we classify all objects as 'good'
and 'bad,' according as they are ends to be pursued or avoided, or means
which further or frustrate the pursuit of ends. This general antithesis
between the 'good' and the 'bad' has numerous specific forms, applicable
to different departments of human activity. Thus, in conduct, actions
are judged 'good' or 'evil' and 'right' or 'wrong'; in thinking, ideas
are 'true' or 'false,' and 'relevant' or 'irrelevant'; for art, objects
are 'beautiful' or 'ugly,' and so forth, for the modes of valuation in
life are innumerable. Any one of these adjectives either denotes value
or censures lack of worth, and each gets its meaning by reference to the
specific purpose, moral, aesthetic, or intellectual, it appeals to. The
_summum bonum_, or supreme good, will then be the ideal of the
harmonious satisfaction of all purposes.

What, then, from the standpoint of Humanism, is the function of
'truth-values' in our life? They indicate a relation to the cognitive
end. What is this end? Surely not self-sufficing? A truth that is merely
true in itself has no interest for human life, and no human mind has an
interest in discovering and affirming it. Truth, therefore, cannot
stand aloof from life. It must somehow subserve our vital purposes. But
how shall it do this? Only by becoming applicable to the reality we have
to live with, by becoming useful for the changes we desire to effect in
it. Whoever will not admit this, and renders truth inapplicable, does in
fact render it unmeaning.

The fact that thought essentially refers to a 'reality' external to it
in no way diminishes its purposive character. Whether the mind is
idealizing an aspect of reality (as in mathematics) or abstracting,
classifying, and predicting (as in science), it is always the fact that
a particular kind of reality is needed for some serious or trivial
purpose which guides the operations of the thinker. A mind which craved
to embrace all or 'any' reality need not _think_; it would do better to
float without discrimination upon the flux of change. This procedure
would be so absolutely antithetical to human knowing that it seems a
wanton paradox on that account to treat it as the final goal of
knowledge.

Actually, of course, the philosophers who claim to be devoted to pure
theory follow no such course. They deliberately choose their ideal of
what is worth knowing--_e.g._, 'God,' or 'the unity of all things,' or
'the laws of the universe'-