To affirm a snake is to affirm potentialities going beyond what is actually given; it says that what is given is _going_ to do something--the doing characteristic of a snake, so that