THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH
From the beginning of discourse there is a subtle reality posited which
is not a thing: I mean the truth. If intuition of essence exists
anywhere without discourse, the being of truth need not be posited
there, because intuition of itself is intransitive, and having no object
other than the datum, can be neither true nor false. Every essence
picked up by intuition is equally real in its own sphere; and every
degree of articulation reached in intuition defines one of a series of
essences, each contained in or containing its neighbour, and each
equally central in that infinite progression. The central one, for
apprehension, is the one that happens to appear at that moment.
Therefore in pure intuition there is no fear of picking up the wrong
thing, as if the object were a designated existence in the natural
world; and therefore the being of truth is not broached in pure
intuition.
Truth is not broached even in pure dialectic, which is only the
apprehension of a system of essences so complex and finely articulated,
perhaps, as to tax human attention, or outrun it if unaided by some
artifice of notation, but essentially only an essence like any other.
Truth, therefore, is as irrelevant to dialectic as to merely æsthetic
intuition. Logic and mathematics are not true inherently, however cogent
or extensive. They are ideal constructions based on ideal axioms; and
the question of truth or falsity does not arise in respect to them
unless the dialectic is asserted to apply to the natural world, or
perhaps when a dispute comes up as to the precise essence signified by
some word, such as, for instance, infinity.
When men first invented language and other symbols, or fixed in
reflection the master-images of their dreams and thoughts, it seemed to
them that they were discovering parts of nature, and that even in those
developments they must be either right or wrong. There was a _true_ name
for every object, a part of its nature. There was a _true_ logic, and a
_true_ ethics, and a _true_ religion. Certainly in so far as these mixed
disciplines were assertions about alleged facts, they were either right
or wrong; but in so far as they were systems of essences, woven together
in fancy to express the instincts of the mind, they were only more or
less expressive and fortunate and harmonious, but not at all true or
false. Dialectic, though so fine-spun and sustained, is really a more
primitive, a more dream-like, exercise of intuition than are animal
faith and natural science. It is more spontaneous and less responsible,
less controlled by secondary considerations, as poetry is in contrast
with prose. If only the animals had a language, or some other fixed
symbols to develop in thought, I should be inclined to believe them the
greatest of dialecticians and the greatest of poets. But as they seem
not to speak, and there is no ground for supposing that they rehearse
their feelings reflectively in discourse, I will suppose them to be very
empty-headed when they are not very busy; but I may be doing them an
injustice. In any case their dreams would not suggest to them the being
of truth; and even their external experience may hardly do so.
It might seem, perhaps, that truth must be envisaged even by the animals
in action, when things are posited; especially as uncertainty and change
of tactics and purpose are often visible in their attitudes. Certainly
truth is there, if the thing pursued is such as the animal presumes it
to be; and in searching for it in the right quarter and finding it, he
enacts a true belief and a true perception, even if he does not realise
them spiritually. What he realises spiritually, I suppose, is the
pressure of the situation in which he finds himself, and the changes in
his object; but that his belief from moment to moment was right or wrong
he probably never notices. Truth would then not come within his purview,
nor be distinguished amongst his interests. He would want to be
successful, not to be right.
So in a man, intent experience, when not reflective, need not disclose
the being of truth. Sometimes, in a vivid dream, objects suffer a
transformation to which I eagerly adapt myself, changing my feelings and
actions with complete confidence in the new facts; and I never ask
myself which view was true, and which action appropriate. I live on in
perfect faith, never questioning the present circumstances as they
appear, nor do I follow my present policy with less assurance than I did
the opposite policy a moment before. This happens to me in dreams; but
politicians do the same thing in real life, when the lives of nations
are at stake. In general I think that the impulse of action is
translated into a belief in changed things long before it reproaches
itself with having made any error about them. The recognition of a truth
to be discerned may thus be avoided; because although a belief in things
must actually be either true or false, it is directed upon the present
existence and character of these things, not upon its own truth. The
active object posited alone interests the man of action; if he were
interested in the rightness of the action, he would not be a man of
action but a philosopher. So long as things continue to be perceived in
one form or another, and can be posited accordingly, the active impulse
is released, and the machine runs on prosperously until some hitch
comes, or some catastrophe. It is then always the things that are
supposed to have changed, not the forms of folly. Even the most pungent
disappointment, as when a man loses a bet, is not regarded otherwise
than as a misfortune. It is all the fault of the dice; they might and
ought to have turned up differently. This, I say to myself, is an
empirical world; all is novelty in it, and it is luck and free will that
are to blame. My bet was really right when I made it; there was no error
about the future then, for I acted according to the future my fancy
painted, which was the only future there was. My act was a creative act
of vitality and courage; but afterwards things accountably went wrong,
and betrayed their own promise.
I am confirmed in this surmise about the psychology of action by the
reasoning of empirical and romantic philosophers, who cling to this
instinctive attitude and deny the being of truth. No substance exists,
according to their view, but only things as they seem from moment to
moment; so that it is idle to contrast opinion with truth, seeing that
there is nothing, not even things, except in opinion. They can easily
extend this view to the future of opinion or of experience, and maintain
that the future does not exist except in expectation; and at a pinch,
although the flesh may rebel against such heroic subjectivism, they may
say that the past, too, exists only in memory, and that no other past
can be thought of or talked about; so that there is no truth, other than
current opinion, even about the past. If an opinion about the past, they
say, seems problematical when it stands alone, we need but corroborate
it by another opinion about the past in order to make it true. In other
words, though the word truth is familiar to these philosophers, the idea
of it is unintelligible to them, and absent altogether from their
apprehension of the world.
The experience which perhaps makes even the empiricist awake to the
being of truth, and brings it home to any energetic man, is the
experience of other people lying. When I am falsely accused, or when I
am represented as thinking what I do not think, I rebel against that
contradiction to my evident self-knowledge; and as the other man asserts
that the liar is myself, and a third person might very well entertain
that hypothesis and decide against me, I learn that a report may fly in
the face of the facts. There is, I then see clearly, a comprehensive
standard description for every fact, which those who report it as it
happened repeat in part, whereas on the contrary liars contradict it in
some particular. And a little further reflection may convince me that
even the liar must recognise the fact to some extent, else it would not
be _that_ fact that he was misrepresenting; and also that honest memory
and belief, even when most unimpeachable, are not exhaustive and not
themselves the standard for belief or for memory, since they are now
clearer and now vaguer, and subject to error and correction. That
standard comprehensive description of any fact which neither I nor any
man can ever wholly repeat, is the truth about it.
The being of truth thus seems to be first clearly posited in
disputation; and a consequence of this accident (for it is an accident
from the point of view of the truth itself under what circumstances men
most easily acknowledge its authority)—a consequence is that truth is
often felt to be somehow inseparable from rival opinions; so that people
say that if there was no mind and consequently no error there could be
no truth. They mean, I suppose, that nothing can be correct or incorrect
except some proposition or judgement regarding some specific fact; and
that the same constitution of the fact which renders one description
correct, renders any contradictory description erroneous. “Truth” is
often used in this abstract sense for correctness, or the quality which
all correct judgements have in common; and another word, perhaps “fact”
or “reality,” would then have to be used for that standard comprehensive
description of the object to which correct judgements conform. But a
fact is not a description of itself; and as to the word “reality,” if it
is understood to mean existence, it too cannot designate a description,
which is an essence only. Facts are transitory, and any part of
existence to which a definite judgement is addressed is transitory too;
and when they have lapsed, it is only their essence that subsists and
that, being partially recovered and assigned to them in a retrospective
judgement, can render this judgement true. Opinions are true or false by
repeating or contradicting some part of the truth about the facts which
they envisage; and this truth about the facts is the standard
comprehensive description of them—something in the realm of essence, but
more than the essence of any fact present within the limits of time and
space which that fact occupies; for a comprehensive description includes
also all the radiations of that fact—I mean, all that perspective of the
world of facts and of the realm of essence which is obtained by taking
this fact as a centre and viewing everything else only in relation with
it. The truth about any fact is therefore infinitely extended, although
it grows thinner, so to speak, as you travel from it to further and
further facts, or to less and less relevant ideas. It is the splash any
fact makes, or the penumbra it spreads, by dropping through the realm of
essence. Evidently no opinion can embrace it all, or identify itself
with it; nor can it be identified with the facts to which it relates,
since they are in flux, and it is eternal.
The word truth ought, I think, to be reserved for what everybody
spontaneously means by it: the standard comprehensive description of any
fact in all its relations. Truth is not an opinion, even an ideally true
one; because besides the limitation in scope which human opinions, at
least, can never escape, even the most complete and accurate opinion
would give precedence to some terms, and have a direction of survey; and
this direction might be changed or reversed without lapsing into error;
so that the truth is the field which various true opinions traverse in
various directions, and no opinion itself. An even more impressive
difference between truth and any true discourse is that discourse is an
event; it has a date not that of its subject-matter, even if the
subject-matter be existential and roughly contemporary; and in human
beings it is conversant almost entirely with the past only, whereas
truth is dateless and absolutely identical whether the opinions which
seek to reproduce it arise before or after the event which the truth
describes.
The eternity of truth is inherent in it: all truths—not a few grand
ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should
necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and
leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not
rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name
ought to mark its sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in
the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very
properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent
witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future,
which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so
differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like
the sun. It is not necessary to offer any evidence for this eternity of
truth, because truth is not an existence that asks to be believed in,
and that may be denied. It is an essence involved in positing any fact,
in remembering, expecting, or asserting anything; and while no truth
need be acknowledged if no existence is believed in, and none would
obtain if there was no existence in fact, yet on the hypothesis that
anything exists, truth has appeared, since this existence must have one
character rather than another, so that only one description of it in
terms of essence will be complete; and this complete description,
covering all its relations, will be the truth about it. No one who
understands what is meant by this eternal being of truth can possibly
deny it; so that no argument is required to support it, but only enough
intensity of attention to express what we already believe.
Inspired people, who are too hot to think, often identify the truth with
their own tenets, to signify by a bold hyperbole how certain they feel
in their faith; but the effect is rather that they lead foolish people,
who may see that this faith may be false, to suppose that therefore the
truth may be false also. Eternal truths, in the mouth of both parties,
are then tenets which the remotest ancestors of man are reputed to have
held, and which his remotest descendants are forbidden to abandon. Of
course there are no eternal tenets: neither the opinions of men, nor
mankind, nor anything existent can be eternal; eternity is a property of
essences only. Even if all the spirits in heaven and earth had been so
far unanimous on any point of doctrine, there is no reason, except the
monotony and inertia of nature, why their logic or religion or morals
should not change to-morrow from top to bottom, if they all suddenly
grew wiser or differently foolish.
At the risk of being scholastic I will suggest the uses to which the
word eternal and the terms akin to it might be confined if they were
made exact.
A thing that occupied but one point of physical time would be
_instantaneous_. No essence is instantaneous, because none occupies any
part of physical time or space; and I doubt whether any existence is
instantaneous either; for if the mathematicians decide that the
continuous or extended must be composed of an infinite number of
inextended and non-contiguous units, in bowing to their authority I
should retain a suspicion that nothing actual is confined to any of
these units, but that the smallest event has duration and contains an
infinite number of such units; so that one event (though not one
instant) can be contiguous to another.
A given essence containing no specious temporal progression or
perspective between its parts would be _timeless_. Colour, for instance,
or number, is timeless. The timeless often requires to be abstracted
from the total datum, because round any essence as actually given there
is an atmosphere of duration and persistence, suggesting the existential
flux of nature behind the essence. Colour seems to shine, that is, to
vibrate. Number seems to mount, and to be built up. The timeless is
therefore better illustrated in objects like laws or equations or
definitions, which though intent on things in time, select relations
amongst them which are not temporal.
A being that should have no external temporal relations and no locus in
physical time would be _dateless_. Thus every given essence and every
specious present is dateless, internally considered, and taken
transcendentally, that is, as a station for viewing other things or a
unit framing them in. Though dateless, the specious present is not
timeless, and an instant, though timeless, is not dateless.
Whatsoever, having once arisen, never perishes, would be _immortal_. I
believe there is nothing immortal.
Whatsoever exists through a time infinite in both directions is
_everlasting_. Matter, time, the life of God, souls as Plato conceived
them, and the laws of nature are commonly believed to be everlasting. In
the nature of the case this can be only a presumption.
That which without existing is contemporary with all times is _eternal_.
Truth is dateless and eternal, but not timeless, because, being
descriptive of existence, it is a picture of change. It is frozen
history. As Plato said that time was a moving image of eternity, we
might say that eternity was a synthetic image of time. But it is much
more than that, because, besides the description of all temporal things
in their temporal relations, it contains everything that is not temporal
at all; in other words, the whole realm of essence, as well as the whole
realm of truth.