lieve we have found
a criterion, this belief itself may be mistaken; we should be begging
the question if we tried to test the criterion by applying the criterion
to itself.

But although the notion of an absolute criterion is chimerical, there
may be relative criteria, which increase the probability of truth.
Common sense and science hold that there are. Let us see what they have
to say.

One of the plainest cases of verification, perhaps ultimately the only
case, consists in the happening of something expected. You go to the
station believing that there will be a train at a certain time; you
find the train, you get into it, and it starts at the expected time This
constitutes verification, and is a perfectly definite experience. It is,
in a sense, the converse of memory instead of having first sensations
and then images accompanied by belief, we have first images accompanied
by belief and then sensations. Apart from differences as to the
time-order and the accompanying feelings, the relation between image and
sensation is closely similar in the two cases of memory and expectation;
it is a relation of similarity, with difference as to causal
efficacy--broadly, the image has the psychological but not the physical
effects that the sensation would have. When an image accompanied by
an expectation-belief is thus succeeded by a sensation which is the
"meaning" of the image, we say that the expectation-belief has been
verified. The experience of verification in this sense is exceedingly
familiar; it happens every time that accustomed activities have results
that are not surprising, in eating and walking and talking and all our
daily pursuits.

But although the experience in question is common, it is not wholly easy
to give a theoretical account of it. How do we know that the sensation
resembles the previous image? Does the image persist in presence of the
sensation, so that we can compare the two? And even if SOME image does
persist, how do we know that it is the previous image unchanged? It does
not seem as if this line of inquiry offered much hope of a successful
issue. It is better, I think, to take a more external and causal view of
the relation of expectation to expected occurrence. If the occurrence,
when it comes, gives us the feeling of expectedness, and if the
expectation, beforehand, enabled us to act in a way which proves
appropriate to the occurrence, that must be held to constitute the
maximum of verification