HE PROBLEM 
 OF -TRUTH 
 
 I WILD ON GARR 
 
 THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS
 
 THE 
 
 PEOPLE'S 
 BOOKS 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH
 
 THE 
 
 PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 BY H. WILDON CARR 
 
 HONORARY D.Lnr., DURHAM 
 
 LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK 
 G7 LONG ACRE, W.C., AND EDINBURGH 
 NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 A PROBLEM of philosophy is completely different from a 
 problem of science. In science we accept our subject- 
 matter as it is presented in unanalysed experience ; in 
 philosophy we examine the first principles and ultimate 
 questions that concern conscious experience itself. The 
 problem of truth is a problem of philosophy. It is not 
 a problem of merely historical interest, but a present 
 problem a living controversy, the issue of which is un- 
 decided. Its present interest may be said to centre 
 round the doctrine of pragmatism, which some fifteen 
 years ago began to challenge the generally accepted 
 principles of philosophy. In expounding this problem 
 of truth, my main purpose has been to make clear to 
 the reader the nature of a problem of philosophy and 
 to disclose the secret of its interest. My book presumes 
 no previous study of philosophy nor special knowledge 
 of its problems. The theories that I have shown in 
 conflict on this question are, each of them, held by 
 some of the leaders of philosophy. In presenting them, 
 therefore, I have tried to let the full dialectical force 
 of the argument appear. I have indicated my own 
 view, that the direction in which the solution lies is in 
 the new conception of life and the theory of knowledge 
 given to us in the philosophy of Bergson. If I am 
 right, the solution is not, like pragmatism, a doctrine of 
 the nature of truth, but a theory of knowledge in which 
 
 2034524
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 the dilemma in regard to truth does not arise. But, as 
 always in philosophy, the solution of one problem is the 
 emergence of another. There is no finality. 
 
 My grateful acknowledgment is due to my friend 
 Professor S. Alexander, who kindly read my manuscript 
 and assisted me with most valuable suggestions, and 
 also to my friend Dr. T. Percy Nunn for a similar 
 service. 
 
 H. WILDON CAER.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS .... 
 II. APPEARANCE AND REALITY . . . 15 
 
 III. THE LOGICAL THEORIES 
 
 no 
 
 IV. THE ABSOLUTE . 
 
 V. PRAGMATISM 42 
 
 VI. UTILITY 55 
 
 VII. ILLUSION 6 ' 
 
 VIII. THE PROBLEM OF ERROR .... 74 
 
 GO 
 
 IX. CONCLUSION 
 
 Ql 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Ql 
 INDEX y *
 
 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS 
 
 THE progress of physical science leads to the continual 
 discovery of complexity in what is first apprehended as 
 simple. The atom of hydrogen, so long accepted as the 
 ideal limit of simplicity, is now suspected to be not the 
 lowest unit in the scale of elements, and it is no longer 
 conceived, as it used to be, as structureless, but as 
 an individual system, comparable to a solar system, 
 of electrical components preserving an equilibrium pro- 
 bably only temporary. The same tendency to dis- 
 cover complexity in what is first apprehended as simple 
 is evident in the study of philosophy. The more our 
 simple and ordinary notions are submitted to analysis, 
 the more are profound problems brought to conscious- 
 ness. It is impossible to think that we do not know 
 what such an ordinary, simple notion as that of truth 
 is ; yet the attempt to give a definition of its meaning 
 brings quite unexpected difficulties to light, and the 
 widest divergence at the present time between rival 
 principles of philosophical interpretation is in regard to 
 a theory of the nature of truth. It is not a problem 
 that is pressed on us by any felt need, nor is anyone who 
 does not feel its interest called upon to occupy himself 
 with it. We speak our language before we know its
 
 10 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 grammar, and we reason just as well whether we have 
 learnt the science of logic or not. 
 
 This science of Logic, or, as it is sometimes called, of 
 Formal Logic, was, until modern times, regarded as a 
 quite simple account of the principles that govern the 
 exercise of our reasoning faculty, and of the rules 
 founded on those principles by following which truth 
 was attained and false opinion or error avoided. It was 
 called formal because it was supposed to have no re- 
 lation to the matter of the subject reasoned about, but 
 only to the form which the reasoning must take. A 
 complete account of this formal science, as it was recog- 
 nised and accepted for many ages, might easily have 
 been set forth within the limits of a small volume such 
 as this. But the development of modern philosophy 
 has wrought an extraordinary change. Anyone now 
 who will set himself the task of mastering all the pro- 
 blems that have been raised round the question of the 
 nature of logical process, will find himself confronted 
 with a vast library of special treatises, and involved in 
 discussions that embrace the whole of philosophy. The 
 special problem of truth that it is the object of this 
 little volume to explain is a quite modern question. It 
 has been raised within the present generation of philo- 
 sophical writers, and is to-day, perhaps, the chief 
 controversy in which philosophers are engaged. But 
 although it is only in the last few years that contro- 
 versy has been aroused on this question, the problem 
 is not new it is indeed as old as philosophy itself. In 
 the fifth century before Christ, and in the generation 
 that immediately preceded Socrates, a famous philo- 
 sopher, Protagoras (481-411 B.C.) published a book 
 with the title The Truth. He had the misfortune, 
 common at that time, to offend the religious Athenians,
 
 PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS 11 
 
 for he spoke slightingly of the gods, proposing to 
 " banish their existence or non-existence from writing 
 and speech." He was convicted of atheism, and his 
 books were publicly burnt, and he himself, then seventy 
 years of age, was either banished or at least was obliged 
 to flee from Athens, and on his way to Sicily he lost 
 his life in a shipwreck. Our knowledge of this book of 
 Protagoras is due to the preservation of its argument 
 by Plato in the dialogue " Thesetetus." Protagoras, we I 
 are there told, taught that " man is the measure of all I 
 things of the existence of things that are, and of the I 
 non-existence of things that are not." " You have read 
 him ? " asks Socrates, addressing Thesetetus. " Oh yes, 
 again and again," is These tetus' reply. Plato was en- 
 tirely opposed to the doctrine that Protagoras taught. 
 It seemed to him to bring gods and men and tadpoles 
 to one level as far as truth was concerned ; for he drew 
 the deduction that if man is the measure of all things, 
 then to each man his own opinion is right. Plato l 
 opposed to it the theory that truth is the vision of a I 
 pure objective reality. 
 
 This same problem that exercised the ancient world 
 is now again a chief centre of philosophical interest, and 
 the aim of this little book is not to decide that question, 
 but to serve as a guide and introduction to those who 
 desire to know what the question is that divides philo- 
 sophers to-day into the hostile camps of pragmatism 
 and intellectualism. 
 
 The subject is not likely to interest anyone who does 
 not care for the study of the exact definitions and ab- 
 stract principles that lie at the basis of science and 
 philosophy. There are many who are engaged in the 
 study of the physical and natural sciences, and also 
 many who devote themselves to the social and political
 
 12 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 sciences, who hold in profound contempt the fine dis- 
 tinctions and intellectual subtleties that seeni to them 
 the whole content of logic and metaphysic. The attitude 
 of the scientific mind is not difficult to understand. It 
 has recently been rather graphically expressed by a 
 distinguished and popular exponent of the principles 
 of natural science. " One may regard the utmost possi- 
 bilities of the results of human knowledge as the contents 
 of a bracket, and place outside the bracket the factor 
 x to represent those unknown and unknowable possi- 
 bilities which the imagination of man is never wearied 
 of suggesting. This factor x is the plaything of the 
 metaphysician." x This mathematical symbol of the 
 bracket, multiplied by x to represent the unknown and 
 unknowable possibilities beyond it, will serve me to 
 indicate with some exactness the problem with which I 
 am going to deal. The symbol is an expression of the 
 agnostic position. The popular caricature of the meta- 
 physician and his " plaything " we may disregard as a 
 pure fiction. The unknowable x of the agnostic is not 
 the " meta " or " beyond " of physics which the meta- 
 physician vainly seeks to know. The only " beyond " 
 of physics is consciousness or experience itself, and this 
 is the subject-matter of metaphysics. Our present 
 problem is that of the bracket, not that of the factor 
 outside, if there is any such factor, nor yet the particular 
 nature of the contents within. There are, as we shall 
 see, three views that are possible of the nature of the 
 bracket. In one view, it is merely the conception of 
 the extent which knowledge has attained or can attain ; 
 it has no intimate relation to the knowledge, but marks 
 externally its limit. This is the view of the realist. In 
 another view, the whole of knowledge is intimately related 
 1 Sir Ray Lankester.
 
 PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS 13 
 
 to its particular parts ; the things we know are not a 
 mere collection or aggregate of independent facts that 
 we have discovered ; the bracket which contains our 
 knowledge gives form to it, and relates organically the 
 dependent parts to the whole in one comprehensive 
 individual system. This is the view of the idealist. 
 There is yet another view : human knowledge is relative 
 to human activity and its needs ; the bracket is the 
 ever-changing limit of that activity within it is all 
 that is relevant to human purpose and personality, 
 without it is all that is irrelevant. This is the view of 
 the pragmatist. 
 
 It is not only the scientific mind, but also the ethical 
 and religious mind, that is likely to be at least impatient, 
 if not contemptuous, of this inquiry. The question, 
 What is truth ? will probably bring to everyone's mind 
 the words uttered by a Roman Procurator at the supreme 
 moment of a great world -tragedy. Pilate's question is 
 usually interpreted as the cynical jest of a judge indiffer- 
 ent to the significance of the great cause he was trying 
 the expression of the belief that there is no revelation 
 of spiritual truth of the highest importance for our 
 human nature, or at least that there is no infallible test 
 by which it can be known. It is not this problem of 
 truth that we are now to discuss. 
 
 There are, on the other hand, many minds that can 
 never rest satisfied while they have accepted only, and 
 not examined, the assumptions of science and the values 
 of social and political and religious ideals. Their quest 
 of first principles may appear to more practical natures 
 a harmless amusement or a useless waste of intellectual 
 energy ; but they are responding to a deep need of our 
 human nature, a need that, it may be, is in its very nature 
 insatiable the need of intellectual satisfaction. It is
 
 14 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 the nature of this intellectual satisfaction itself that is 
 our problem of truth. 
 
 There are therefore two attitudes towards the problem 
 of truth and reality that of the mind which brings a 
 practical test to every question, and that of the mind 
 restless to gain by insight or by speculation a clue to the 
 mystery that enshrouds the meaning of existence. The 
 first attitude seems peculiarly to characterise the man 
 of science, who delights to think that the problem of 
 reality is simple and open to the meanest understanding. 
 Between the plain man's view and that of the man of 
 high attainment in scientific research there is for him 
 only a difference of degree, and science seems almost to 
 require an apology if it does not directly enlarge our 
 command over nature. It would explain life and con- 
 sciousness as the result of chemical combination of 
 material elements. Philosophy, on the other hand, is 
 the instinctive feeling that the secret of the universe is 
 not open and revealed to the plain man guided by 
 common-sense experience alone, even if to this experi- 
 ence be added the highest attainments of scientific 
 research. Either there is far more in matter than is * 
 contained in the three-dimensional space it occupies, 
 or else the universe must owe its development to some- 
 thing beyond matter. The universe must seem a poor 
 thing indeed to a man who can think that physical i 
 science does or can lay bare its meaning. It is the : 
 intense desire to catch some glimpse of its meaning 
 that leads the philosopher to strive to transcend the ; 
 actual world by following the speculative bent of the ' 
 reasoning power that his intellectual nature makes
 
 APPEARANCE AND REALITY 15 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 APPEARANCE AND REALITY 
 
 OUR conscious life is one unceasing change. From the 
 first awakening of consciousness to the actual present, 
 no one moment has been the mere repetition of another, 
 and the moments which as we look back seem to have 
 made up our life are not separable elements of it but 
 our own divisions of a change that has been continuous. 
 And as it has been, so we know it will be until con- 
 sciousness ceases with death. Consciousness and life 
 are in this respect one and the same, although when we 
 speak of our consciousness we think chiefly of a passive 
 receptivity, and when we speak of our life we think of 
 an activity. Consciousness as the unity of knowing and / 
 acting is a becoming. The past is not left behind, it 
 is with us in the form of memory ; the future is not a 
 predetermined order which only a natural disability 
 prevents us from knowing, it is yet uncreated ; con- 
 scious life is the enduring present which grows with the 
 past and makes the future. 
 
 This reality of consciousness is our continually chang- 
 ing experience. But there is also another reality with 
 which it seems to be in necessary relation and also in 
 complete contrast this is the reality of the material or _ 
 physical universe. The world of physical reality seems 
 to be composed of a matter that cannot change in a 
 space that is absolutely unchangeable. This physical 
 world seems made up of solid things, formed out of 
 matter. Change in physical science is only a rearrange- 
 ment of matter or an alteration of position in space. 
 
 This physical reality is not, as psychical reality is,
 
 16 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 known to us directly ; it is an interpretation of our sense 
 experience. Immediate experience has objects, gene- 
 rally called sense data. These objects are what we 
 actually see in sensations of sight, what we actually 
 hear in sensations of sound, and so on ; and they lead us 
 to suppose or infer physical objects that is, objects that 
 do not depend upon our experience for their existence, 
 but whose existence is the cause of our having the ex- 
 perience. The process by which we infer the nature of 
 the external world from our felt experience is logical. 
 It includes perceiving, conceiving, thinking or reasoning. 
 The object of the logical process, the aim or ideal to 
 which it seeks to attain, is truth. Knowledge of reality 
 is truth. 
 
 There are therefore two realities, the reality of our 
 felt experience from which all thinking sets out, and 
 the reality which in thinking we seek to know. The 
 one reality is immediate ; it is conscious experience 
 itself. The other reality is that which we infer from the 
 fact of experience, that by which we seek to explain our 
 existence. The one we feel, the other we think. If 
 the difference between immediate knowledge and mediate 
 knowledge or inference lay in the feeling of certainty 
 alone or in the nature of belief, the distinction would 
 not be the difficult one that it is. The theories of 
 idealism and realism show how widely philosophers are 
 divided on the subject. We are quite as certain of 
 some of the things that we can only infer as we are of 
 the things of which we are immediately aware. We 
 cannot doubt, for instance, that there are other persons 
 besides ourselves, yet we can have no distinct knowledge 
 of any consciousness but one our own. Our knowledge 
 that there are other minds is an inference from our ob- 
 servation of the behaviour of some of the things we
 
 APPEARANCE AND REALITY 17 
 
 directly experience, and from the experience of our own 
 consciousness. And even those things which seem in 
 direct relation to us the things we see, or hear, or touch 
 are immediately present in only a very small, perhaps 
 an infinitesimal, part of what we know and think of as 
 their full reality; all but this small part is inferred. 
 From a momentary sensation of sight, or sound, or touch 
 we infer reality that far exceeds anything actually given 
 to us by the sensation. 
 
 Thinking is questioning experience. When our atten- 
 tion is suddenly attracted by something a flash of light, 
 or a sound, or a twinge of pain consciously or uncon- 
 sciously we say to ourself , What is that ? The that 
 a simple felt experience contains a meaning, brings a 
 message, and we ask what ? We distinguish the exist- 
 ence as an appearance, and we seek to know the reality. \ 
 The quest of the reality which is made known to us by ( 
 the appearance is the logical process of thought. The i 
 end or purpose of this logical process is to replace the 
 immediate reality of the felt experience with a mediated 
 reality that is, a reality made known to us. Directly, 
 therefore, that we begin to think, the immediately 
 present existence becomes an appearance, and through- 
 out the development of our thought it is taken to be 
 something that requires explanation. We seek to dis- 
 cover the reality which will explain it. 
 
 It is hi this distinction of appearance and reality that 
 the problem of truth arises. It does not depend upon 
 any particular theory of knowledge. The same fact is 
 recognised by idealists and by realists. Idealism may 
 deny that the knowledge of independent reality is pos- 
 sible ; realism may insist that it is implied in the very 
 fact of consciousness itself whichever is right, the 
 reality which thinking brings before the mind is quite 
 
 B
 
 18 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 unlike and of a different order to that which we imme- 
 diately experience in feeling. And even if we know 
 nothing of philosophy, if we are ignorant of all theories 
 of knowledge and think of the nature of knowledge 
 simply from the standpoint of the natural man, the fact 
 is essentially the same the true reality of things is 
 something concealed from outward view, something to 
 be found out by science or by practical wisdom. Our 
 knowledge of this reality may be true, in this case only 
 is it knowledge ; or it may be false, in which case it is 
 not knowledge but opinion or error. 
 
 The reality then, the knowledge of which is truth, is 
 
 i not the immediate reality of feeling but the inferred 
 reality of thought. To have any intelligible meaning, 
 
 ' the affirmation that knowledge is true supposes that 
 there already exists a distinction between knowledge 
 and the reality known, between the being and the 
 knowing of that which is known. In immediate know- 
 ledge, in actual conscious felt experience there is no 
 such distinction, and therefore to affirm truth or error 
 of such knowledge is unmeaning. I cannot have a 
 toothache without knowing that I have it. In the 
 actual felt toothache knowing and being are not only 
 inseparable they are indistinguishable. If, however, I 
 think of my toothache as part of an independent order 
 of reality, my knowledge of it may be true or false. I 
 am then thinking of it as the effect of an exposed nerve, 
 or of an abscess or of an inflammation as something, 
 that is to say, that is conditioned independently of my 
 consciousness and that will cease to exist when the 
 conditions are altered. In the same way, when I behold 
 a landscape, the blue expanse of sky and variegated 
 colour of the land which I actually experience are not 
 either true or false, they are immediate experience in
 
 APPEARANCE AND REALITY 19 
 
 which knowing is being and being is knowing. Truth 
 and error only apply to the interpretation of that 
 experience, to the independent reality that I infer from 
 it. We can, then, distinguish two kinds of knowledge 
 which we may call immediate and mediate, or, better 
 still, acquaintance and description. Accordingly, when \ 
 we say that something is, or when we say of anything 
 that it if real, wo may mean either of two things. We 
 may mean that it is part of the changing existence that 
 we actually feel and that we call consciousness or life, 
 or we may mean that it is part of an independent order 
 of things whose existence we think about in order to 
 explain, not what our feeling is (there can be no explana- 
 tion of this), but how it comes to exist. We know by 
 description a vast number of things with which we never 
 can be actually acquainted. Such, indeed, is the case 
 with all the knowledge by which we rule our lives and 
 conceive the reality which environs us. Yet we are 
 absolutely dependent on the reality we know by f 
 acquaintance for all our knowledge of these things. ; 
 Not only is immediate sense experience and the know- 
 ledge it gives us by acquaintance the only evidence we 
 have of the greater and wider reality, but we are de- 
 pendent on it for the terms wherewith to describe it, 
 for the form in which to present it, for the matter with 
 which to compose it. And this is the real ground of 
 the study of philosophy, the justification of its stand- 
 point. It is this fact this ultimate undeniable fact 
 that all reality of whatever kind and in whatever way 
 known, whether by thought or by feeling, whether it is 
 perceived or conceived, remembered or imagined, is in * 
 the end composed of sense experience : it is this fact 
 from which all the problems of philosophy arise. It is 
 this fact that our utilitarian men of science find them-
 
 20 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 selves forced to recognise, however scornful they may 
 be of metaphysical methods and results. 
 
 The special problem of the nature of truth is con- 
 cerned, then, with the reality that we have distinguished 
 as known by description, and conceived by us as inde- 
 pendent in its existence of the consciousness by which 
 we know it. What is the nature of the seal by which 
 we stamp this knowledge true ? 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE LOGICAL THEOEIES 
 
 WHOEVER cares to become acquainted with the diffi- 
 culty of the problem of truth must not be impatient of 
 dialectical subtleties. There is a well-known story in 
 BoswelFs Life of Dr. Johnson which relates how the 
 Doctor refuted Berkeley's philosophy which affirmed the 
 non-existence of matter. " I observed," says Boswell, 
 " that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, 
 it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the 
 alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot 
 with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded 
 from it ' I refute it thus? " Dr. Johnson is the repre- 
 sentative of robust common sense. It has very often 
 turned out in metaphysical disputes that the common- 
 sense answer is the one that has been justified in the 
 end. Those who are impatient of metaphysics are, 
 therefore, not without reasonable ground ; and indeed 
 the strong belief that the common-sense view will be 
 justified in the end, however powerful the sceptical 
 doubt that seems to contradict it, however startling 
 the paradox that seems to be involved in it, is a posses- 
 sion of the human mind without which the ordinary
 
 THE LOGICAL THEORIES 21 
 
 practical conduct of life would be impossible. When, 
 then, we ask ourselves, What is truth ? the answer seems 
 to be simple and obvious. Truth, we reply, is a pro- 
 perty of certain of our ideas ; it means their agreement, 
 as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. If I 
 say of anything that it is so, then, if it is so, what I say / 
 is true ; if it is not so, then what I say is false. This 
 simple definition of truth is one that is universally 
 accepted. No one really can deny it, for if he did he 
 would have nothing to appeal to to justify his own 
 theory or condemn another. The problem of truth is ; 
 only raised when we ask, What does the agreement of 
 an idea with reality mean ? If the reader will ask 
 himself that question, and carefully ponder it, he will , 
 see that there is some difficulty in the answer to the 
 simple question, What is truth ? The answer that will 
 **l \probably first of all suggest itself is that the idea is a H 
 
 f the reality. And at once many experiences 
 seem to confirm this view. Thus when we look at a 
 landscape we know that the lines of light which radiate 
 from every point of it pass through the lens of each of 
 our eyes to be focussed on the retina, forming there a 
 small picture which is the exact counterpart of the 
 realitjr. If we look into another person's eye we may 
 see there a picture of the whole field of his vision re- 
 flected from his lens. It is true that what we see is 
 not what he sees, for that is on his retina, but the analogy 
 of this with a photographic camera, where we see the 
 picture on the ground glass, seems obvious and natural; . 
 and so we think of knowledge, so far as it depends on I 
 the sense of vision, as consisting in more or less vivid, I 
 more or less faded, copies of real things stored up by * 
 the memory. But a very little reflection will convince 
 us that the truth of our ideas cannot consist in the fact
 
 22 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 that they are copies of realities, for clearly they are not 
 
 copies in any possible meaning of the term. Take, for 
 
 example, this very illustration of seeing a landscape : 
 
 what we see is not a picture or copy of the landscape, 
 
 but the real landscape itself. We feel quite sure of 
 
 this, and with regard to the other sensations, those 
 
 that come to us by hearing, taste, smell, touch, it would 
 
 seem highly absurd to suppose that the ideas these 
 
 ; sensations produce in us are copies of real things. The 
 
 : pain of burning is not a copy of real fire, and the truth 
 
 of the judgment, Fire burns, does not consist in the fact 
 
 that the ideas denoted by the words " fire," " burns," 
 
 faithfully copy certain real things which are not ideas. 
 
 And the whole notion is seen to be absurd if we consider 
 
 1 that, were it a fact that real things produce copies of 
 
 ! themselves in our mind, we could never know it was so 
 
 ; all that we should have any knowledge of would be the 
 
 I copies, and whether these were like or unlike the reality, 
 
 or indeed whether there was any reality for them to be 
 
 like would, in the nature of the case, be unknowable, 
 
 and we could never ask the question. 
 
 If, then, our ideas are not copies of things, and if 
 
 there are things as well as ideas about things, it is quite 
 
 j clear that the ideas must correspond to the things in 
 
 some way that does not make them copies of the things. 
 
 5 The most familiar instance of correspondence is the 
 
 i symbolism we use in mathematics. Are our ideas of 
 
 this nature ? And is their truth their correspondence ? 
 
 Is a perfectly true idea one in which there exists a point 
 
 to point correspondence to the reality it represents ? 
 
 At once there will occur to the mind a great number of 
 
 instances where this seems to be the case. A map of 
 
 England is not a copy of England such as, for example, 
 
 a photograph might be if we were to imagine it taken
 
 THE LOGICAL THEORIES 23 
 
 from the moon. The correctness or the truth of a map 
 consists in the correspondence between the reality and 
 the diagram, which is an arbitrary sign of it. Through- 
 out the whole of our ordinary lif e we find that we make 
 use of symbols and signs that are not themselves either 
 parts of or copies of the things for which they stand. 
 Language itself is of this nature, and there may be 
 symbols of symbols of symbols of real things. Written 
 language is the arbitrary visual sign of spoken language, 
 and spoken language is the arbitrary sign, it may be, of 
 an experienced thing or of an abstract idea. Is, then, 
 this property of our ideas which we call truth the 
 correspondence of ideas with their objects, and is falsity 
 the absence of this correspondence ? It cannot be so. 
 To imagine that ideas can correspond with realities is I 
 to forget that ideas simply are the knowledge of realities ; I 
 it is to slip into the notion that we know two kinds of | 
 different things, first realities and secondly ideas, and 
 that we can compare together these two sorts of things. 
 But it is at once evident that if we could know realities 
 without ideas, we should never need to have recourse 
 to ideas. It is simply ridiculous to suppose that the \ 
 relation between consciousness and reality which we ' 
 call knowing is the discovery of a correspondence be- j 
 tween mental ideas and real things. The two things I - 
 that are related together in knowledge are not the idea j 
 and its object, but the mind and its object. The ideaf 
 of the object is the knowledge of the object. There 
 may be correspondence between ideas, but not between 
 ideas and independent things, for that supposes that the j tf 
 mind knows the ideas and also knows the things and I 
 observes the correspondence between them. And even J 
 if we suppose that ideas are an independent kind of^' 
 entity distinguishable and separable from another kind ** *"*"
 
 24 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 of entity that forms the real world, how could we know 
 that the two corresponded, for the one would only be 
 inferred from the other ? 
 
 There is, however, a form of the correspondence 
 theory of truth that is presented in a way which avoids 
 this difficulty. Truth, it is said, is concerned not with 
 the nature of things themselves but with our judgments 
 about them. Judgment is not concerned with the 
 terms that enter into relation these are immediately 
 experienced and ultimate but with the relations in 
 which they stand to one another. Thus, when we say 
 John is the father of James, the truth of our judgment 
 does not consist in the adequacy of our ideas of John 
 and James, nor in the correspondence of our ideas with 
 the realities, but is concerned only with the relation 
 that is affirmed to exist between them. This relation 
 is declared to be independent of or at least external to 
 the terms, and, so far as it is expressed in a judgment, 
 truth consists in its actual correspondence with fact. 
 So if I say John is the father of James, then, if John is 
 the father of James, the judgment is true, the affirma- 
 tion is a truth ; if he is not, it is false, the affirmation 
 is a falsehood. This view has the merit of simplicity, and 
 is sufficiently obvious almost to disarm criticism. There 
 is, indeed, little difficulty in accepting it if we are able 
 to take the view of the nature of the real universe 
 which it assumes. The theory is best described as 
 pluralistic realism. It is the view that the universe 
 consists of or is composed of an aggregate of an infinite 
 number of entities. Some of these have a place in the 
 space and time series, and these exist. Some, on the 
 other hand, are possibilities which have not and may 
 never have any actual existence. Entities that have 
 their place in the perceptual order of experience exist,
 
 THE LOGICAL THEORIES 25 
 
 or have existed, or will exist; but entities that are 
 concepts, such as goodness, beauty, truth, or that are 
 abstract symbols like numbers, geometrical figures, pure 
 forms, do not exist, but are none the less just as real 
 as the entities that do exist. These entities are the 
 subject-matter of our judgments, and knowing is dis- 
 covering the relations in which they stand to one 
 another. The whole significance of this view lies in / 
 the doctrine that relations are external to the entities I 
 that are related they do not enter into and form part \ 
 of the nature of the entities. The difficulty of this 
 view is just this externality of the relation. It seems 
 difficult to conceive what nature is left in any entity 
 deprived of all its relations. The relation of father and 
 son in the judgment, John is the father of James, is so 
 far part of the nature of the persons John and James, 
 that if the judgment is false then to that extent John 
 and James are not the actual persons John and James 
 that they are thought to be. And this is the case even 
 in so purely external a relation as is expressed, say, in 
 the judgment, Edinburgh is East of Glasgow. It is 
 difficult to discuss any relation which can be said to be 
 entirely indifferent to the nature of its terms, and it is 
 doubtful if anything whatever would be left of a term 
 abstracted from all its relations. 
 
 These difficulties have led to the formulation of an /*s 
 altogether different theory, namely, the theory thai/"!*. 
 > truth does not consist in correspondence between ideas r*-* 
 ; and then* real counterparts, but in the consistence and [ 
 \ internal harmony of the ideas themselves. It is named !. 
 'the coherence theory. It will be recognised at once 
 that there is very much in common experience to 
 support it. It is by the test of consistency and 
 coherence that we invariably judge the truth of evidence.
 
 26 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 Also it seems a very essential part of our intellectual 
 nature to reject as untrue and false any statement or 
 any idea that is self -contradictory or irreconcilable with 
 the world of living experience. But then, on the other 
 hand, we by no means allow that that must be true 
 which does not exhibit logical contradiction and incon- 
 sistency. It is a common enough experience that ideas 
 prove false though they have exhibited no inherent 
 failure to harmonise with surrounding circumstances 
 nor any self-contradiction. The theory, therefore, re- 
 quires more than a cursory examination. 
 
 Thinking is the activity of our mind which discovers 
 the order, arrangement, and system in the reality that 
 the senses reveal. Without thought, our felt experience 
 would be a chaos and not a world. The philosopher 
 Kant expressed this by saying that the understanding 
 gives unity to the manifold of sense. The understanding, 
 he said, makes nature. It does this by giving form to 
 the matter which comes to it by the senses. Thejnincl 
 is not a tabula rasa upon which the external world makes 
 I and leaves impressions, it is a relating activity which 
 \ arranges the matter it receives in forms. First of all 
 there are space and time, which are forms in which we 
 receive all perceptual experience, and then there are 
 categories that are conceptual frames or moulds by 
 which we think of everything we experience as having 
 definite relations and belonging to a real order of ex- 
 istence. Substance, causality, quality, and quantity 
 are categories ; they are universal forms in which the 
 mind arranges sense experience, and which constitute 
 the laws of nature, the order of the world. Space and 
 time, and the categories of the understanding Kant 
 declared to be transcendental that is to say, they are 
 the elements necessary to experience which are not
 
 THE LOGICAL THEORIES 27 
 
 themselves derived from experience, as, for example, 
 that every event has a cause. There are, he declared, 
 synthetic a priori judgments that is, judgments about 
 experience which are not themselves derived from ex- 
 perience, but, on the contrary, the conditions that 
 make experience possible. It is from this doctrine of 
 Kant that the whole of modern idealism takes its rise. 
 Kant, indeed, held that there are things-in-themselves, 
 and to this extent he was not himself an idealist, but 
 he also held that things-in-themselves are unknowable, 
 and this is essentially the idealist position. Clearly, 
 if we hold the view that things-in-themselves are un- 
 1 knowable, truth cannot be a correspondence between 
 
 Iour ideas and these things-in-themselves. Truth must 
 be some quality of the ideas themselves, and this can 
 only be their logical consistency. Consistency, be- 
 cause the ideas must be in agreement with one another ; 
 and logical, because this consistency belongs to the 
 thinking, and logic is the science of thinking. Truth, 
 in effect, is the ideal of logical consistency. We experi- 
 ence in thinking an activity striving to attain the 
 knowledge of reality, and the belief, the feeling of satis- 
 faction that we experience when our thinking seems to 
 attain the knowledge of reality, is the harmony, the 
 absence of contradiction, the coherence, of our ideas 
 themselves. This is the coherence theory. Let us see 
 what it implies as to the ultimate nature of truth and 
 reality. 
 
 In both the theories we have now examined, truth is 
 a logical character of ideas. In the correspondence 
 theory there is indeed supposed a non-logical reality, 
 but it is only in the ideas that there is the conformity 
 or correspondence which constitutes their truth. In 
 the coherence theory, reality is itself ideal, and the
 
 28 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 ultimate ground of everything is logical. This is the 
 theory of truth that accords with the idealist view, and 
 this view finds its most perfect expression in the theory 
 of the Absolute. The Absolute is the idea of an object / 
 that realises perfect logical consistency. This object I 
 logic itself creates ; if it be a necessary existence, then ' 
 knowledge of it cannot be other than truth. This view, 
 on account of the supreme position that it assigns to 
 the intellect, and of the fundamental character with 
 which it invests the logical categories, has been named 
 by those who oppose it Intellectualism. It is important 
 that it should be clearly understood, and the next chapter 
 will be devoted to its exposition. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 
 
 A COMPARISON of the two theories of truth examined 
 in the last chapter will show that, whereas both rest on 
 a logical quality in ideas, the first depends on an ex- 
 ternal view taken by the mind of an independent non- 
 mental reality, whereas the second depends on the 
 discovery of an inner meaning in experience itself. It 
 is this inner meaning of experience that we seek to know 
 when asking any question concerning reality. It is 
 the development of this view, and what it implies as to 
 the ultimate nature of reality and truth, that we are now 
 to examine. 
 
 When we ask questions about reality, we assume in 
 I the very inquiry that reality is of a nature that experi- 
 1 ence reveals. Reality in its ultimate nature may be 
 * logical that is to say, of the nature of reason, or it may
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 29 
 
 be non-logical that is to say, of the nature of feeling or 
 will ; but in either case it must be a nature of which 
 conscious experience can give us knowledge. If indeed 
 we hold the view which philosophers have often en- 
 deavoured to formulate, that reality is unknowable, 
 then there is no more to be said ; for, whatever the picture 
 or the blank for a picture by which the mind tries to 
 present this unknowable reality, there can be no question 
 in relation to it of the nature and meaning of truth. 
 An unknowable reality, as we shall show later on, is 
 to all intents and purposes non-existent reality. On 
 the other hand, if thinking leads to the knowledge of 
 reality that we call truth, it is because being and know- 
 ing are ultimately one, and this unity can only be in 
 conscious experience. This is the axiom on which the 
 idealist argument is based. 
 
 The theory of the Absolute is a logical argument of 
 great dialectical force. It is not an exaggeration to V 
 say that it is the greatest dialectical triumph of modem I 
 philosophy. It is the most successful expression of 
 idealism. That this is not an extravagant estimate 
 is shown, I think, by the fact that, widespread and 
 determined as is the opposition it has had to encounter, 
 criticism has been directed not so much against its logic 
 as against the basis of intellectualism on which it rests. 
 The very boldness of its claim and brilliance of its 
 triumph lead to the suspicion that the intellect cannot * 
 be the sole determining factor of the ultimate nature ? 
 of reality. 
 
 It will be easier to understand the theory of the 
 Absolute if we first of all notice, for the sake of after- 
 wards comparing it, another argument very famous in 
 the history of philosophy the argument to prove the I 
 existence of God named after St. Anselm of Canterbury, j
 
 80 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 It runs thus : We have in God the idea of a perfect being ; 
 the idea of a perfect being includes the existence of that 
 being, for not to exist is to fall short of perfection ; there- 
 fore God exists. The theological form of this argument 
 need raise no prejudice against it. It is of very great 
 intrinsic importance, and if it is wrong it is not easy to 
 point out wherein the fallacy lies. It may, of course, 
 be denied that we have or can have the idea of a perfect 
 being that is to say, that we can present that idea to 
 the mind with a positive content or meaning as distinct 
 from a merely negative or limiting idea. But this is 
 practically to admit the driving force of the argument, 
 namely, that there may be an idea of whose content or 
 meaning existence forms part. With regard to every- 
 thing else the idea of existing is not existence. There 
 is absolutely no difference between the idea of a hundred 
 dollars and the idea of a hundred dollars existing, but 
 there is the whole difference between thought and reality 
 in the idea of the hundred dollars existing and the ex- 
 istence of the hundred dollars. Their actual existence 
 in no way depends on the perfection or imperfection of 
 my idea, nor in the inclusion of their existence in my 
 idea. This is sufficiently obvious in every case in which 
 we are dealing with perceptual reality, and in which 
 we can, in the words of the philosopher Hume, produce 
 the impression which gives rise to the idea. But there 
 are some objects which by their very nature will not 
 submit to this test. No man hath seen God at any 
 time, not because God is an object existing under con- 
 ditions and circumstances of place and time impossible 
 for us to realise by reason of the limitations of our finite 
 existence, but because God is an object in a different 
 sense from that which has a place in the perceptual 
 order, and therefore it is affirmed of God that the
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 81 
 
 idea involves existence. God is not an object of per- 
 ception, either actual or possible ; nor in the strict sense 
 is God a concept that is to say, a universal of which 
 there may be particulars. He is in a special sense the 
 object of reason. If we believe that there is a God, it 
 is because our reason tells us that there must be. God, 
 in philosophy, is the idea of necessary existence, and 
 the argument runs : God must be, therefore is. If, then, 
 we exclude from the idea of God every mythological 
 and theological element if we mean not Zeus nor 
 Jehovah nor Brahma, but the first principle of existence 
 then we may find in the St. Anselm argument the 
 very ground of theism. 
 
 I have explained this argument, which is of the class 
 called ontological because it is concerned with the 
 fundamental question of being, in order to give an in- 
 stance of the kind of argument that has given us the 
 theory of the Absolute. I will now try to set that 
 theory before the reader, asking only that he will put 
 himself into the position of a plain man with no special 
 acquaintance with philosophy, but reflective and anxious 
 to interpret the meaning of his ordinary experience. 
 
 We have already seen that thinking is the questioning , 
 of experience, and that the moment it begins it gives 
 rise to a distinction between appearance and reality. 
 It is the asking what ? of every that of felt experience ; 
 to which the mind attends. The world in which we 
 find ourselves is extended all around us in space and 
 full of things which affect us in various ways : some 
 give us pleasure, others give us pain, and we ourselves 
 are things that affect other things as well as being our- 
 selves affected by them. When we think about the things 
 in the world in order to discover what they really are,^ 
 we very soon find that we are liable to illusion and error. I
 
 32 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 Things turn out on examination to be very different to 
 what we first imagined them to be. Our ideas, by which 
 we try to understand the reality of things are just so 
 many attempts to correct and set right our illusions 
 | and errors. And so the question arises, how far are our 
 j ideas about things truths about reality ? It is very 
 I soon evident that there are some qualities of things that 
 give rise to illusion and error much more readily than 
 others. The spatial qualities of things, solidity, shape, 
 size, seem to be real in a way that does not admit of 
 doubt. We seem able to apply to these qualities a test 
 that is definite and absolute. On the other hand, there 
 seem to be effects of these things in us such as their 
 colour, taste, odour, sound, coldness, or heat, qualities 
 that are incessantly changing and a fruitful source of 
 illusion and error. We therefore distinguish the spatial 
 qualities as primary, and consider that they are the real 
 things and different from their effects, which we call 
 their secondary qualities. And this is, perhaps, our 
 most ordinary test of reality. If, for example, we 
 should think that something we see is an unreal phantom, 
 or a ghost, or some kind of hallucination, and on going 
 up to it find that it does actually occupy space, we 
 correct our opinion and say the thing is real. But the 
 spatial or primary qualities of a thing, although they 
 may seem more permanent and more essential to the 
 reaKty of the thing than the secondary qualities, are 
 
 ! nevertheless only qualities. They are not the thing 
 itself, but ways in which it affects us. It seems to us 
 that these qualities must inhere in or belong to the 
 thing, and so we try to form the idea of the real thing 
 as a substance or substratum which has the qualities. 
 This was a generally accepted notion until Berkeley 
 (1685-1753) showed how contradictory it is. So
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 83 
 
 simple and convincing was his criticism of the notion, 
 that never since has material substance been put for- 
 ward as an explanation of the reality of the things we 
 perceive. All that he did was to show how impossible 
 and contradictory it is to think that the reality of that | 
 which we perceive is something in its nature impercep- ] 
 tible, for such must material substance be apart from its \ 
 sense qualities. How can that which we perceive be 
 something imperceptible ? And if we reflect on it, we 
 /. shall surely agree that it is so by the thing we mean its | 
 j qualities, and apart from the qualities there is no thing. / 
 v We must try, then, in some other way to reach the reality. 
 What, we shall now ask, can it be that binds together 
 these sense qualities so that we speak of them as a 
 thing ? There are two elements that seem to enter 
 into everything whatever that comes into our experience, 
 and which it seems to us would remain if everything 
 in the universe were annihilated. These are space and 
 time. Are they reality ? Here we are met with a new 
 kind of difficulty. It was possible to dismiss material 
 substance as a false idea, an idea of something whose 
 existence is impossible ; but space and time are certainly 
 not false ideas. The difficulty about them is that we 
 cannot make our thought of them consistent they are 
 ideas that contain a self-contradiction, or at least that 
 lead to a self-contradiction when we affirm them of 
 reality. With the ideas of space and time are closely 
 linked the ideas of change, of movement, of causation, 
 of quality and quantity, and all of these exhibit this 
 same puzzling characteristic, that they seem to make 
 us affirm what we deny and deny what we affirm. I 
 might fill this little book with illustrations of the para- 
 doxes that are involved in these ordinary working ideas. 
 Everyone is familiar with the difficulty involved in the 
 

 
 34 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 idea of time. We must think there was a beginning, 
 and we cannot think that there was any moment to 
 which there was no before. So also with space, it is 
 an infinite extension which we can only think of as a 
 beyond to every limit. This receding limit of the 
 infinitely extensible space involves the character of in- 
 finite divisibility, for if there are an infinite number of 
 points from which straight lines can be drawn without 
 intersecting one another to any fixed point there is 
 therefore no smallest space that cannot be further 
 divided. The contradictions that follow from these 
 demonstrable contents of the idea of space are endless. 
 The relation of time to space is another source of con- 
 tradictory ideas. I shall perhaps, however, best make 
 the meaning of this self -contradictory character of our 
 ordinary ideas clear by following out a definite illustra- 
 tion. What is known as the antinomy of motion is 
 probably familiar to everyone from the well-known 
 paradox of the Greek philosopher Zeno. The flying 
 arrow, he said, does not move, because if it did it would 
 be in two places at one and the same time, and that is 
 impossible. I will now put this same paradox of move- 
 ment in a form which, so far as I know, it has not been 
 presented before. My illustration will involve the idea 
 of causation as well as that of movement. If we sup- 
 [pose a space to be fully occupied, we shall agree that 
 within that space can move without thereby 
 >lacing whatever occupies the position into which 
 it moves. That is to say, the movement of any occupant 
 of one position must cause the displacement of the 
 occupant of the new position into which he moves. 
 But on the other hand it is equally clear that the dis- 
 placement of the occupant of the new position is a 
 prior condition of the possibility of the movement of
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 85 
 
 the mover, for nothing can move unless there is an un- 
 occupied place for it to move into, and there is no un- 
 occupied place unless it has been vacated by its occupant 
 before the movement begins. We have therefore the 
 clear contradiction that a thing can only move when 
 something else which it causes to move has already 
 moved. Now if we reflect on it we shall see that this 
 is exactly the position we occupy in our three-dimen- 
 sional space. The space which surrounds us is occupied, 
 and therefore we cannot move until a way is made clear I 
 for us, and nothing makes way for us unless we move./ 
 We cannot move through stone walls because we cannot' 
 displace solid matter, but we can move through air and 
 water because we are able to displace these. The 
 problem is the same. My movement displaces the air, 
 but there is no movement until the air is displaced. 
 Can we escape the contradiction by supposing the dis- 
 placement is the cause and the movement the effect. 
 Are we, like people in a theatre queue, only able to move 
 from behind forward as the place is vacated for us in 
 front ? In that case we should be driven to the in- 
 credible supposition that the original cause or con- 
 dition of our movement is the previous movement of 
 something at the outskirts of our occupied space, that 
 this somewhat moving into the void made possible the 
 movement of the occupant of the space next adjoining, ] 
 and so on until after a lapse of time which may be ages, > 
 which may indeed be infinite, the possibility of move- j 
 ment is opened to us. In fact we must believe that the 
 effect of our movement namely, the displacement of 
 the previous occupants from the positions we occupy f j 
 in moving happened before it was caused. Now it is 4 f 
 impossible for us to believe either of the only two 
 alternatives either that we do not really move but only
 
 86 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 appear to do so, or that the displacement our movement 
 causes really precedes the movement. When we meet 
 with a direct self-contradiction in our thoughts about 
 anything, we can only suppose that that about which 
 we are thinking is in its nature nonsensical, or else that 
 our ideas about it are wrong. 
 
 It may perhaps be thought that the whole difficulty 
 arises simply because what we are trying to think con- 
 sistently about is a reality that is external to us. Space 
 and time, movement, cause and effect are ideas that 
 apply to a world outside and independent of the mind 
 that tries to think it. May not this be the reason of 
 our failure and the whole explanation of the seeming 
 contradiction ? If we turn our thoughts inward upon 
 our own being and think of the self, the I, the real 
 subject of experience, then surely where thought is at 
 home and its object is mental not physical, we shall 
 know reality. It is not so. The same self-contra- 
 diction characterises our ideas when we try to present 
 the real object of inner perception as when we try to 
 present the real object of external perception. Not, of 
 course, that it is possible to doubt the reality of our own 
 existence, but that we fail altogether to express the 
 meaning of the self we so surely know to exist in any 
 idea which does not fall into self-contradiction. As in 
 the case of the thing and its qualities, we think that 
 there is something distinct from the qualities in which 
 they inhere and yet find ourselves unable to present to 
 the mind any consistent idea of such thing, so we think 
 that there must be some substance or basis of personal 
 identity, some real self which has the successive changing 
 conscious states, which has the character which dis- 
 tinguishes our actions as personal but which neverthe- 
 less is not itself these things. The self-contradiction
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 37 
 
 in the idea of self, or I, or subject, is that it both cannot I 
 change and is always changing. As unchanging, we j 
 distinguish it from our body, which is an external object 
 among other objects and is different from other objects 
 only in the more direct and intimate relation in which 
 it stands to us. The body is always changing ; never 
 for two successive moments is it exactly the same 
 combination of chemical elements. We distinguish also 
 ourself from that consciousness which is memory, the 
 awareness of past experience, from present feelings, 
 desires, thoughts, and strivings these, we say, belong 
 to the self but are not it. The self must have qualities 
 and dwell in the body, guiding, directing, and controlling 
 it, yet this self we never perceive, nor can we conceive | 
 it, for our idea of it is of a reality that changes and is [ 
 yet unchangeable. 
 
 There is, however, one idea an idea to which we 
 have already alluded that seems to offer us an escape . 
 from the whole of this logical difficulty, the idea that '_ 
 reality is unknowable. May not the contradictoriness 
 of our ideas be due to this fact, that our knowledge is 
 entirely of phenomena, of appearances of things, and 
 not of things as they are in themselves ? By a thing- 
 in-itself we do not mean a reality that dwells apart in 
 a universe of its own, out of any relation whatever to 
 our universe. There may or may not be such realities, 
 and whether there are or not is purely irrelevant to * 
 any question of the nature of reality in our universe. I 
 The thing-in-itself is the unknowable reality of the ; 
 thing we know. We conceive it as existing in complete 
 abstraction from every aspect or relation of it that 
 constitutes knowledge of it in another. The self-con- 
 tradiction of such an idea is not difficult to show, quite 
 apart from any consideration of its utter futility as an
 
 38 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 explanation. The thing-in-itself either is or else it is 
 not the reality of phenomena. If it is, then, inasmuch 
 as the phenomena reveal it, it is neither in-itself nor 
 unknowable. If, on the other hand, it is not, if it is 
 unrelated in any way to phenomena, then it is not only 
 unknowable it does not exist to be known. It is an 
 idea without any content or meaning, and therefore in- 
 distinguishable from nothing. It is simply saying of 
 one and the same thing that it must be and that there 
 is nothing that it can be. 
 
 While, then, there is no actual thing that we experi- 
 ence, whether it be an object outside of us or an object 
 within us, of which we can say this is not a pheno- 
 menon or appearance of reality but the actual reality 
 itself, we cannot also say that we do not know reality, 
 because if we had no idea, no criterion, of reality we 
 could never know that anything was only an appearance. 
 It is this fact the fact that we undoubtedly possess, in 
 the very process of thinking itself, a criterion of reality 
 that the idealist argument lays hold of as the basis of 
 its doctrine. The mere fact seems, at first sight, barren 
 and unpromising enough, but the idealist does not find 
 it so. Possessed of this principle, logic, which has 
 seemed till now purely destructive, becomes in his 
 hands creative, and gives form and meaning to an 
 object of pure reason. 
 
 The criterion of reality is self -consistency. We cannot 
 think that anything is ultimately real which has its 
 ground of existence in something else. A real thing is 
 that which can be explained without reference to some 
 other thing. Reality, therefore, is completely self- 
 contained existence, not merely dependent existence. 
 Contradictions cannot be true. If we have to affirm a 
 contradiction of anything, it must be due to an appear-
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 89 
 
 ance, and the reality must reconcile the contradiction. 
 The idea of reality, therefore, is the idea of perfect 
 harmony. Knowing, then, what reality is, can we say . 
 that there is any actual object of thought that conforms 
 to it ? And have we in our limited experience anything 
 that will guide us to the attainment of this object ? 
 The idealist is confident that we have. Some things 
 seem to us to possess a far higher degree of reality than 
 others, just because they conform in a greater degree 
 to this ideal of harmonious existence. It is when we 
 compare the reality of physical things with the reality 
 of mental things that the contrast is most striking, and 
 in it we have the clue to the nature of the higher reality. 
 Physical reality may seem, and indeed in a certain 
 sense is, the basis of existence, but when we try to 
 think out the meaning of physical reality, it becomes 
 increasingly abstract, and we seem unable to set any 
 actual limit to prevent it dissipating into nothing. In \ 
 physical science we never have before us an actual 
 element, either matter or energy, in which we can 
 recognise, however far below the limit of perceivability, 
 the ultimate stuff of which the universe is composed. 
 Science has simply to arrest the dissipation by boldly 
 assuming a matter that is the substance and foundation 
 of reality and an energy that is the ultimate cause of 
 the evolution of the universe. On the other hand, when 
 we consider mental existence, the pursuit of reality is 
 in an exactly contrary direction. There, the more con- 
 crete, the more comprehensive, the more individual a 
 thing is, the greater degree of reality it seems to have. 
 In the spiritual realm, by which we mean, not some 
 supposed supra-mundane sphere, but the world of 
 values, the world in which ideas have reality, in which ; 
 we live our rational life, reality is always sought in a
 
 40 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 higher and higher individuality. The principle of indi- 
 viduality is that the whole is more real than the parts. 
 An individual human being, for example, is a whole, 
 an indivisible organic unity, not merely an aggregation 
 of physiological organs with special functions, nor are 
 these a mere collection of special cells, nor these a mere 
 concourse of chemical elements. The State as a com- 
 munity is an individual organic unity with a reality 
 that is more than the mere total of the reality of indi- 
 vidual citizens who compose it. It is this principle of 
 individuality that is the true criterion of reality. It is 
 this principle that, while it leads us to seek the unity 
 in an individuality ever higher and more complete than 
 we have attained, at the same time explains the dis- 
 crepancy of our partial view, explains contradictions as 
 the necessary result of the effort to understand the 
 parts in independence of the whole which gives to 
 them their reality. Thus, while on the one hand the 
 scientific search for reality is ever towards greater 
 simplicity and abstractness, a simplicity whose ideal 
 limit is zero, the philosophical search for reality is ever 
 towards greater concreteness, towards full comprehen- 
 siveness, and its ideal limit is the whole universe as 
 one perfect and completely harmonious individual. 
 This idea of full reality is the Absolute. There are not 
 two realities, one material and the other spiritual ; the 
 material and the spiritual are two directions in which 
 we may seek the one reality, but there is only one 
 pathway by which we shall find it. 
 
 The Absolute is the whole universe not in its aspect 
 of an aggregate of infinitely diverse separate elements, 
 whether these are material or spiritual, but in its aspect 
 of an individual whole and in its nature as a whole. 
 This nature of the whole is to be individual only in
 
 THE ABSOLUTE 41 
 
 the individual are contradictions reconciled. Is the 
 Absolute more than an idea ? Does it actually exist ? 
 Clearly we cannot claim to know it by direct experience, 
 by acquaintance ; it is not a that of which we can ask 
 what ? It is the object of reason itself, therefore we 
 know that it must be. Also we know that it can be ; it 
 is a possible object in the logical meaning that it is not 
 a self-contradictory idea, like every other idea that we 
 can have. It is not self-contradictory, for it is itself 
 the idea of that which is consistent. Therefore, argues 
 the idealist, it is, for that which must be, and can be, 
 surely exists. The reader will now understand why I 
 introduced this account of the Absolute with a descrip- 
 tion for comparison of the St. Anselm proof of the 
 existence of God. 
 
 There is one further question. Whether the Absolute 
 does or does not exist, is it, either in idea or reality, of 
 any use to us ? The reply is that its value lies in this, 
 that it reveals to us the nature of reality and the mean- 
 ing of truth. Logic is the creative power of thought 
 which leads us to the discovery of higher and higher 
 degrees of reality. The Satyr, in the fable, drove his 
 guest from his shelter because the man blew into his 
 hands to warm them, and into his porridge to cool it. 
 The Satyr could not reconcile the contradiction that 
 one could with the same breath blow hot and cold. 
 Nor would he reconcile it ever, so long as he sought 
 truth as correspondence. Truth would have shown 
 the facts coherent by reconciling the contradiction in 
 a higher reality.
 
 42 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PRAGMATISM 
 
 THE theory of the Absolute is only one form of Idealism, 
 but it illustrates the nature and general direction of 
 the development of philosophy along the line of specu- 
 lation that began with Kant. There have been, of 
 course, other directions. In particular many attempts 
 have been made to make philosophy an adjunct of 
 physical science, but the theory I have sketched is 
 characteristic of the prevailing movement in philosophy 
 during the last period of the Nineteenth Century, and 
 until the movement known as Pragmatism directed 
 criticism upon it. The form the pragmatical criticism 
 of the theory of the Absolute took was to direct atten- 
 tion to the logical or intellectual principle on which it 
 rests in fact to raise the problem of the nature of truth. 
 Pragmatism is a theory of the meaning of truth. It is 
 the denial of a purely logical criterion of truth, and the 
 insistence that truth is always dependent on psycho- 
 logical conditions. Pragmatism therefore rejects both 
 the views that we have examined the theory that truth 
 is a correspondence of the idea with its object, and the 
 theory that it is the logical coherence and consistency 
 of the idea itself. It proposes instead the theory that 
 truth is always founded on a practical postulate, and 
 consists in the verification of that postulate ; the verifi- 
 cation not being the discovery of something that was 
 waiting to be discovered, but the discovery that the 
 postulate that claims to be true is useful, in that it 
 works. Truth is what works. 
 
 The Absolute is reality and truth. The idealist 
 argument which we have followed was an attempt to
 
 PRAGMATISM 48 
 
 determine the nature of reality, and not an attempt to 
 explain what we mean when we say that an idea agrees 
 with its object. What is true about reality ? was the 
 starting point, and not, What is truth ? nor even, What 
 is true about truth ? The search for reality failed to 
 discover any object that agreed with its idea, but at 
 last there was found an idea that must agree with its 
 object, an idea whose object cannot not be. This idea, 
 the Absolute, reveals the nature of reality. The prag- I 
 rnatist when he asks, What is truth ? seems to dig \ 
 beneath the argument, seems indeed even to reach the $ 
 bedrock, but it is only in appearance that this is so. 
 How, indeed, could he hope to be able to answer the 
 question he has himself asked, if there is no way of 
 distinguishing the true answer from the false ? We j 
 must already know what truth is even to be able to | 
 ask what it is a point which many pragmatist writers J 
 appear to me to have overlooked. 
 
 In challenging the idea of truth, the pragmatist raises 
 the no less important question of the nature of error. 
 A theory of truth must not only show in what truth 
 consists, but must distinguish false from true and show 
 the nature of error. The pragmatist claims for his \ 
 theory that it alone can give a consistent account of I 
 illusion and error. Now, as we saw in our account of J 
 the idealist argument, it is the fact of illusion and error 
 that compels us to seek reality behind the appearances 
 that are the sense data of our conscious experience. 
 The whole force of the pragmatist movement in philo- 
 sophy is directed to proving that truth is a prior 
 consideration to reality. If we understand the nature 
 of truth, we shall see reality .in the making. Reality 
 can in fact be left to look after itself ; our business is 
 with our conceptions alone, which are either true or 
 false. The distinction of appearance and reality does I 
 
 
 tvA*
 
 44 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 | not explain illusion and error because it does not dis- 
 tinguish between true and false appearance. There 
 ^is no principle in idealism by which the Absolute rejects 
 ,the false appearance and reconciles the true. 
 
 Before I examine the pragmatist argument, I ought 
 
 first to explain the meaning and origin of the word. 
 
 The term pragmatism, that has in the last few years 
 
 entered so widely into all philosophical discussion, was 
 
 used first by Mr. C. S. Peirce, an American philosopher, 
 
 in a magazine article written as long ago as 1878, but 
 
 it attracted no attention for nearly twenty years, when 
 
 it was recalled by William James in the criticism of 
 
 the current philosophy in his Will to Believe, a book 
 
 which marks the beginning of the new movement. 
 
 % Pragmatism was first put forward as the principle that 
 
 = the whole meaning of any conception expresses itself 
 
 in practical consequences. The conception of the 
 
 '; practical effects of a conception is the whole conception 
 
 of the object. The pragmatist maxim is would you 
 
 (know what any idea or conception means, then consider 
 what practical consequences are involved by its accept- } 
 ance or rejection. Dr. Schiller, the leading exponent of 
 the principle in England, prefers to call the philosophy 
 " Humanism " in order still more to emphasize the 
 psychological and personal character of knowledge. 
 The name is suggested by the maxim of Protagoras, 
 " Man is the measure of all things." The term Intel- 
 lectualism is used by pragmatist writers to include all 
 theories of knowledge that do not agree with their own, 
 very much as the Greeks called all who were not Greeks, 
 ' Barbarians. It must not be taken to mean, as its 
 etymology would imply, a philosophy like that of 
 ^ /Plato, which held that only universals, the ideas, are 
 i real, or like that of Hegel, who said that " the actual 
 [ is the rational and the rational is the actual." The
 
 PRAGMATISM 45 
 
 pragmatists apply the term intellectualist to all philo- 
 sophers who recognise an objective character in the 
 logical ideal of truth, whether or not they also recognise 
 non-logical elements in reality, and whether or not 
 these non-logical elements are physical, such as matter 
 and energy, or purely psychical, such as will, desire, 
 emotion, pleasure, and pain. 
 
 Pragmatism is a criticism and a theory. If reality 
 in its full meaning is the Absolute, and if all seeming 
 reality is only a degree of or approximation to this full \ 
 reality, if the knowledge of this reality only is truth, \ 
 must it not seem to us that truth is useless knowledge ? ( 
 Useless, not in the sense that it is without value to the i 
 mind that cares to contemplate it, but useless in so far 
 as the hard everyday working world in which we have 
 to spend our lives is concerned. We who have to win 
 our existence in the struggle of life, need truth. We 
 need truth in order to act. Truth that transcends our 
 temporal needs, truth that is eternal, truth that recon- 
 ciles illusion and error, that accepts them as a necessary . 
 condition of appearance in time, is useless in practice, I 
 however it may inspire the poet and philosopher. Truth 1 
 to serve us must reject error and not reconcile it, must 
 be a working criterion and not only a rational one. 
 Whatever truth is, it is not useless ; it is a necessity j 
 of life, not a luxury of speculation. Pragmatism there- | 
 fore rejects the logical criterion of truth because it is 
 purely formal and therefore useless. It demands for 
 us a practical criterion, one that will serve our continual 
 needs. Whether our working ideas cause, time, space, 
 movement, things and their qualities, terms and their 
 relations, and the like are consistent or inconsistent 
 in themselves, they more or less work ; and in so far as i 
 they work they are useful and serve us, and because I 
 they work, and just in so far as they work, they are true. |
 
 46 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 \ The pragmatist therefore declares that utility, not 
 f logical consistency, is the criterion of truth. Ideas are 
 1 true in so far as they work. The discovery that they 
 I serve us is their verification. If we discover ideas that 
 | will serve us better, the old ideas that were true become 
 1 untrue, and the new ideas that we adopt become true 
 } because they are found to work. 
 
 This doctrine of the verification or making true of 
 ideas leads to a theory of the origin of the ideas them- 
 ' selves. Each idea has arisen or been called forth by a 
 ,jf ' human need. It has been formed by human nature to 
 meet a need of human nature. It is a practical postu- 
 late claiming truth. Even the axioms that now seem 
 to us self-evident such, for example, as the very law of 
 contradiction itself, from which, as we have seen, the 
 logical criterion of consistency is deduced were in their 
 origin practical postulates, called forth by a need, and, 
 
 t because found to work, true. The inconsistencies and 
 contradictions in our ideas do not condemn them as 
 appearance, and compel us to construct a reality in 
 which they disappear or are reconciled, but are evidence 
 ( of their origin in practical need and of their provisional 
 character. Truth is not eternal, it is changing. New 
 -3 conditions are ever calling forth new ideas, and truths 
 become untrue. Each new idea comes forward with a 
 ""jj* claim to truth, and its claim is tested by its practica- 
 ' bility. Truth is not something we discover, and which 
 ' was there to be discovered. We verify ideas. To 
 verify is not to find true but to make true. 
 
 The pragmatist theory therefore is that truth is made. 
 In all other theories truth is found. But if we make 
 truth we must make reality, for it is clear that if reality 
 is there already, the agreement with it of man-made 
 truth would be nothing short of a miracle. The prag- 
 matist, or at all events the pragmatist who is also a 

 
 PRAGMATISM 47 
 
 humanist, finds no difficulty in accepting this conse- 
 quence of the theory, although at the same time in- 
 sisting that the whole problem of being as well as of 
 knowing is concerned with truth. We shall see, how- 
 ever, that it offers a serious difficulty to the acceptance 
 of the theory a theory which in very many respects f 
 agrees with ordinary practice and with scientific method, j 
 Take, for example, scientific method. Is not all pro- I 
 gress in science made by suggesting a hypothesis, and 
 testing it by experiment to see if it works ? Do we not 
 judge its claim to truth by the practical consequences 
 involved in accepting or rejecting it ? Is there any 
 other verification ? This is the simple pragmatist test, 
 does the laboratory worker add to it or find it in any 
 respect insufficient ? If truth can be considered alone, 
 then we must admit that it is the attribute of knowledge 
 which is comprised under the term useful, the term 1 
 being used in its most comprehensive meaning to include \ 
 every kind of practical consequence. It is the question j 
 of reality that raises the difficulty for the scientific 
 worker. We cannot believe, or perhaps we should say, 
 the ordinary man and the scientific man would find it 
 very difficult to believe, that reality changes corre- 
 spondingly with our success or failure in the verification 
 of our hypothesis. When the scientific worker verifies 
 his hypothesis, he feels not that he has made something 
 true which before was not true, but that he has dis- 
 covered what always was true, although until the dis- 
 covery he did not know it. To this the pragmatist 
 reply is, that this very belief is a practical consequence 
 involved in the verification of the hypothesis, involved 
 in the discovery that it works. What he denies is that | 
 truth reveals, or ever can reveal, a reality entirely irrele- I 
 vant to any human purpose. It is also very important 
 to add that in declaring that truth is verification, the
 
 48 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 pragmatist does not set up a purely practical or utili- 
 
 : tarian standard. The " working " of truth means 
 
 ' theoretical as well as practical working. Much of the 
 
 current criticism of pragmatism has failed to take notice 
 
 of this intention or meaning of its principle, and hence 
 
 the common misapprehension that the maxim " truth is 
 
 what works " must mean that whatever a man believes is 
 
 for him truth. 
 
 The pragmatist doctrine and attitude will perhaps be 
 easier to understand if we take it in regard to a par- 
 ticular instance of truth and error in regard to funda- 
 mental notions. In the last four or five years a new 
 principle has been formulated in Physics, named the 
 Principle of Relativity. It revolutionises the current 
 conceptions of space and time. It is so recent that 
 probably some of my readers now hear of it for the first 
 time, and therefore before I refer to its formulation by 
 mathematicians I will give a simple illustration to ex- 
 plain what it is. Suppose that you are walking up and 
 down the deck of a steamer, and let us suppose that 
 the steamer is proceeding at the speed of four miles an 
 hour, the space that you cover and the interval of time 
 that you occupy are exactly the same for you whether 
 you are moving up the deck in the direction the steamer 
 is going or down the deck in the direction which is the 
 reverse of the steamer's movement. But suppose some 
 one on the shore could observe you moving while the 
 ship was invisible to him, your movement would appear 
 to him entirely different to what it is to you. When 
 you were walking up the deck you would seem to be 
 going at twice the speed you would be going, and when 
 you were going down the deck you would seem not to 
 I be moving at all. The time measurement would also 
 j seem different to the observer on the shore, for while 
 \ to you each moment would be measured by an equal
 
 PRAGMATISM 49 
 
 space covered, to him one moment you would be | 
 moving rapidly, the next at rest. This is simple and 
 easy to understand. Now suppose that both you and c 
 the observer were each observing a natural phenomenon, 
 say a thunder-storm, it would seem that each of you 
 ought to observe it with a difference a difference 
 strictly calculable from the system of movement, the 
 ship, in which you were placed in relation to him. The 
 propagation of the sound and of the light would have 
 to undergo a correction if each of you described your 
 experience to the other. If you were moving in the 
 direction of the light waves they would be slower for 
 you than for him, and if against their direction they 
 would be faster for you than for him. Of course the 
 immense velocity of the light waves, about 200,000 miles 
 a second, would make the difference in a movement of 
 four miles an hour so infinitesimal as to be altogether 
 inappreciable, but it would not be nothing, and you 
 would feel quite confident that if it could be measured 
 the infinitesimal quantity would appear hi the result. 
 Now suppose that we could measure it with absolute 
 accuracy, and that the result was the discovery that the 
 supposed difference did not exist at all and of course, 
 we suppose that there is no doubt whatever about the 
 measurement what, then, should we be obliged to 
 think ? We should be forced to believe that as the 
 velocity of light was the same for the two observers, t 
 one moving, one at rest, therefore the space and the\ 
 time must be different for each. Now, however strange * 
 it may seem, such a measurement has been made, and i 
 with this surprising result. In consequence there has 
 been formulated a new principle in Physics named the 
 Principle of Relativity. I take this Principle of Re- 
 lativity for my illustration because it is based on reason- | 
 ing that practically admits of no doubt, and because [ 
 
 D
 
 50 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 it requires us to form new conceptions of space and 
 time which seem to alter fundamentally what we have 
 hitherto considered as the evident and unmistakable 
 nature of those realities. It has always seemed that 
 the distance separating two points, and the interval of 
 time separating two events, were each independent of 
 the other and each absolute. However different the 
 distance and the interval may appear to observers in 
 movement or to observers in different systems of move- 
 ment in relation to ourselves and to one another, in 
 themselves they are the same distance and the same 
 interval for all. They are the same for the man in the 
 express train as for the man standing on the station 
 platform. The Principle of Relativity requires us to 
 think that this is not so, but that, contrary to all our 
 settled notions, the actual space and time vary really 
 undergo an alteration, a contraction or expansion with 
 each different system of movement of translation to 
 which the observer is bound. Events that for an 
 observer belonging to one system of movement happen 
 in the same place, for another observer in a different 
 system of movement happen in different places. Events 
 that for one observer happen simultaneously, for other 
 observers are separated by a time interval according 
 to the movement of translation of the system to which 
 they belong. So that space, which Newton described 
 as rigid, and time which he described as flowing at a 
 constant rate, and which for him was absolute, are for 
 ? the new theory relative, different for an observer in 
 ! every different system of movement of translation. Or 
 ' we may state it in the opposite way, and say that the 
 Principle of Relativity shows us that the reason why 
 natural phenomena, such as the rate of propagation of 
 light, undergo no alteration when we pass from one 
 system of movement of translation to another, as we
 
 PRAGMATISM 51 
 
 are constantly doing in the changing velocity of the 
 earth's movement round the SUM, is that space and time 
 alter with the velocity. I cannot here give the argu- 
 ment or describe the experiments which have given 
 this result I am simply taking it as an illustration. 1 
 It seems to me admirably suited to compare the prag- 
 matist method and the pragmatist attitude with that 
 of scientific realism and of absolute idealism. 
 
 Here, then, is a question in which the truth of our 
 accepted notions is called in question, and new notions 
 claim to be true. The sole question involved, prag- | 
 matism insists, is the truth of conceptions, not the 1 
 reality of things, and there is but one way of testing the * 
 truth of conceptions and that is by comparing the 
 rival conceptions in respect of the practical conse- 
 quences that follow from them and adopting those that 
 will work. If the old conceptions of space and time fail 
 to conform to a new need, then what was true before 
 the need was revealed is no longer true, the new con- 
 ception has become true. By verifying the new con- 
 ception, we make it true. But, objects the realist, an 
 idea cannot become true ; what is now true always was 
 true, and what is no longer true never was true, though 
 we may have worked with the false notion ignorant 
 that it was false. Behind truth there is reality. The 
 earth was spherical even when all mankind believed it 
 flat and found the belief work. To this the pragmatist | 
 reply is that reality is only our objectification of truth ; J 
 it possesses no meaning divorced from human purposes. \ 
 Had anyone announced that the earth was a sphere 
 
 1 The Principle of Relativity is mainly the result of the recent 
 mathematical work of H. A. Lorentz, Einstein, and the late Professor 
 Minkowski. A very interesting and not excessively difficult account 
 of it is contained in Dernteres Pensees, by the late Henri Poincare 1 ; 
 Paris, Alcan.
 
 52 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 when it was generally held to be flat, unless his an- 
 nouncement had some relevance to a defect in the flat 
 earth notion, or a claim to revise that notion, his 
 announcement would have been neither a truth nor a 
 falsehood in any intelligible meaning of the term he 
 would have been making an irrelevant remark. The 
 notions of space and time that Newton held worked, 
 and were therefore true ; if a new need requires us to 
 replace them with other notions, and these other 
 notions will work and are therefore true, they have be- 
 come true and Newton's notions have become false. If 
 it is still objected that the new notions were also true 
 for Newton, although he was ignorant of them, the need 
 for them not having arisen, the only reply is that truth, I 
 or reality, in complete detachment from human pur- f 
 poses, cannot be either affirmed or denied. 
 
 With this view the idealist will be in agreement ; his 
 
 objection is of a different kind. He rejects, as the 
 
 pragmatist does, the notion of a reality independent of 
 
 human nature that forces upon us the changes that our 
 
 conceptions undergo. These changes, he holds, are 
 
 | the inner working of the conceptions themselves, the 
 
 I manifestation of our intellectual nature, ever striving 
 
 [ for an ideal of logical consistency. Truth is this ideal. 
 
 We do not make it ; we move towards it. If we compare, 
 
 then, the idealist and the pragmatist doctrine, it will 
 
 seem that, while for the idealist truth is growing with 
 
 advancing knowledge into an ever larger because more 
 
 comprehensive system of reality, for the pragmatist 
 
 it is ever narrowing, discarding failures as useless and 
 
 | irrelevant to present purpose. How indeed, the idealist 
 
 will ask, if practical consequences be the meaning of 
 
 | truth, is it possible to understand that knowledge has 
 
 advanced or can advance ? Does not the history of 
 
 science prove a continual expansion, an increasing
 
 PRAGMATISM 53 
 
 comprehension ? It is within the conception that the 
 inconsistency is revealed, not in any mere outward use 
 of the conceptions, and the intellectual effort is to 
 reconcile the contradiction by relating the conception 
 to a more comprehensive whole. How, then, does the 
 idealist meet this case which we have specially instanced, 
 the demand for new notions of space and time made by 
 the Principle of Relativity ? He denies that the new 
 conceptions are called forth by human needs in the 
 narrow sense that is to say, in the sense that working 
 hypotheses or practical postulates are required. The 
 need is purely logical. The inconsistency revealed in \ 
 the notions that have hitherto served us can only be l 
 reconciled by apprehending a higher unity. If the 
 older notions of space and time are inadequate to the 
 more comprehensive view of the universe as a co- 
 ordination of systems of movement, then this very 
 negation of the older notions is the affirmation of the 
 new, and from the negation by pure logic the content 
 and meaning which are the truth of the new notions 
 are derived. To this objection the pragmatist reply 
 is that if this be the meaning of the truth there is no 
 way shown by which it can be distinguished from error. 
 There is in fact for idealism no error, no illusion, no 
 falsehood ; as real facts, there are only degrees of truth. 
 But a theory of truth which ignores such stubborn 
 realities as illusion, falsehood, and error is, from what- 
 ever standpoint we view it, useless. On the other 
 hand, pragmatism offers a test by which we can discrimi- 
 nate between true and false namely, the method of 
 judging conceptions by their practical consequences. 
 Can we or can we not make our conceptions work ? 
 That is the whole meaning of asking, Are they true or 
 false ? And now, lest the reader is alarmed at the pros- 
 pect of having to revise his working ideas of space and
 
 54, THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 time, I will, to reassure him, quote the words with which 
 Henri Poincar6 concluded his account of the new con- 
 ceptions, and which admirably express and illustrate 
 the pragmatist's attitude : " What is to be our position 
 in view of these new conceptions ? Are we about to 
 be forced to modify our conclusions ? No, indeed : 
 we had adopted a convention because it seemed to us 
 convenient, and we declared that nothing could compel 
 us to abandon it. To-day certain physicists wish to 
 adopt a new convention. Ifc is not because they are 
 compelled to ; they judge this new convention to be 
 more convenient that is all ; and those who are not of 
 this opinion can legitimately keep the old and so leave 
 their old habits undisturbed. I think, between ourselves, 
 that this is what they will do for a long time to come." 
 I have so far considered pragmatism rather as a 
 criticism than as a doctrine. I will now try and charac- 
 terise it on its positive side. It declares that there is 
 I no such thing as pure thought, but that all thinking is 
 I personal and purposive ; that all knowing is directed, 
 I controlled, and qualified by psychological conditions 
 such as interest, attention, desire, emotion, and the like ; 
 and that we cannot, as formal logic does, abstract from 
 any of these, for logic itself is part of a psychical process. 
 Truth therefore depends upon belief ; truths are matters 
 of belief, and beliefs are rules of action. It is this 
 doctrine that gives to pragmatism its paradoxical, some 
 have even said its grotesque, character. It seems to say 
 that the same proposition is both true and false true for 
 the man who believes it, false for the man who cannot. 
 It seems to say that we can make anything true by 
 believing it, and we can believe anything so long as the 
 consequences of acting on it are not absolutely disastrous. 
 And the proposition, All truths work, seems to involve 
 the conclusion that all that works is true; and the 
 proposition, The true is the useful, seems to imply that
 
 UTILITY 55 
 
 whatever is useful is therefore true. No small part of 
 the pragmatist controversy has been directed to the 
 attempt to show that all and each of these corollaries 
 are, or arise from, misconceptions of the doctrine. I 
 think, and I shall endeavour to show, that there is a 
 serious defect in the pragmatist statement, and that 
 these misconceptions are in a great part due to it. 
 Nevertheless, we must accept the pragmatist disavowal. 
 And there is no difficulty in doing so, for the meaning 
 of the theory is sufficiently clear. Truth, according to 
 pragmatism, is a value and not a fact. Truth is thus 
 connected with the conception of " good." In saying 
 that truth is useful, we say that it is a means to an end, 
 a good. It is not a moral end, but a cognitive end, 
 just as " beauty " is an aesthetic end. Truth, beauty, 
 and goodness thus stand together as judgments of value 
 or worth. It is only by recognising that truth is a 
 value that we can possess an actual criterion to dis- 
 tinguish it from error, for if truth 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 showa 
 that the good aimed at by a " truth claim " is only 
 attainable by the exercise of the will to believe. Thu& 
 it replaces the intellectual maxim, Believe in nothing yoi* 
 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 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 notion that truth is correspondence involves the con- 
 ception of an " impossible " knowledge, and the notion 
 ' that truth is coherence or consistency involves the con- 
 ception 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 
 1 all we can do is to point out the purpose on accoimt of 
 I which it exists. This is not scientific explanation. 
 I 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. 
 
 There appears to me to be a serious defect in the 
 pragmatist conception and application of the principle 
 of utility ; it is based on a conception altogether too 
 narrow. A theory that condemns any purely logical 
 process as resulting in " useless " knowledge can only 
 justify itself by insisting on an application of the 
 principle of utility that will be found to exclude not 
 merely the Absolute of philosophy but most if not all 
 f of the results of pure mathematics and physics, for these 
 f sciences apply a method of pure logical deduction and 
 * induction indistinguishable from that which pragmatism 
 condemns. The intellectual nature of man is an en- 
 dowment whicH sharply distinguishes him from other 
 forms of living creatures. So supreme a position does 
 our intellect assign to us, so wide is the gap that separates
 
 UTILITY 57 
 
 us from other creatures little different from ourselves 
 in respect of perfection of material organisation and 
 adaptation to environment, that it seems almost natural J 
 to suppose that our intellect is that for which we exist, f 
 and not merely a mode of controlling, directing, and 
 advancing our life. Now it is possible to hold and this 
 is the view that I shall endeavour in what follows to 
 develop that the intellect is subservient to life, and that 
 we can show the manner and method of its working and 
 the purpose it serves. So far we may agree with the 
 pragmatist, but it is not the same thing to say that the | 
 intellect serves a useful purpose and to say that truth, 8 
 the ideal of the intellect, the end which it strives for, is I 
 itself only a utility. Were there no meaning in truth I 
 except that it is what works, were there no meaning 
 independent of and altogether distinct from the practical 
 consequences of belief, of what value to us would the I 
 intellect be ? If the meaning the intellect assigns to ! 
 truth is itself not true, how can the intellect serve us ? 
 The very essence ofits service is reduced to nought ; for 
 what else but the conception of an objective truth, a 
 ; logical reality independent of any and every psycho- 
 , logical condition, is the utility that the intellect puts 
 I us in possession of ? It is this conception alone that j 
 constitutes it an effective mode of activity. Therefore, ! 
 if we hold with the pragmatist that the intellect is sub- 
 servient to life, truth is indeed a utility, but it is a 
 utility just because it has a meaning distinct from use- 
 fulness. On the other hand, to condemn any know- 
 ledge as " useless " is to deny utility to the intellect. 
 
 Before I try to show that the logical method of the 
 idealist philosophy, which pragmatism condemns because 
 it leads to " useless " knowledge, is identical in every 
 respect with the method employed in pure mathematics 
 and physics, I will give for comparison two illustrations
 
 58 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 that seem to me instances of a narrow and of a wide 
 use of the concept of utility. 
 
 A short time ago an orang-utang escaped from its 
 cage in the Zoological Gardens under somewhat singu- 
 lar and very interesting circumstances. The cage was 
 secured with meshed wire of great strength, judged 
 sufficient to resist the direct impact of the most powerful 
 of the carnivora ; but the ape, by attention to the twisting 
 of the plied wire, had by constant trying succeeded in 
 loosening and finally in unwinding a large section. It 
 escaped from its enclosure, and after doing considerable 
 damage in the corridor, including the tearing out of a 
 window frame, made its way into the grounds and took 
 refuge in a tree, twisting the branches into a platform 
 said to be similar to the constructions it makes in its 
 native forests. 
 
 In taking this action as an illustration, I am not con- 
 cerned with the question of what may be the distinction 
 between action that is intelligent and action that is 
 instinctive. If we take intelligence in a wide and general 
 meaning, we may compare the intelligence shown by this 
 ape with the intelligence shown by man in the highest 
 processes of the mind. Psychologists would, I think, 
 be unanimous in holding that in the mind of the ape 
 there was no conception of freedom, no kind of mental 
 image of unrestricted life and of a distinct means of 
 attaining it, no clearly purposed end, the means of 
 attaining which was what prompted the undoing of the 
 wire, such as we should certainly suppose in the case of 
 a man in a similar situation. It was the kind of intelli- 
 gent action that psychologists denote by the description 
 " trial and error." It seems to me, however, that this 
 exactly fulfils the conditions that the pragmatist doctrine 
 of the meaning of truth require. We see the intellect 
 of the ape making true by finding out what works.
 
 UTILITY 59 
 
 We can suppose an entire absence of the idea of objective 
 truth to which reality must conform, of truth unaffected 
 by purpose. Here, then, we seem to have the pure type 
 of truth in its simplest conditions, a practical activity 
 using intelligence to discover what works. Is the differ- 
 ence between this practical activity and the higher mental | 
 activities as we employ them in the abstract sciences one I 
 of degree of complexity only, or is it different in kind ? 
 
 Let us consider now, as an illustration of the method 
 of the abstract sciences, the well-known case of the 
 discovery of the planet Neptune. This planet was 
 discovered by calculation and deduction, and was only 
 seen when its position had been so accurately deter- 
 mined that the astronomers who searched for it knew 
 exactly the point of the heavens to which to direct their 
 telescopes. The calculation was one of extraordinary 
 intricacy, and was made independently by two mathe- 
 maticians, Adams of Cambridge and Le vender of i^aris, 
 between the years 1843 and 1846. Each communi- 
 cated his result independently Adams to the astrono- 
 mer Challis, the Director of the Cambridge Observatory, 
 and Leverrier to Dr. Galle of the Berlin Observatory. 
 Within six weeks of one another and entirely unknown 
 to one another, in August and September 1846, each of 
 these astronomers observed the planet where he had 
 been told to look for it. This is one of the romances 
 of modern science. It is not the discovery but the 
 method that led to it which may throw light on our 
 problem of the nature of truth. 
 
 At first sight this seems exactly to accord with and 
 even to illustrate the pragmatist theory, that truth is | 
 what works. The investigation is prompted by the 
 discrepancies between the actual and the calculated 
 positions of Uranus, the outermost planet, as it was then 
 supposed, of the system. This revealed a need, and this :
 
 60 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 need was met by the practical postulate of the exist- 
 ence of another planet as yet unseen. The hypothesis 
 was found to work even before the actual observation 
 put the final seal of actuality on the discovery. What 
 else but the practical consequences of the truth claim 
 in the form of the hypothesis of an undiscovered planet 
 were ever in question ? Yes, we reply, but the actual 
 method adopted, and the knowledge sought for by the 
 method, are precisely of the land that pragmatism 
 rejects as " useless " knowledge. Why were not the 
 observed movements of Uranus accepted as what they 
 were ? Why was it felt that they must be other than 
 they were seen to be unless there was another planet ? 
 The need lay in the idea of system. It was inconsistent 
 with the system then believed complete, and the need 
 was to find the complete system in which it would 
 harmonise. The truth that was sought for was a har- 
 monious individual whole, and the method employed 
 precisely that which the Absolutist theory of reality 
 employs. There is observed a discrepancy, an incon-' 
 sistency, a contradiction within the whole conceived as 
 a system. This negation is treated as a defect, is 
 calculated and accurately determined, and is then posi- 
 tively affirmed of the reality. Now, what is distinctive } 
 in this method is that reality is conceived as a complete I 
 system. If the felt defect in this system cannot be ' 
 made good by direct discovery, its place is supplied by 
 a fiction, using the term in its etymological meaning to 
 express something made and not hi its derived meaning 
 to express something found false. This intellectual 
 process of construction is purely logical ; no psycho- 
 logical element in the sense of the will to believe enters 
 into it or colours it in any way 
 
 This is not an isolated instance, it illustrates the 
 method of science in all theorising. An even more
 
 UTILITY 61 
 
 striking illustration than that we have just given is the 
 case of the hypothesis of the luminiferous aether a 
 supposed existence, a fiction, that has served a useful, 
 even an indispensable service in the history of modern 
 physics. To many physicists, even to Lord Kelvin, the 
 hypothesis seemed so surely established that its non- 
 existence hardly seemed thinkable, yet all the experi- 
 ments designed to detect its presence have been uni- 
 formly negative in result, and it now seems not even 
 necessary as a hypothesis, and likely to disappear. The 
 aether was not only not discovered, it was not even 
 suspected to exist, as in the case of the unknown planet 
 Neptune it was logically constructed. It was required 
 to support the theory of the undulatory nature of light 
 and to fulfil the possibility of light propagation in space. 
 It was therefore a postulate, called forth by a need 
 so far we may adopt the pragmatist account. But 
 what was the nature of the need, and what was the 
 method by which the postulate was called forth ? It 
 is in answering this question that the pragmatist 
 criterion fails. The need was intellectual in the purely 
 logical meaning of the term, and it was met by a purely 
 logical construction. The need was a practical human 
 need only in so far as the intellect working by logical 
 process is a human endowment but not in any personal 
 sense such as is conveyed by the term psychological. 
 Willingness or unwillingness to believe, desire, aversion, 
 interest were all irrelevant. Given the intellect, the 
 logical necessity was the only need that called forth by 
 logical process the " truth-claiming " hypothesis of the 
 tether. But even so, the pragmatist will urge, is its 
 truth anything else but its usefulness as shown in the 
 practical consequences of believing it ? Was it not 
 true while it was useful, and is it not only now false, if 
 it is false, if it is actually discovered not to be useful ?
 
 62 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 The reply is that no mathematician or physicist would 
 recognise the possibility of working with a conception 
 of truth that simply identified truth with utility, and 
 for this reason that he can only conceive reality as a 
 system whose truth is symbolised in an equation. It 
 is the system that determines and characterises the 
 postulate, and not the postulate advanced at a venture, 
 tried and verified, that constitutes the system. The 
 mathematician begins by placing symbols to represent 
 the unknown factors in his equation, and proceeds by 
 means of his known factors to determine their value. 
 The aether is at first a pure fiction constructed to supply 
 an unknown existence recognised as a defect. Its truth 
 cannot mean that it works for it cannot but work, 
 having been constructed purely for that purpose. Its 
 truth means that it corresponds to some actual exist- 
 ence at present unknown. To prove its truth the 
 physicist does not appeal to its value as a hypothesis, 
 but devises experiments by which, if it does exist, its 
 existence will be demonstrated. In this actual case the 
 experiments have had a uniformly negative result, and 
 therefore the truth of the hypothesis is made doubtful 
 or denied. The hypothesis continues to work as well 
 as it ever did, and physicists will probably long con- 
 tinue to use it, but it has failed to establish its truth 
 claim. The result is the modern Principle of Relativity, 
 which, as we have already said, has produced a revolu- 
 tion in modern physics. The abolition of the aether 
 would have been impossible if the physicist had been 
 content with the utility of his hypothesis and had not 
 experimented to prove its truth. The relation between 
 truth and utility is thus proved to be that it is useful 
 to know what is true. 
 
 These two illustrations of scientific method namely, 
 the discovery of Neptune and the negative discovery
 
 UTILITY 68 
 
 that the aether is non-existent make it evident that 
 verification is the intellectual process not of making 
 true, but of finding true. We can, indeed, distinguish 
 quite clearly the two processes. The first process, that 
 of making true, is the constructing of the fiction by 
 which we complete an incomplete system, and the 
 second is the testing of that fiction to see if it corre- 
 sponds to anything actually existing. No kind of intel- 
 lectual activity will make an idea true, and conversely 
 we may say that were truth only a utility, then know- 
 ledge instead of being systematic would be chaotic. 
 Existence has its roots in reality, not in knowledge. 
 Reality does not depend on truth. Truth is the intel- 
 lectual apprehension of reality. 
 
 If the pragmatist objects that in this argument I 
 have throughout supposed him to be urging the narrow 
 meaning of utility, namely, that it is usefulness in the 
 strictly practical sense, whereas he intends it in the 
 widest possible meaning a meaning that includes 
 theoretical usefulness then the trouble is a different 
 one ; it is to know how and where the pragmatist stops 
 short of the coherence theory of truth, and wherein his 
 method differs from that of the idealist. 
 
 This brings me to the consideration of another theory 
 in which the concept of utility plays a large, indeed a 
 predominant part. This is the theory of the relation 
 of knowledge to life that is given to us in the philosophy 
 of Bergson. I have in one of the volumes of this series 
 given an account of this philosophy ; I am here only deal- 
 ing with its relation to this special problem of the nature 
 of truth. It has been claimed that this philosophy is 
 only a form of pragmatism, but it is not a theory of 
 truth, and it has this essential difference from prag- 
 matism that it is the intellect and not truth that is a 
 utility. Before we consider the question that it gives
 
 64 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 rise to in regard to truth, let us first examine the theory 
 of the intellect, and the nature of its utility. The in- 
 tellect is a mode of activity, an endowment acquired 
 in the course of evolution, and which has been retained 
 and perfected because of its utility. This does not 
 mean that the intellect directs us to what is useful and 
 inhibits us from courses fatal to life, neither does it 
 mean that it gives us any power to make true what is 
 not already true, it means that the power to acquire 
 knowledge is useful. There is a contrast in our own 
 existence between our life and our intellect. 
 
 To understand the way in which the intellect serves 
 the living creature endowed with it, we need only regard 
 it from the standpoint of ordinary experience. We 
 know in ourselves that our life is wider than our intellect, 
 
 Iand that our intellect serves the activity of our life. 
 The common expressions we employ, such as using our 
 wits, taking an intelligent interest, trying to think, all 
 imply a utility distinct from the intellect. So viewed, 
 our life appears as an active principle within us, mam- 
 taming our organism in its relations, active and passive, 
 and reactive to the reality outside and independent of 
 it. Our intellect also seems both active and passive. 
 It receives the influences that stream in upon us from 
 the reality around us, it apprehends and interprets 
 them, and works out the lines of our possible action in 
 regard to them. The influences that flow in upon us 
 f from the outside world are already selected before our 
 i intellect apprehends them, for they flow in by the 
 ; avenues of our senses, and the senses are natural instru- 
 \ ments of selection. If we picture these influences as 
 vibrations, then we may say that a certain group of 
 vibrations of a very rapid frequency are selected by 
 the eye and give rise to vision, that another group of very 
 much lower frequency are selected by the ear and 
 
 ^ v
 
 UTILITY 65 
 
 give the sensation of sound, and other groups are 
 selected by taste, smell, and touch. Many groups are 
 known indirectly by means of artificial instruments, 
 and all the infinite series that unite these groups of the 
 actually experienced vibrations escape our apprehen- 
 sion altogether we have no means of selecting them, t 
 But all these sense data, as we may call them, come to 1 
 us without exertion or activity on our part ; it is the j 
 intellect which gives them meaning, which interprets 
 them, which makes them the apprehension or aware- 
 ness of objects or things. And the active part that the I 
 intellect plays is also a process of selection. This is I 
 evident if we reflect upon the universal form which our 
 intellectual activity takes, namely, attention. It is in 
 the act of attention that we are conscious of mental 
 activity, and attention is essentially selection the selec- 
 tion of an interest. Besides the natural selection that 
 is effected by our senses and the conscious selection that 
 is manifest in attention, there is also a more or less 
 arbitrary selection that our intellect performs in mark- 
 ing out the lines of our practical interest and possible V 
 action. In this work of selection the intellect makes/ 
 the world conform to the necessities of our action. 
 
 So far we have looked at our intellectual endowment 
 from the standpoint of ordinary common-sense experi- 
 ence. Let us now consider the philosophical theory 
 based on this view, which explains the nature of know- 
 ledge by showing its purpose. The intellect not only 
 selects, but in selecting transforms the reality. It 
 presents us with knowledge that indeed corresponds 
 with reality, for it is essentially a view of reality, but also 
 in selecting it marks out divisions, and gives to reality 
 a form that is determined by practical interest. The 
 same reality is different to different individuals and to 
 different species according to their practical interests.
 
 66 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 The practical end which the human intellect serves is 
 to present us with a field for our life activity. This 
 is the real world for us, as we know it, real objects in a 
 real space. Had we no other way of knowing but that 
 of our intellect we should not know the life which is 
 active within us as it is really lived, we should be as 
 those who, standing outside, watch a movement, and 
 not as those who are carried along in the movement 
 and experience it from within. In life and intellect we 
 have the counterpart of reality and appearance. Life 
 is not something that changes ; it is the change of which 
 the something is the appearance. Life is the reality of 
 which all things, as we understand them, are the appear- 
 ances, and on account of which, they appear. The solid 
 things in space and time are not in reality what they 
 appear; they are views of the reality. The intellect 
 guided by our practical interest presents reality under 
 this form of solid spatial things. Clearly, then, if this 
 view be true, the whole world, as it is presented to us 
 and thought of by us, is an illusion. Our science is not 
 unreal, but it is a transformed reality. The illusions 
 may be useful, may, indeed, be necessary and indis- 
 pensable, but nevertheless it is illusion. 
 
 But here there arises a new difficulty in regard to 
 truth. If the usefulness of the intellect consists in the 
 active production of an illusion, can we say that the 
 intellect leads us to truth ? Is it not only if we can 
 turn away from the intellect and obtain a non-intellectual 
 intuition that we can know truth ?
 
 ILLUSION 67 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 ILLUSION 
 
 THE doctrine that the world that appears is essentially 
 unlike the world that is is neither new nor peculiar to any 
 particular theory of philosophy. It has received a new 
 interest and a new interpretation lately in the theory 
 that we are now considering, that the clue to the appear- j 
 ance of the world to us is to be found in the conception I 
 of the nature of the utility of the intellect and in the! 
 mode of its activity. The idea that we are perhaps* 
 disqualified by our very nature itself from beholding 
 reality and knowing truth is illustrated in the well- 
 known allegory in the Republic of Plato : 
 
 " And now let me show in a figure how far our 
 nature is enlightened or unenlightened. Behold ! human 
 beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth 
 open towards the light and reaching all along the den ; 
 here they have been from their childhood, and have 
 their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move 
 and can only see before them, being prevented by the 
 chains from turning round their heads. Above and 
 behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between 
 the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way ; and you 
 will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like 
 the screen which marionette players have in front of 
 them, over which they show the puppets. And men are 
 passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and 
 statues, and figures of animals made of wood and stone 
 and various materials, which appear over the wall. . . . 
 
 " They are strange prisoners, like ourselves, and they 
 see only their own shadows or the shadows of one 
 another which the fire throws on the opposite wall of 
 the cave. And so also of the objects carried and of the 
 passers-by ; to the prisoners the truth would be literally 
 nothing but the shadows of the images.
 
 68 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 "And now look again, and see what will naturally 
 follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of 
 their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and 
 compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round 
 and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp 
 pains ; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable 
 to see the realities of which in his former state he had 
 seen the shadows. And then conceive someone saying 
 to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but 
 that now, when he is approaching nearer to being, and 
 his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has 
 a clearer vision, and what will be his reply ? Will he 
 not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw 
 are truer than the objects which are now shown to 
 him ? . . . 
 
 " And suppose that he is forced into the presence of 
 the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated ? 
 When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, 
 and he will not be able to see anything at all of what 
 are now called realities." 
 
 The thought that Plato has expressed in this wonder- 
 ful allegory has entered deeply into all philosophy. 
 What we first take for reality is merely a shadow world. 
 But in Plato's view it is the intellect which gives us the 
 means of escape, the power to turn from the illusion to 
 behold the reality. It is not until now that philosophy 
 has sought the clue to the illusion in the nature of the } 
 intellect itself. The very instrument of truth is unfitted i 
 to reveal to us the reality as it is, because its nature 
 and purpose is to transform reality, to make reality 
 appear in a form which, though of paramount importance 
 to us as active beings, is essentially an illusion. The 
 intellectual bent of our mind leads us away from, and not 
 towards a vision of reality in its purity. The more our 
 intellect progresses, and the more and more clearly we
 
 ILLUSION 69 
 
 see into a greater and ever greater number of things, 
 the farther are we from, and not the nearer to a grasp 
 of reality as it is. To obtain this vision of reality we 
 have to turn away from the intellect and find ourselves 
 again in that wider life out of which the intellect is 
 formed. Life, as it lives, is an intuition that is non- 
 intellectual. 
 
 " Human intelligence," writes Bergson, " is not at 
 all what Plato taught hi the allegory of the cave. Its 
 function is not to look at passing shadows, nor yet to 
 turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun. It 
 has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, 
 to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and 
 joints, the weight of the plough, and the resistance of the 
 soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come 
 into touch with reality and even to live it, but only in 
 the measure hi which it concerns the work that is being 
 accomplished and the furrow that is being ploughed, 
 such is the function of human intelligence." 
 
 The illusion to which our intellectual nature subjects 
 us is the necessity we are under to regard the things of * 5 
 the universe as more ultimate, as more fundamental f < 
 than the movement which actuates the universe. It I \ 
 seems to us impossible that there could exist movement, 
 or change, unless there already existed things to be 
 moved or changed, things whose nature is not altered, 
 but only their form and their external relations, when 
 they are moved or changed. This necessity of thought 
 seems to have received authoritative recognition in all 
 attempts, religious and scientific, to conceive origins. 
 Thus we read in the Book of Genesis : 
 
 " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 
 And the earth was without form, and void ; and darkness 
 was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved 
 upon the face of the waters."
 
 70 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 The matter of the universe, it is felt, must be in existence 
 before the movement which vivifies it. The dead inert 
 stuff must be created before it can receive the breath 
 of life. And if God the creator is conceived as living 
 before the matter which He has created, it is as an ex- 
 ternal principle, the relation of which to the creation 
 is by most religious minds thought to transcend the 
 power of the finite understanding to conceive. 
 
 The same fundamental conception of the primacy 
 of matter over movement is evident in the scientific 
 theories of the nature and origin of life. Life appears 
 to science as a form of energy that requires things, 
 matter occupying space, to support it. According to 
 one view, life is the result of a certain combination or 
 . synthesis of chemical or physical elements, previously 
 1 existing separately a combination of very great com- 
 f , i plexity, and one that may possibly have occurred once 
 ? only in the long process of nature, but which neverthe- 
 less might be, and some think probably, or even certainly, 
 will be brought about by a chemist working in his 
 laboratory. This is the mechanistic or materialist view. 
 On the other hand, there is the theory of vitalism. 
 Life, it is contended, cannot be due to such a synthesis 
 of material elements as the mechanistic view supposes, 
 ; because it is of the nature of an " entelechy " that is, 
 *j I an individual existence which functions, as a whole, in 
 \ every minutest part of the organism it " vitalises.'* 
 i Life has supervened upon, and not arisen out of the 
 material organism which it guides and controls not by 
 relating independent parts, but by making every part 
 subserve the activity and unity of the whole. But the 
 vitalist theory, as well as the mechanistic theory, con- 
 
 (eeives the movement and change which is life as de- 
 pendent on the previous existence of a matter or stuff 
 which is moved or changed. The philosophical con-
 
 ILLUSION 71 
 
 ception differs, therefore, from both these theories. It \ 
 is that life is an original movement, and that this J 
 movement is the whole reality of which things, inert I 
 matter, even spatial extension, are appearances. True 
 duration is change, not the permanence of something 
 amidst change. There are no unchanging things. 
 Everything changes. Reality is the flux ; things are J 
 views of the flux, arrests or contractions of the flowing I 
 that the intellect makes. The appearance of the world j 
 to us is our intellectual grasp of a reality that flows. 
 This original movement is the life of the universe. 
 Briefly stated, the argument on which the theory is . 
 based is that it is logically impossible to explain change ,- 
 by changelessness, movement by immobility. Realj 
 change cannot be a succession of states themselves 
 fixed and changeless; real movement cannot be the 
 immobile positions in which some thing is successively 
 at rest. On the other hand, if movement is original, the '? 
 interruption of movement, in whatever way effected, 7 
 will appear as things. The experience which confirms ' 
 this argument is the insight that everyone may obtain 
 of the reality of his own life as continuous movement, 
 unceasing change, wherein all that exists exists to- 
 gether in a present activity. To develop this argument 
 would exceed the limits of this book, and would be 
 outside its purpose. It is essential, however, that such 
 a theory should be understood, for clearly it is possible 
 to hold not only that we are subject to illusion, but 
 that illusion is of the very nature of intellectual appre- 
 hension. If, then, the understanding works illusion for ! 
 the sake of action, is it thereby disqualified as an instru- \ 
 ment for the attainment of truth ? 
 
 We are brought, then, to the critical point of our 
 inquiry. If illusion is the essential condition of human 
 activity, if the intellect, the very instrument of truth,
 
 72 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 is itself affected, what is to save us from universal 
 scepticism ? If the salt have lost his savour, where- 
 with shall it be salted ? The intellect with its frames 
 and moulds shapes living change and movement into 
 fixed immobile states ; the process of knowing alters 
 profoundly the reality known. Must we not conclude 
 that knowledge, however useful, is not true ? And to 
 what shall we turn for truth ? There is, indeed, if this 
 be so, a deeper irony in the question, What is truth ? 
 than even Pilate could have imagined. We have abso- 
 lutely no practical concern with truth we must leave it 
 to the mystic, to the unpractical, the contemplative man 
 who has turned aside from the stern task of busy life. 
 
 It is not so. The problem that seems so fundamental 
 admits a quite simple solution. Illusion is not error, 
 nor is it falsehood ; it is the appearance of reality. It is 
 the reality that appears, and when we grasp the prin- 
 ciple of utility we understand the shape that the ap- 
 pearance must assume. This shape may seem to us a 
 distortion, but in recognising appearance we are in 
 
 f touch with reality, and practical interest is the key that 
 
 { opens to us the interpretation of intellectual experience. 
 
 And it is not only by the intellect that we interpret the 
 nature of reality, for besides logic there is life, and in 
 life we directly perceive the reality that in logic we 
 think about. 
 
 The intellect, then, does not make truth, neither does 
 it make reality ; it makes reality take the form of spatial 
 things, and it makes things seem to be the ground of 
 reality. Were our nature not intellectual, if all con- 
 sciousness was intuitive, the world would not then 
 
 I appear as things there would be no things. But, not- 
 withstanding that our world is an illusion, it is not the 
 less on that account a true world, and our science is 
 true knowledge, in the objective meaning of truth, for
 
 ILLUSION 73 
 
 once an illusion is interpreted, it becomes an integral 
 part of the conception of reality. It would be easy to 
 find abundant illustration of this fact within science 
 itself. Thus in the familiar case of the straight stick 
 which appears bent when partly immersed in water, as 
 soon as the illusion is understood as due to the different 
 refraction of light in media of different density, air and 
 water, it ceases to be an illusion. We then recognise 
 that if a partly immersed stick did not appear bent, it 
 would really be bent. Again, the illusion that clings to 
 us most persistently throughout our experience is that 
 which is connected with movement and rest. The 
 system of movement in which we are ourselves carried 
 along appears to us stationary, while that which is out- 
 side it seems alone to move. In very simple cases, 
 such as viewing the landscape from a railway-carriage 
 window, habit has long caused the illusion to cease, 
 but we all remember the child's feeling that the trees 
 and fields were flying past us. The earth's motion 
 never becomes to us a real experience of movement, we 
 accept the fact and never doubt the scientific evidence 
 on which it rests, yet we always speak and think of 
 sunrise and sunset ; and this is not merely due to the 
 accident that our language was fixed before the nature 
 of the celestial movement was known, but to a natural 
 illusion which it is far more convenient to retain than 
 to abandon. 
 
 The fact of illusion is not the tenet of any particular 
 philosophy, nor even of philosophy itself ; it is a recog- 
 nised factor in common life and in physical science, 
 but in instancing the theory of Bergson's philosophy 
 I am choosing an extreme case. Berkeley held that 
 illusion is practically universal ; Kant taught that the 
 apparent objectivity of phenomena is the form that the 
 understanding imposes on things ; but Bergson teaches
 
 74 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 not only that all material reality is illusion, but also 
 that this very illusion is the work of the intellect, that 
 the intellect is formed for this purpose, intellect and 
 matter being correlative, evolving pari passu. To such 
 a doctrine there is of necessity a positive side, for it is 
 impossible that it can rest on universal scepticism 
 scepticism both of knowledge and of the instrument of 
 knowledge. If the intellectual view of reality as solid 
 matter in absolute space is illusion, it must be possible 
 to apprehend the reality from which the judgment that 
 it is illusion is derived. If the intellect distorts, there 
 must be an intuition which is pure, and the relation 
 between these will be the relation between reality and 
 appearance. Neither, then, is reality truth, nor appear- 
 ance error. There is a truth of appearance, a truth 
 that is a value in itself, a truth that is more than the 
 mere negation that appearance is not reality. The ap- 
 pearance is our hold upon the reality, our actual con- 
 tact with it, the mode and direction of our action upon it. 
 What, then, is error ? It cannot consist in the fact 
 that we know appearance only, not reality, for we can 
 only know reality by its appearance. It cannot be an 
 appearance behind which there is no reality, for non- 
 being cannot appear. It cannot be nothing at all or 
 pure non-being, for to think of absolute nothing is not 
 to think. In error there is some object of thought 
 which is denied real being. What this is is the problem 
 of error. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 
 
 IN the Theostetus of Plato, Socrates has been discussing 
 with Theaetetus what knowledge is, and when at last 
 agreement seems to be reached in the definition that
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 75 
 
 knowledge is true opinion, a new difficulty occurs to 
 Socrates : 
 
 " There is a point which often troubles me and is a 
 great perplexity to me both in regard to myself and to 
 others. I cannot make out the nature or origin of the 
 mental experience to which I refer. How there can be 
 false opinion that difficulty still troubles the eye of 
 my mind. Do we not speak of false opinion, and say 
 that one man holds a false and another a true opinion, 
 as though there were some natural distinction between 
 them ? All things and everything are either known or 
 not known. He who knows, cannot but know ; and he 
 who does not know, cannot know. . . . Where, then, 
 is false opinion ? For if all things are either known or 
 unknown, there can be no opinion which is not compre- 
 hended under this alternative, and so false opinion is 
 excluded." 
 
 This difficulty may appear at first sight purely verbal, 
 and we shall perhaps be inclined to see the answer to it 
 in the double use that we make of the word knowledge. 
 We use the word in two senses, in one of which it in- 
 cludes all and everything that is or can be present to 
 the mind in thinking, and in another and narrower 
 .sense the word knowledge means truth. It was in the 
 narrow sense of the word that whatever is not true is 
 not knowledge that Socrates interpreted the meaning 
 of the Delphic oracle that had declared him the wisest 
 of men. His wisdom must be, he said, that whereas 
 other men seemed to be wise and to know something, 
 he knew that he knew nothing. All men have opinion, 
 but opinion is not knowledge, though easily and gener- 
 ally mistaken for it. His perplexity was to understand 
 I what actually this false opinion could be which passed 
 for knowledge. It could not be nothing at all, for then 
 it would simply mean ignorance ; but in false opinion
 
 76 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 some object is present to the mind. Everything that 
 the mind thinks of has being. A thing may have being 
 that does not exist if by existence is meant the particular 
 existence of an event in time, for most of the things we 
 think about are timeless they are ideas, such as white- 
 ness, goodness, numbers and the properties of numbers, 
 faith, love, and such-like. All such ideas are called 
 universals, because their reality does not mean that 
 they exist at one particular moment and no other, but 
 they are real, they have being. How, then, can there 
 be anything intermediate between being and not being, 
 anything that is and also is not, for this is what false 
 opinion or error seems to be ? 
 
 There is, then, a problem of error, and it is quite distinct 
 , from the problem of truth. The problem of truth is to 
 / know by what criterion we can test the agreement of 
 i r our ideas with reality ; the problem of error is to know 
 how there can be false opinion. There is false opinion, 
 of this no one needs to be convinced ; but where its place 
 is in the fundamental scheme of the mental process, in 
 what precisely it consists, whether it is purely a nega- 
 tion or whether it has a positive nature of its own, this 
 is the problem we have now to consider. 
 
 There is an important distinction in logic between 
 what is contradictory and what is contrary. Of two 
 contradictory propositions one must be true, the other 
 must be false ; but of two contrary propositions one 
 must be false, but both may be false. Of contradictory 
 propositions one is always a pure negation, one declares 
 the non-existence of what the other affirms the existence ; 
 but of contrary propositions each has a positive content, 
 and both may be false. A true proposition may be 
 based on a false opinion, and it is very important to 
 have a clear idea of what we intend by false opinion. 
 We do not mean by false opinion such plainly false
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 77 
 
 propositions as that two and two are five or that there 
 may be no corners in a square such propositions are 
 false, because they contradict propositions that are self- 
 evident. If anyone should seriously affirm them, we 
 should not, I think, say that such a one had a false 
 opinion, but that he failed, perhaps through some 
 illusion, to understand the meaning of the terms he was 
 using. An example of what would now, I suppose, be 
 unquestionably regarded by everyone as error is that 
 whole body of opinion that found expression in the 
 theory and practice of witchcraft. This was once 
 almost universally accepted, and though probably at no 
 period nor in any country was there not some one 
 who doubted or disbelieved, still the reasons of such 
 doubt or disbelief would probably be very different 
 from those reasons which lead us to reject it to-day. 
 For witchcraft was grounded on a general belief that 
 spiritual agencies, beneficent and malign, were the cause 
 of material well-being or evil. This conception has now 
 given place to the mechanistic or naturalistic theory on 
 which our modern physical science is based. We inter- 
 pret all physical occurrences as caused by material 
 agency. But this belief, quite as much as the belief in 
 spiritual agencies, is opinion, not knowledge, and it may 
 be false. It is conceivable that future generations will 
 reject our scientific notions, self-evident though they 
 seem to us, as completely as we reject the notions of 
 the dark ages. It is even conceivable that the whole 
 of our modern science may come to appear to mankind 
 as not even an approximation to knowledge. Error, 
 like illusion, may be universal. No one whose opinion 
 counts as a rational belief now holds that sickness may 
 be caused by the malign influence of the evil eye, and 
 that this influence may be neutralised by making the 
 sign of the cross ; some, but very few, believe that a
 
 78 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 sick man may be healed by the prayers and anointing 
 of righteous men ; many believe that material disease, 
 however malignant, may be expelled from the body by 
 faith ; while the majority of rational men, whatever 
 independent religious views they hold, regard sickness 
 and disease as material in the ordinary sense, and 
 expect them to yield to drugs and treatment. Now, of 
 these various opinions some must be false, while all 
 may be false. Let us add some illustrations from 
 philosophy. Some philosophers hold, in common with 
 general opinion, that sense experience is caused by 
 physical objects ; others hold that there are no physical 
 objects, but that consciousness is the one and only 
 reality ; and there are others who think that the 
 reality that gives rise to our sense experience is neither 
 physical in the sense of a material thing, nor mental 
 in the sense of consciousness or thought, but is move- 
 ment or change change that requires no support and 
 is absolute. All these are opinions, and may be false, 
 and our belief that any one of them is true does not 
 depend on immediate experience, but on reasons. The 
 best that can be said in favour of any belief is that 
 there is no reason for supposing it false, and the worst 
 that can be said against any belief is that there is no 
 reason for supposing it true. Our problem, then, is to 
 know what constitutes the nature of error in any one 
 of these examples if it is, as each one may be, false ? 
 
 The instances we have given are all of them proposi- 
 tions or judgments, or else conceptions formed out of 
 propositions or judgments, the purpose of which is to 
 interpret experience. The actual experience itself, in 
 i so far as it consists of the actual presence of the object 
 I to the mind aware of it, is, as we have seen, neither 
 I truth nor error ; it simply is what it is. It is the con- 
 ceptions by which we interpret this experience that are
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 79 
 
 true orjalse. And our problem is that the meaning or 
 content of a conception, that which is present to the 
 mind when we make a judgment, is precisely the same 
 whether the conception is true or false, there is no ? 
 distinctive mark or feature by which we can know that * 
 in the one case the object of thought is a real or actual \ 
 fact, in the other an opinion to which no reality corre- 
 sponds. And, further, it seems exceedingly difficult to 
 understand in what way a non-reality can be present 
 to the mind at all. 
 
 Let us now examine some attempts to solve this 
 problem, and first of all let us take the pragmatist 
 solution. Pragmatism claims that it has no difficulty 
 in explaining error, because, as we have already seen, 
 it acknowledges no other test or criterion of truth except 
 a pragmatic one. Every proposition or judgment that 
 we make must, in order to have any meaning whatever, I 
 be relevant to some human purpose ; every such pro- | 
 position is a truth-claim ; and every truth-claim is I 
 tested by its workability. Consequently, error is simply * 
 the failure of a proposition to establish its claim by the 
 practical test of working. Propositions marked by such 
 failure are errors. As there is no truth independent of 
 time, place, and circumstance, no irrelevant truth, no 
 truth independent of the conditions under which its 
 claim is put forward, there is no truth that may not 
 become error. No judgment, according to pragmatism, 
 is an error pure and simple that is to say, it cannot 
 come into existence as error, for it comes claiming 
 truth, and maintaining that claim until challenged; it 
 becomes an error in retrospect only, and always in re- t 
 latioii to another judgment which corrects it. Error 
 docs not characterise a class of judgments ; it is something 
 that happens to a judgment, it is a judgment whose 
 truth-claim is rejected in reference to another judgment
 
 80 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 which succeeds. The essential thing in the pragmatist 
 doctrine of error is that in claiming to be true a judg- 
 
 !ment is not challenging comparison with some inde- 
 pendent reality, nor is it claiming to belong to a timeless 
 ; order of existence to be eternal ; it is claiming to fulfil 
 the particular purpose for which it has been called 
 forth, whether that purpose be practical or theoretical. 
 
 Let us now consider the explanation of error offered 
 by the idealist philosophy. In this view only the whole 
 truth is wholly true ; the Absolute, as a perfect, concrete, 
 individual system, is the ideal, and all that falls short of 
 it can only possess a degree of truth a degree which 
 is greater or lees according as it approximates to the ideal. 
 The degrees of truth are not quantitative, not a mixture 
 of truth and error, but a nearer or more distant approach 
 to the ideal. There can be no absolute error, because 
 if truth is the whole, error, if it exists at all, must in 
 some way be included in truth. Clearly error cannot 
 as such be truth, and therefore it must follow that, in 
 the whole, error loses its character of error, and finds 
 reconciliation of its contradiction to truth. Error, 
 then, if it is something, and not a pure negation, is partial 
 or incomplete truth ; the perplexity and contradiction 
 that it gives rise to are incidental to our partial view. 
 Knowledge, it must seem to us, can exist only for 
 omniscience. Unless we know everything, we know 
 nothing. 
 
 These two doctrines are in a sense the exact antithesis 
 of one another. They agree together in this, that 
 in each the explanation of error follows as a conse- 
 quence of the conception of the nature of truth. The 
 pragmatist theory implies that there is no truth in any 
 real sense, but only more or less successful error. The 
 idealist theory implies that there is no real error, but only 
 a variety in the degree of truth.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 81 
 
 Most people, however, are convinced that truth and 
 error are not related to one another, nor to the circum- 
 stances that call forth belief or disbelief. Let us now 
 examine a theory that recognises this. There are false 
 judgments, and they need explanation ; error has a 
 nature of its own. If a judgment is false, it is absolutely 
 and unalterably false ; if it is true, it is unconditionally 
 true and with no reserve. No logical process, no psycho- 
 logical disposition, can make what is false true. Error 
 must lie in the nature of knowledge, and to discover that 
 nature we must understand the theory of knowledge 
 and determine the exact nature of the mental act in 
 knowing. The first essential is to distinguish the kind 
 of knowledge to which truth and error can apply. We 
 pointed out in the second chapter that all knowledge 
 rests ultimately on immediate experience. In immediate 
 experience the relation between the mental act of knowing 
 and the object that is known is so simple that any ques- 
 tion as to truth or error in regard to it is unmeaning. 
 To question the truth of immediate experience is to 
 question its existence ; it is to ask if it is what it is, and 
 this is plainly unmeaning. But thinking, we said, is 
 questioning experience in order to know its content or 
 meaning, and in thinking, the simplicity of the relation 
 which unites the mind to its object in immediate ex- 
 perience is left behind, and a logical process of very 
 great complexity takes its place. It is in this complexity 
 that the possibility of error lies. 
 
 Let us look at it a little more closely. Knowing is 
 a relation which unites two things, one the mind that 
 knows, the other the thing known. In every act of 
 knowing, something is present to the mind ; if knowing 
 is simply awareness of this actually present something, 
 we call it immediate experience, we are acquainted with 
 the object. But our knowledge is not only of objects
 
 82 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 immediately present to the mind and with which we 
 are therefore acquainted. Knowledge embraces the 
 past and future and the distant realms of space. Indeed 
 were knowledge only of what is actually present to the 
 mind, it is difficult to imagine that we could, in the 
 ordinary meaning of the word, know anything at all. 
 I may be thinking, for example, of an absent friend ; all 
 that is present to my mind is, it may be, a memory 
 image, a faint recall of his appearance on some one 
 occasion, or perhaps a recollection of the tone of his 
 voice, or it may be the black marks on white paper 
 which I recognise as his handwriting. This image is 
 present to my mind, but the image is not the object, 
 my friend, about whom I think and make endless judg- 
 jinents, true and false. So also, if what is present to 
 the mind is affecting me through the external senses, 
 if it is a sense impression, it is clear that what is actually 
 present is not the whole object of which I am aware, 
 but only a very small part of it, or, it may be, no part 
 of it at all, but something, a sound, or an odour, that 
 represents it. The immediate data of consciousness are 
 named by some philosophers sense data, by others, 
 presentations, by others images, and there is much 
 controversy as to their nature and existence, but with 
 this controversy we are not here concerned we are 
 seeking to make clear an obvious distinction, namely, 
 the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and 
 knowledge by description. 
 
 What kind of knowledge is it that we acquire by 
 description ? Knowledge about things with which we 
 are not first acquainted. The most important know- 
 ledge that we possess or acquire is knowledge of objects 
 which we know only by the knowledge we have about 
 them objects that we know about without knowing; 
 them. They are not direct impressions on our senses/
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 83 
 
 nor are they ideas known in actual experience. We 
 make judgments about them, and the subjects about 
 which we make these judgments are really composed 
 of these judgments that we make about them. To go 
 back to our illustrations, we may know a great deal 
 about the evil eye, a malignant influence, disease, faith, 
 healing, causality, physical objects, without any ac- 
 quaintance with them, without even knowing that they , 
 exist. Such knowledge is descriptive, and the objects / 
 are descriptions. Knowledge by description is never * 
 quite simple, and is often very complex, for, besides the 
 relation of the mental act to the object known, there 
 are the terms and relations which are the elements 
 in the judgment and the relations of the judgments 
 themselves. If we analyse a judgment, every word 
 in which it is expressed, whether it is a noun or a 
 verb or a preposition or a conjunction, conveys a 
 distinct meaning, indicates a term or a relation, each of 
 which can be made a distinct object to the mind, and all 
 of which are combined in the single meaning the judg- 
 ment expresses. It is in this complexity that the possi- 
 bility of error lies, and the possibility increases as the 
 complexity increases. All the terms and the relations 
 
 | which a judgment contains depend on the knowledge : - 
 we have by acquaintance that is to say, we are ulti- \ 
 
 . mately dependent on our actual experience for all[ 
 knowledge whatever, whether it is acquaintance or * 
 description, for we can only describe in terms with which 
 we are acquainted ; but in the judgment these elements 
 are combined into new objects, or a certain relation is 
 declared to exist between objects, and it is this com- 
 bination of the elements of the judgment that involves 
 its truth or falsehood. 
 
 If this view of the nature of the mental act of knowing 
 is accepted, we are able to understand how false opinion
 
 84 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 is consistent with the fact that all knowledge is truth. 
 We escape both the alternatives that seemed to Socrates 
 the only possible ones. " When a man has a false 
 opinion, does he think that which he knows to be some 
 other thing which he knows, and knowing both is he at the 
 same time ignorant of both ? Or does he think of some- 
 thing which he does not know as some other thing which 
 he does not know ? " No, neither ; in error he thinks 
 that something that he knows is in a relation that he 
 knows to some other thing that he knows, when in fact 
 that relation is not relating the two things. The false 
 proposition is not one in which the constituent terms 
 and relations are unknown or non-existent, but one in 
 which a combination of these terms and relations is 
 thought to exist when in fact it does not exist ; and the 
 true proposition is that in which the combination 
 thought to exist does exist. We can, therefore, if this 
 account be true, at least know what false opinion or 
 error can be, whether or not we have any means of 
 deciding in regard to any particular opinion that it is 
 false. 
 
 There is one other theory, the last we shall notice. 
 It is in one respect the most important of all, namely, 
 that it is the most direct attempt to grapple with the 
 problem of error. It is founded on a theory of know- 
 ledge which we owe mainly to the profound and acute 
 work of a German philosopher (Meinong), and which 
 at the present time is being keenly discussed. It is an 
 attempt to determine more exactly than has yet been 
 done the fundamental scheme of the mental life and 
 development. The brief account that I am now offering, 
 I owe to a paper by Prof. G. F. Stout on " Some Funda- 
 mental Points in the Theory of Knowledge." We have 
 seen that the problem of error is the difficulty there is 
 in conceiving how there can be any real thing, any real
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 85 
 
 object of thought, intermediate between being and not- 
 being. Error seems to exist and yet to have a nature 
 which is a negation of existence, and it seems therefore 
 to be a downright contradiction when we affirm that 
 error or false opinion can be that there is a real object 
 of thought when we judge falsely. This theory meets 
 the difficulty directly by distinguishing in the mental 
 act of knowing a process that is neither perceiving nor 
 thinking of things, and that involves neither believing 
 nor disbelieving on the one hand nor desiring or willing 
 on the other: this is the process of supposing. Cor- 
 responding to this mental act of supposing, there is a 
 distinct kind of object intended or meant by the mind 
 an object that is neither a sense datum nor an idea, 
 nor a judgment, but a supposition. Also and again 
 corresponding to this mental act of supposing and its 
 intended object the supposition, there is a mode of 
 being which is neither existence nor non-existence, but 
 is named subsistence. A supposition, it is said, does not 
 exist it subsists. This thesis, it will easily be under- 
 stood, is based on an analysis, and deals with arguments 
 that touch the most fundamental problems of theory 
 of knowledge. Moreover, its presentment is excessively 
 technical, and only those highly trained in the habit of 
 psychological introspection and skilled in philosophical 
 analysis are really competent to discuss it. It is not 
 possible to offer here anything but a simple outline of 
 the part of the theory that concerns the present problem. 
 The actual experience of knowing is a relation between 
 two things, one of which is a mental act, the act of per- 
 ceiving or thinking or having ideas, and the other is 
 an object, that which is perceived or thought of. The 
 act is a particular mental existence, it is the act of a 
 psychical individual. The object is not included within 
 the actual experience which is the knowing of it, it is
 
 86 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 that which is meant or intended by the experience. 
 The act, then, is the mental process of meaning or in- 
 tending, the object the thing meant or intended. The 
 mental act differs according to the kind of object in- 
 tended. The act of perceiving is the direction of the 
 mind towards sense data and ideas ; the act of judging 
 is the direction of the mind towards judgments or 
 propositions about things, propositions that affirm or 
 deny relations between things ; the act of supposing 
 is different from both these it is the direction of the 
 mind towards suppositions. Suppositions differ from 
 ideas in this, that they may be either positive or nega- 
 tive, whereas ideas are never negative. This may seem 
 to contradict experience. Can we not, for example, 
 have an idea of not-red just as well as an idea of red ? 
 No, the two ideas can easily be seen to be one and the 
 same ; in each case it is red we are actually acquainted 
 with, and the difference is in affirming or denying 
 existence to the one idea. The difference is in our 
 judgment, which may be affirmative or negative. A 
 supposition is like a judgment in this respect ; it may be 
 either affirmative or negative, but it differs from a judg- 
 ment in another respect, that while a judgment always 
 conveys a conviction, always expresses belief or dis- 
 belief, a supposition does not it is neither believed nor 
 disbelieved. 
 
 Before I show the application of this analysis of 
 knowledge to the problem of error, let me try and clear 
 up its obscurity, for undoubtedly it is difficult to com- 
 prehend. Its difficulty lies in this, that though all the 
 ideas with which it deals are quite familiar supposi- 
 tions, real and unreal possibilities, fulfilled and non- 
 fulfilled beliefs yet it seems to run counter to all our 
 notions of the extreme simplicity of the appeal to reality. 
 It seems strange and paradoxical to our ordinary habit
 
 THE PROBLEM OF ERROR 87 
 
 of thinking to affirm that there are real things and real 
 relations between things which though real yet do not 
 exist, and also that non-existent realities are not things 
 that once were real but now are nought they are things 
 that subsist. Yet this is no new doctrine. The most 
 familiar case of such realities is that of numbers. The 
 Greeks discovered that numbers do not exist that is to 
 say, that their reality is of another kind to that which 
 we denote by existence. Numbers are realities, other- 
 wise there would be no science of mathematics. Pytha- 
 goras (about 540-500 B.C.) taught that numbers are the 
 reality from which all else is derived. And there are 
 many other things of the mind that seem indeed to be 
 more real than the things of sense. It is this very 
 problem of error that brings into relief this most im- 
 portant doctrine. 
 
 Now let us apply this theory of the supposition to the 
 problem of error, and we shall then see how there can 
 be an object present to the mind when we judge falsely, 
 and also that the object is the same whether we judge 
 truly or falsely. Suppositions are real possibilities ; 
 they are alternatives that may be fulfilled or that may 
 never be fulfilled. These real possibilities, or these 
 possible alternatives, are objects of thought ; they do 
 not belong to the mental act of thinking ; they are not 
 in the mind, but realities present to the mind. In mere 
 supposing they are present as alternatives ; in judging, 
 we affirm of them or deny of them the relation to general 
 reality that they are fulfilled. Judgments therefore 
 are true or false accordingly as the fulfilment they affirm 
 does or does not agree with reality. In this way, then, 
 we may answer the perplexing question, How can there 
 be an object of thought in a false judgment ? The 
 answer is, that the objects of thought about which we 
 make judgments are suppositions, and our judgments
 
 88 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 concern their fulfilment, and their fulfilment is a relation 
 external to them it is their agreement or disagreement 
 with reality. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 I WILL now briefly sum up the argument of this book. 
 The problem of truth is to discover the nature of the 
 agreement between the things of the mind, our ideas, 
 and the reality of which ideas are the knowledge. We 
 call the agreement truth. What is it ? We have seen 
 that there are three different answers, namely (1) That 
 it is a correspondence between the idea and the reality ; 
 (2) That it is the coherence of the idea in a consistent 
 and harmonious whole ; and (3) That it is a value that 
 we ourselves give to our ideas. 
 
 The theory that truth is correspondence we found to 
 offer, this difficulty. To say of an idea that it corre- 
 sponds with reality supposes a knowledge of reality in 
 addition to and distinct from the knowledge that is the 
 idea, and yet the knowledge of reality is the idea of it. 
 And if it be said that not the idea but the judgment 
 is what corresponds with reality in truth, this equally 
 supposes a knowledge of reality that is not a judgment. 
 If, as the common sense of mankind requires us to 
 believe, the reality that is known by us exists in entire 
 independence of our relation of knowing to it, how can 
 we state this fact without falling into contradiction in 
 the very statement of it ? This is the difficulty of a 
 realist theory of knowledge. 
 
 We next examined the theory that truth is coherence, 
 and this seemed to present to us an unattainable ideal.
 
 CONCLUSION 89 
 
 Only the whole truth is wholly true. We followed the 
 idealist argument on which it is based, and this seemed 
 to lead us inevitably, in the doctrine of the Absolute, 
 to the paradox that unless we know everything we 
 know nothing. 
 
 In pragmatism we met a new principle, the proposal 
 to regard truth as a value. Truth, it is said, is some- 
 thing that happens to ideas ; they become true, or are 
 made true. There is no criterion, no absolute standard, 
 independent of ideas to which they must conform if 
 they are judged to be true. The value of an idea is 
 its practical usefulness as tested by its workability. 
 Truth is Avhat works. This led us to criticise the con- 
 cept of utility. We found that it is impossible to identify 
 utility with truth even if we include theoretical utility 
 in its widest meaning, because over and above the 
 usefulness and workability of an idea there always 
 remains the question of its relation to reality. But we 
 recognised in the principle of truth-value an important 
 advance towards a theory of knowledge. 
 
 The solution of the problem of truth, it became clear, 
 must be sought in a theory of knowledge. Have we, 
 in the new theory of life and knowledge of Bergson's 
 philosophy, an answer to the question, What is truth. ? 
 Yes, but not in the form of a direct solution of the 
 dilemma which confronts us in every theory that 
 accepts the independence of knowledge and reality 
 rather in a theory of knowledge in which the dilemma 
 does not and cannot arise. 
 
 The theory of Bergson is that in the intuition of life 
 we know reality as it is, our knowledge is one with our 
 knowing ; and in the intellect we possess a mode of 
 knowing which is equally immediate but the essential 
 quality of which is that it externalises or spatialises 
 reality. We understand this mode of knowing in recog-
 
 90 THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH 
 
 nising the purpose it serves, its practical advantage to 
 us. The theory, therefore, resembles pragmatism in 
 bringing the concept of utility to the aid of its theory 
 of knowledge. But, we insisted, the resemblance is 
 outward only, for the essential tenet of pragmatism, 
 that truth itself is a value, is fatal to the theory. It 
 would mean, in fact, that not the mode of knowing, that 
 is the intellect, but the actual knowledge itself is a 
 practical endowment. But the problem of truth arises 
 in a new form, for the practical utility of the intellect 
 consists in the illusion which it produces in us. It 
 makes the flowing reality appear as fixed states. How, 
 then, can universal illusion be consistent with the 
 possession of truth ? To answer this question we 
 examined the nature of illusion and its distinction 
 from error. 
 
 In the last chapter we have dealt with the problem 
 of error. The fact of error presented a difficulty dis- 
 tinct from the question, What is truth ? for it implied 
 a real object of thought, of which it seemed equally 
 contradictory to say that it exists and that it does not 
 exist. In the solutions that have been proposed we 
 saw how the problem is forcing philosophers to examine 
 again the fundamental processes of the mind and the 
 nature of the universe they reveal.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 THE Thecetetus of Plato is an exposition of the problem 
 of truth and error as it presented itself in ancient philo- 
 sophy. The quotation I have made from it, and also 
 the quotations from the Republic, are from Jowett's 
 translation. 
 
 The most clear exposition of what I have called the 
 realistic doctrine is The Problems of Philosophy, by the 
 Hon. Bertrand Russell, in the Home University Library 
 (Williams and Norgate). I have adopted Mr. Russell's 
 terms, "acquaintance " and " description " ; the distinc- 
 tion they denote seems to me of fundamental importance, 
 and Mr. Russell's doctrine on this point a permanent 
 addition to philosophy. Mr. Russell's theory, that in 
 the judgment what is present to the mind is a rela- 
 tion which is external to the terms of the judgment, 
 and that agreement or disagreement between this rela- 
 tion and reality makes the truth or falsehood of the 
 judgment, can only be appreciated if studied in con- 
 nection with his general scheme. 
 
 The classical work on what I have called the modern 
 idealist doctrine (I have avoided the word intellectiialist) 
 is Mr. F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality. I have 
 attempted to give the main lines of the theory in my 
 chapter on " The Absolute." Although it is a book for 
 advanced students, it is not a closed volume even to 
 the uninstructed. The brilliant dialectical skill of the 
 
 91
 
 92 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 author is acknowledged and may be enjoyed by those 
 who reject or may fail to understand his conclusion. 
 Mr. Harold H. Joachim's The Nature of Truth (Oxford, 
 Clarendon Press) is a most able and scholarly argument 
 for the coherence theory of truth. 
 
 The principal expositions of Pragmatism are the 
 works of William James and of Dr. F. C. S. Schiller. 
 William James' The Will to Believe was the first distinct 
 formulation of the principle. Pragmatism, a New Name 
 for some Old Ways of Thinking, is the fullest and most 
 systematic statement of the doctrine. The Meaning 
 of Truth is a defence of the doctrine against the criticism 
 that had been meted out to it unsparingly. All three 
 books are published by Longmans. 
 
 Dr. F. C. S. Schiller is uncompromising in his advocacy 
 of a complete return to the doctrine taught in the ancient 
 world by Protagoras. He has defended that philosopher 
 against the arguments of Plato in a polemical pamphlet 
 entitled Plato or Protagoras? (Oxford, Blackwell). An 
 Essay on "Axioms as Postulates " in Personal Idealism 
 (Macmillan & Co.), and two volumes of collected essays 
 on Humanism (Macmillan & Co.), set forth the doctrine, 
 which he prefers to call Humanism, with great force, 
 abundant illustration, and the relief of no small amount 
 of humour. 
 
 For an account of the theories of Bergson, I may 
 mention my own little book in this series, Henri Bergson : 
 Th-e Philosophy of Change. M. Bergson's books are Time 
 and Freewill, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. 
 To these has been recently added An Introduction to 
 Metaphysics (Macmillan, 1912). It is the republication 
 in English of an article written in 1903, which has been 
 for a long time out of print. It is a short and clear 
 statement of the doctrine of Intuition.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 93 
 
 The important studies of Professor G. F. Stout are 
 not easily accessible to the general reader, as they consist 
 in contributions to philosophical journals and proceed- 
 ings of learned societies. The essay referred to in the 
 last chapter, " Some Fundamental Points in the Theory 
 of Knowledge," is in the St. Andrews Quincentenary 
 Publications, 1911 (Maclehose). I may mention also 
 his essay on " Error " in Personal Idealism, noticed 
 above, and " The Object of Thought and Real Being," 
 in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1911.
 
 INDEX 
 
 BERGSON, Mons. Henri, 63, 69, 
 
 73,89 
 Berkeley, 20, 32, 73 
 
 COHERENCE Theory, 25, 27 
 Correspondence Theory, 24, 27 
 
 DISCOVERY of Planet Neptune, 
 59 
 
 FAITH -ATTITUDE of Pragma- 
 tism, 55 
 Formal Logic, 10 
 
 HEGEL, 44 
 Hume, 30 
 
 INTELLECTUALISM, 44 
 
 JAMES, William, 44 
 KANT, 26, 27, 42, 73 
 MEINONG, 84 
 
 PIERCE, C: S,, 44 
 Plato, 11, 44, 67, 68, 74 
 
 Pluralistic Realism, 24 
 Poincare", Henri, 54 
 Pragmatist Theory of Truth, 
 
 55 
 
 Primary Qualities, 32 
 Protagoras, His book The Truth, 
 
 10, 11 ; His maxim, 44 
 Pythagoras, 87 
 
 RELATIVITY, Principle of, 48, 
 
 53,62 
 Republic of Plato, 67 
 
 S. ANSELM'S Argument, 29, 31, 
 
 41 
 
 Schiller, Dr. F. C. S., 44 
 Belf , The Idea of, 36 
 Socrates, 11, 74 
 Space and Time, 33, 34, 36 
 Stout, Prof. G. F.,84 
 
 Theatetus of Plato, 11, 74 
 UNKNOWABLE, The, 29, 37 
 ZENO, 34 
 
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 64. Navigation By W/Hail, R.N., B.A. 
 
 *6 5 . Pond Life By E. C. Ash, M.R.A.C. 
 
 *66. Dietetics By Alex. Bryce, M.D., D.P.H. 
 
 *94. The Nature of Mathematics . . By P. G. B. Jourdain, M.A. 
 
 95. Applications of Electricity ... By Alex. Ogilvie, B.Sc. 
 
 *g6. Gardening By A. Cecil Bartlett 
 
 97. The Care of the Teeth . . . By J. A. Young, L.D.S. 
 
 * 9 8- Atlas of the World .... By J. Bartholomew, F.R.G.S. 
 
 *uo. British Birds By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 
 
 25. The Meaning of Philosophy . . By Prof. A. E.Taylor, M. A., F.B.A. 
 26. Henri Bergson By H. Wildon Carr. 
 
 27. Psychology By H. J. Watt, M.A., Ph.D. 
 
 * 2 8. Ethics By Canon Rashdall, D. Litt., F.B.A. 
 
 29. Kant's Philosophy By A. D. Lindsay, M.A. 
 
 30. The Teaching of Plato . . . By A. D. Lindsay, M.A. 
 
 *6 7 . Aristotle By Prof. A. E.Taylor, M. A., F.B.A. 
 
 68. Nietzsche By M. A. Mugge, Ph.D. 
 
 69. Eucken By A. J. Jones, M.A., B.Sci.Ph.D. 
 
 70. The^xperimental Psychology of J By c w Valentine, B.A. 
 
 71. The Problem of Truth ' .' .' .' By H. Wildon Carr. 
 99. Geor^e^ Berkeley: the Philosophy J By G Dawes HickSj L;U D 
 
 31. Buddhism . .' .' .' .' .' By Prof. T.W. Rhys Davids, F.B.A. 
 32. Roman Catholicism . . . . By H. B. Coxon. 
 
 33. The Oxford Movement . . .By Wilfrid P. Ward. 
 
 34. The Bible in the Light of the Higher / By Rev. W. F. Adeney, M.A., and 
 
 Criticism \ Rev. Prof. W. H.Bennett, Litt. D. 
 
 35. Cardinal Newman By Wilfrid Meynell. 
 
 72. The Church of England . . . By Rev. Canon Masterman.
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION (continued) 
 73. Anglo-Catholicism . . . . By A. E. Manning Foster. 
 
 *74. The Free Churches .... By Rev. Edward Shillito, M.A. 
 
 75. Judaism ....... By Ephraim Levine, B.A. 
 
 The 
 
 76. Theosophy 
 
 36. The Growth of Freedom 
 37. Bismarck 
 * 38. Oliver Cromwell 
 *39. Mary Queen of Scots . 
 Cecil Rhodes 
 
 40. C 
 
 *4i. Julius Caesar 
 
 History of England 
 
 42. England in the Making . 
 *43. England in the Middle Ages 
 
 44. The Monarchy and the People 
 
 By Annie Besant. 
 HISTORY 
 
 . . . By H. W. Nevinson. 
 
 By Prof. F. M. Powicke, M.A. 
 
 By Hilda Johnstone, M.A. 
 . . . By E. O'Neill, M.A. 
 
 By Ian Colvin. 
 
 By Hilary Hardinge. 
 
 By Prof. F. J.C. Hearnshaw, LL.D. 
 
 By E. O'Neill, M.A. 
 
 By \V. T. Waugh, M.A. 
 
 By A. Jones, M.A. 
 
 By G. S. Veitch, M.A. 
 
 By L. G. Redmond Howard. 
 
 By H. W. Wilson. 
 
 By Major G. W. Redway. 
 
 By E. Fearenside, B.A. 
 
 By L. D. Agate, M.A. 
 
 By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. 
 
 By John Macdonald. 
 
 By Mrs. Arthur Bell. 
 
 By F. B. Kirkman, B.A. 
 
 By Rev. B. Jarrett, O.P., M.A. 
 
 By J. H. Harley, M.A. 
 
 By H. M. Hallsworth, M.A., B.Sc. 
 
 By Joseph Clayton. 
 
 By W. A. Robertson, F.F. A, 
 
 By G. Spiller. 
 
 By Joseph Clayton. 
 By J. J. 
 
 45. 
 
 46. Empire and Democracy 
 *6i. Home Rule . . . . 
 
 77. Nelson 
 
 * 7 8. Wellington and Waterloo . . 
 100. A History of Greece . . . 
 tor. Luther and the Reformation . 
 102. The Discovery of the New World 
 103. Turkey and the Eastern Question 
 104. A History of Architecture . . 
 
 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC 
 *47. Women's Suffrage . . . . By M. G. Fawcett, LL.D. 
 
 48 ' ^^^ove^ml^o-day 5 ! 1 S ?*^}*7 Prof. Ramsay Muir, M.A. 
 
 40. An Introduction to Economic Science By Prof. H. O. Meredith, M.A. 
 
 50 Socialism ... . 
 
 79 . Mediaeval Socialism .... 
 80. Syndicalism ...... 
 
 8 r. Labour and Wages .... 
 
 *8z. Co-operation ...... 
 
 *8 3 . Insurance as Investment . . . 
 * 9 2- The Training of the Child . . . 
 * 105. Trade Unions ...... 
 
 106. Everyday Law ..... 
 
 LETTERS 
 51. Shakespeare ...... By Prof. C. H. Herford, Litt.D. 
 
 52. Wordsworth ...... By Rosaline Masson. 
 
 * 53 . Pure Gold-A Choice of Lyrics and j By H c O'Neill. 
 
 * 5 . Francis Bacon ..... By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 
 
 *S$. The Brontes ...... By Flora Masson. 
 
 S 6 Carlyle . By the Rev. L. MacLean Watt. 
 
 *57. Dante . By A. G. Ferrers Howell. 
 
 58. Ruskin ....... By A. Ely th Webster, M.A. 
 
 59. Common Faults in Writing English By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 
 *6o. A Dictionary of Synonyms ... By Austin K. Gray, B.A. 
 
 84. Classical Dictionary . . . . By A. E. Stirling. 
 
 85. History of English Literature . . By A. Compton-Rickett. 
 
 86. Browning. ' ..... By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 
 
 *8 7 . Charles Lamb ..... By Flora Masson. 
 
 88. Goethe ....... By Prof. C. H. Herford, Litt.D 
 
 89. Balzac ....... By Frank Harris. 
 
 90. Rousseau ....... By H. Sacher. 
 
 91. Ibsen ........ By Hilary Hardinge. 
 
 93. Tennyson ...... By Aaron Watson. 
 
 107. R. L. Stevenson ..... By Rosaline Masson. 
 
 *io8. Shelley ....... By Sydney Waterlo 
 
 109. William Morris . . . By A. Blyth Webste 
 
 Ada 
 
 , M.A. 
 
 M.A. 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH: T. C. & E. C. JACK 
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