BY H. WILDON CARR
HONORARY D.LITT., DURHAM
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
67 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 undecided. 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 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 CARR.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
II. APPEARANCE AND REALITY
III. THE LOGICAL THEORIES
IV. THE ABSOLUTE
V. PRAGMATISM
VI. UTILITY
VII. ILLUSION
VIII. THE PROBLEM OF ERROR
IX. CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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 probably only temporary. The same tendency to discover 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 consciousness. 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 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 relation 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 recognised 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 problems 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 philosophical 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 controversy 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 philosopher, 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, 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 "TheÆtetus." Protagoras, we are there told, taught that "man is the measure of all things—of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence of things that are not." "You have read him?" asks Socrates, addressing TheÆtetus. "Oh yes, again and again," is TheÆtetus' reply. Plato was entirely 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 opposed to it the theory that truth is the vision of a 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 philosophers 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 abstract 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 sciences, who hold in profound contempt the fine distinctions and intellectual subtleties that seem 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 possibilities 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 possibilities which the imagination of man is never wearied of suggesting. This factor x is the plaything of the metaphysician."[1] 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 metaphysician 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 metaphysician 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 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 indifferent 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 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 consciousness 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 experience 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 something beyond matter. The universe must seem a poor thing indeed to a man who can think that physical 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 possible.
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 consciousness 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; conscious life is the enduring present which grows with the past and makes the future.
This reality of consciousness is our continually changing 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 rearrangement of matter or an alteration of position in space.
This physical reality is not, as psychical reality is, known to us directly; it is an interpretation of our sense experience. Immediate experience has objects, generally 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 experience. 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. Wd 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 observation of the behaviour of some of the things we 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 attention is suddenly attracted by something—a flash of light, or a sound, or a twinge of pain—consciously or unconsciously 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 existence 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 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 throughout the development of our thought it is taken to be something that requires explanation. We seek to discover the reality which will explain it.
It is in 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 possible; 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 unlike and of a different order to that which we immediately 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 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 knowledge, 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 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, we 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 explanation 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 acquaintance for all our knowledge of these things. Not only is immediate sense experience and the knowledge it gives us by acquaintance the only evidence we have of the greater and wider reality, but we are dependent 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 standpoint. 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 themselves forced to recognise, however scornful they may be of metaphysical methods and results.
The special problem of the nature of truth is concerned, then, with the reality that we have distinguished as known by description, and conceived by us as independent 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 THEORIES
Whoever cares to become acquainted with the difficulty of the problem of truth must not be impatient of dialectical subtleties. There is a well-known story in Boswell's 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 representative 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 possession of the human mind without which the ordinary 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 property 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 probably first of all suggest itself is that the idea is a copy of the reality. And at once many experiences will 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 reality. If we look into another person's eye we may see there a picture of the whole field of his vision reflected 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 the sense of vision, as consisting in more or less vivid, 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 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 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 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 clear that the ideas must correspond to the things in some way that does not make them copies of the things. The most familiar instance of correspondence is the 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 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. Throughout the whole of our ordinary life 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 to forget that ideas simply are the knowledge of realities; 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 between mental ideas and real things. The two things that are related together in knowledge are not the idea and its object, but the mind and its object. The idea 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 mind knows the ideas and also knows the things and observes the correspondence between them. And even if we suppose that ideas are an independent kind of entity distinguishable and separable from another kind 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 affirmation 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, 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 discovering 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 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 altogether different theory, namely, the theory that truth does not consist in correspondence between ideas and their 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. 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 inconsistency. 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, requires 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. The mind is not a tabula rasa upon which the external world makes 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 existence. 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 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 experience, 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 unknowable, truth cannot be a correspondence between our ideas and these things-in-themselves. Truth must be some quality of the ideas themselves, and this can only be their logical consistency. Consistency, because 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 experience in thinking an activity striving to attain the knowledge of reality, and the belief, the feeling of satisfaction 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 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 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 external 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 the very inquiry that reality is of a nature that experience reveals. Reality in its ultimate nature may be logical—that is to say, of the nature of reason, or it may 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 endeavoured 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 knowing 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 say that it is the greatest dialectical triumph of modern 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 afterwards comparing it, another argument very famous in the history of philosophy—the argument to prove the existence of God named after St. Anselm of Canterbury. 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; therefore 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 everything 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 existence 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 conditions 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 idea involves existence. God is not an object of perception, 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 instance 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 ourselves 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. 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 ideas about things truths about reality? It is very 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 reality 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 (1685-1763) showed how contradictory it is. So simple and convincing was his criticism of the notion, that never since has material substance been put forward 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 imperceptible, 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 qualities, and apart from the qualities there is no thing. 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 paradoxes that are involved in these ordinary working ideas. Everyone is familiar with the difficulty involved in the 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 infinite 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 contradictory ideas. I shall perhaps, however, best make the meaning of this self-contradictory character of our ordinary ideas clear by following out a definite illustration. 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 movement 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 suppose a space to be fully occupied, we shall agree that nothing within that space can move without thereby displacing 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 displacement of the occupant of the new position is a prior condition of the possibility of the movement of the mover, for nothing can move unless there is an unoccupied place for it to move into, and there is no unoccupied 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-dimensional space. The space which surrounds us is occupied, and therefore we cannot move until a way is made clear 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 displacement 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 incredible supposition that the original cause or condition 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 movement 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 in moving—happened before it was caused. Now it is impossible for us to believe either of the only two alternatives—either that we do not really move but only 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 consistently 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-contradiction 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 distinguishes our actions as personal but which nevertheless is not itself these things. The self-contradiction in the idea of self, or I, or subject, is that it both cannot change and is always changing. As unchanging, we 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. 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-contradiction of such an idea is not difficult to show, quite apart from any consideration of its utter futility as an 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 indistinguishable 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 experience, whether it be an object outside of us or an object within us, of which we can say this is not a phenomenon 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 appearance, 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 concrete, 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 higher and higher individuality. The principle of individuality 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 community is an individual organic unity with a reality that is more than the mere total of the reality of individual 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 discrepancy 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 comprehensiveness, 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 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 description 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 meaning 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.
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 speculation 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 attention 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 psychological 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 verification 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 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 pragmatist 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 must already know what truth is even to be able to ask what it is—a point which many pragmatist writers 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 illusion and error. Now, as we saw in our account of 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 philosophy 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 not explain illusion and error because it does not distinguish 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 acceptance 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 Intellectualism 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 real, or like that of Hegel, who said that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual." The pragmatists apply the term intellectualist to all philosophers 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 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 reconciles illusion and error, that accepts them as a necessary condition of appearance in time, is useless in practice, however it may inspire the poet and philosopher. Truth 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 of life, not a luxury of speculation. Pragmatism therefore 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 they work they are useful and serve us, and because they work, and just in so far as they work, they are true. The pragmatist therefore declares that utility, not logical consistency, is the criterion of truth. Ideas are true in so far as they work. The discovery that they serve us is their verification. If we discover ideas that will serve us better, the old ideas that were true become 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 themselves. Each idea has arisen or been called forth by a human need. It has been formed by human nature to meet a need of human nature. It is a practical postulate 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, 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 conditions are ever calling forth new ideas, and truths become untrue. Each new idea comes forward with a claim to truth, and its claim is tested by its practicability. 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 pragmatist, or at all events the pragmatist who is also a humanist, finds no difficulty in accepting this consequence of the theory, although at the same time insisting that the whole problem, of being as well as of knowing is concerned with truth. We shall see, however, that it offers a serious difficulty to the acceptance of the theory—a theory which in very many respects agrees with ordinary practice and with scientific method. Take, for example, scientific method. Is not all progress 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 being used in its most comprehensive meaning to include every kind of practical consequence. It is the question 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 correspondingly 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 discovered what always was true, although until the discovery 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 irrelevant to any human purpose. It is also very important to add that in declaring that truth is verification, the pragmatist does not set up a purely practical or utilitarian 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 particular instance of truth and error in regard to fundamental 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 explain 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 be moving at all. The time measurement would also seem different to the observer on the shore, for while to you each moment would be measured by an equal 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 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 in 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, 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 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 Relativity for my illustration because it is based on reasoning that practically admits of no doubt, and because 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 movement 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 are constantly doing in the changing velocity of the earth's movement round the sun, is that space and time alter with the velocity. I cannot here give the argument 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 pragmatist method and the pragmatist attitude with that of scientific realism and of absolute idealism.
