ustifies his assumption of that name, is that
every belief or preference whatever is fitly to be tried by all or any
of the tests by which beliefs have been sifted in the past, or may more
effectually be tested in the future. We are to do with both our
religion and our science in general what we have done in the past and
are still doing with our medicine, our sanitation, our education, our
physics, our historiography.

Without more ado, then, we may proceed to ask how reasons for beliefs
are ultimately to be appraised by reasonable and consistent people--in
other words, how beliefs are honestly to be justified.

FOOTNOTE:

[12] So Kant: 'Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without
conceptions are blind' (_Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, ed. Kirchmann,
1870, p. 100); and Comte: 'There is no absolute separation between
observing and reasoning' (_Politique Positive_, 1851, i. 500).

Sec. 7. THE TEST OF TRUTH

It may have been observed, with or without perplexity, that Mr. Balfour
specified a 'need for religious _truth_' as his ground for holding his
unspecified 'theological beliefs,' this after bracketing Religion and
Science as alike 'unproved systems,' consisting (by implication) of a
body of propositions as to which we have not 'any ground for believing
them to be even approximately true.' The skeptico-religious conception
of truth being thus found to be as nugatory as that of 'reason' put
forward from the same quarter, we are compelled to posit one more
conformable to common sense, common usage, and common honesty. For the
generality of instructed men, truth in secular affairs means not merely
'that which is trowed,' but (_a_) that which we have adequate 'reason'
to trow, and (_b_) that of which our acceptance is consistent with our
way of testing credences of any or all other kinds. The ultimate
criterion of our beliefs, in short, is the consistency with which we
hold them.

By this test the ground is rapidly cleared of skeptico-religious
literature. That puts a spurious problem to mask a real one. The
question for us is not and cannot be whether, seeing that by inference
from experience some of the beliefs we now hold are likely to be found
false by posterity, we have any right to accept one belief and discredit
another. The skeptic is himself doing so in this very argument, and all
the time. His whole intellectual life is one of judgments and
preferences. There is no intellectual life without t