is a judgment of fact, if it asserts existence, so also does error. The pragmatist principle has an important bearing on religion. It justifies the Faith attitude. It shows that the good aimed at by a "truth claim" is only attainable by the exercise of the will to believe. Thus it replaces the intellectual maxim, Believe in nothing you can possibly doubt, with the practical maxim, Resolve not to quench any impulse to believe because doubts of the truth are possible. Belief may even be a condition of the success of the truth claim. CHAPTER VI UTILITY We have seen in the last chapter that pragmatism is both a criticism and a theory. It shows us that the {56} notion that truth is correspondence involves the conception of an "impossible" knowledge, and the notion that truth is coherence or consistency involves the conception of a "useless" knowledge. The explanation pragmatism itself offers is of the kind that is called in the technical language of philosophy teleological. This means that to explain or to give a meaning to truth all we can do is to point out the purpose on account of which it exists. This is not scientific explanation. Physical science explains a fact or an event by showing the conditions which give rise to it or that determine its character. Pragmatism recognises no conditions determining truth such as those which science embodies in the conception of a natural law--that is, the idea of a connection of natural events with one another which is not dependent on human thoughts about them nor on human purposes in regard to them. Truth is in intimate association with human practical activity; its meaning lies wholly in its utility. We must therefore now examine somewhat closely this notion of utility.