When one says even the perfectly commonplace thing that not all assertions are equally true, that is, that not all of them agree with the objects with which they mean to agree, he really makes an assumption upon which all thinking, all controversy, all the postulates that we previously studied, all science, all morality depend; and, as we maintain, this assump¬ tion is: That the agreement or the disagreement of his judgments with their intended objects exists and has meaning for an actual thought, a con¬ sciousness, to which both these related terms are present, namely, both the judgment and the object wherewith it is to agree. So that, if my thought has objects outside of it with which it can agree or disagree, those objects and that agreement can have meaning, can be possible, only if there is a thought that includes both my thought and the object where¬ with my thought is to agree. This inclusive thought must be related to my thought and its objects, as my thought is related to the various partial thoughts that it includes and reduces to unity in any one of my complex assertions. For only by some such unity as this can this higher thought compare my judgment with its object, and so constitute the relation that is implied in the truth or in the error of my thought. So, in the commonplace assump¬ tion that a statement of mine can agree or can fail to agree with its real object, when this object is wholly outside my thought, in this assumption, with¬ out which you can make no rational statement, is contained implicitly the assumption that all reality, spiritual and material, is present in its true nature to an all-embracing, intelligent thought, of which mine is simply one subordinate part or element. In truth, as we shall come to see, regarded in itself, my mind can be concerned only with its own ideas. That is the view of all so-called subjective idealism.
But if my mind can be concerned only with its own ideas, then sincerity and truth are identical, truth and error will be alike impossible. What I talk about will be my ideas; their objects will be them¬ selves other ideas of mine, and meaning only these ideas when I make assertions, I cannot fail to make correct assertions about these, the objects that I mean. But thus controversy, progress towards truth, failure to get truth, error, refutation, yes, doubt itself, will all cease to have any meaning whatsoever. But if my thought is related to a higher thought, even as the parts of one of my thoughts are related to the whole thought, then truth and error, as objective truth and objective error, are possible, since my thought and its object, both as I think this object and as it is, are together in the universal thought, of which they form ele¬ ments, and in which they live and move and have their being. As my thoughts have a unity more or less complete in themselves, so all thoughts and ob¬ jects must be postulated as in unity in that thought for which is the whole imi verse. As I can say to myself with solely subjective truth, This line that I mentally picture is in truth shorter for me than that, and to say otherwise is to speak falsely / even so my statement, All straight lines are in all cases shortest lines between their extremities, is true ob¬ jectively, and its contradictory false only in case both the world of possible straight lines and my thoughts about this world are known to a higher thought, are in fact members of a higher thought, which, comparing what I cannot compare, making a synthesis of what is to me separate, unifying what is for me diverse, finds my thought really true or false.
This is the barest outline of a proof by which, in the next chapter, we shall try to reach the position which some call absolute or objective idealism. W e shall find this theory as just set forth a necessary assumption, which we shall make because we want to think clearly, and because we find nothing else that even suggests an answer to the critical questions that trouble us as to the nature of thought. We shall not substitute this conception of reality for the scientific conception. On the contrary, this conception will merely undertake, presupposing the scien¬ tific spirit, to include the scientific conception of the world in one that will, as a whole, better satisfy the needs of this scientific spirit itself. Our theory will give us no a 'priori account of facts of expe¬ rience, but a theory of that which makes experience, as a whole, possible. This theory, which we offer as the one rational account of the nature of truth, is the doctrine that the world is in and for a thought, all-embracing, all-knowing, universal, for which are all relations and all truth, a thought that estimates perfectly our imperfect and halting thoughts, a thought in which and for which are we all. No other view, as we shall affirm, offers any chance of a philosophy, nor any hope of even a rational sci¬ entific notion of things.
The reader may be impatient to see, in detail, the argument by which we undertake to establish such a thesis as the foregoing. Of that argument he shall get enough in another chapter. But we ask him to wait yet a moment, while we hint to him the conse¬ quences, for our religious theory, that will flow from our hypothesis when we have got it more certainly in our minds.
The ambiguous relation of the conscious individ¬ uals to the universal thought in the foregoing first statement of our idealism, will be decided in the sense of their inclusion, as elements, in the universal thought. They will indeed not become “ things in the dream” of any other person than themselves, hut their whole reality, just exactly as it is in them, will be found to be but a fragment of a higher reality. This reality will be no Power, nor will it produce the individuals by dreaming of them, but it will complete the existence that in them, as sep¬ arate beings, has no rational completeness. This will be our first result.
Then will follow other thoughts. In so far as there is any objective truth in moral conceptions, this truth is eternally known to this all-embracing thought. If there be moral or immoral acts, they are forever known and judged in and by this allembracing conscious thought. And thus we shall have found Job’s longed-for, perfect, all -knowing judge. “ He knoweth the way that I take.” Here is an absolute estimate, objectively present in the world, an estimate of all your good and evil deeds. You are a part cf the universal life. Your thoughts are parts of the whole. Your acts form an element in the universe that the great Judge knows. All of you then is known and justly estimated by the ab¬ solute thought that embraces all possible truth, and for whom are all relations, present, past, and future of all possible beings, acts, and thoughts in all places. If there be any virtue, this virtue is known to the infinite thought of the universe. If there be any vice, that vice is estimated, in all its infinite base¬ ness, by the infinite consciousness. Inasmuch as ye do good unto the least of these, ye do it with the universal consciousness as onlooker; your work is all accomplished in the presence of the Absolute.
With this truth before us, we shall be ready to leave unsolved our problems about this or that Power, about this or that future state, about the fallen angels, or about the historical justification of God’s ways. The world of Divine Life will be in deepest truth not a Power at all, but the Infinite Knowing One, for whom are all the powers, but who is above them all, beyond them all, — no striving good principle that cannot get realized in a wicked world, but an absolute J udge that perfectly estimates the world. In the contemplation of this truth we may find a religious comfort.
And then, by all this, we shall make the postu¬ lates of our previous chapter appear in a new light. The postulates, we said, express the conditions under which we are determined to do our work. They are expressions of the spirit of courageous devotion to the highest. They find and can find no perfect verification in experience. They dwell in part on the unseen. But they do not resist verifi¬ cation, if any can be offered from a higher source. But this, our new doctrine, if we truly get to it, will offer them their higher verification. Their office will not thereby be vacated or abolished. They will forever remain the maxims of our work. But they will no longer be just leaps in the dark. We shall see that when science assumes rationality, and religion assumes goodness, as at the heart of things, they have neither of them acted vainly. W e shall then have reason to go on assuming both, and to regulate our lives accordingly. Faith of some sort will continue to be our meat and drink; but it will be faith with a philosophical foundation.
The reader will pardon us for having detained him so long in the study of idealism as a bare postulate, when we have a more serious doctrine behind. The inveterate prejudices and misunderstandings to which idealistic theories fall prey, furnish our excuse for trying to reconcile ourselves to an imperfect form of idealism as a mere postulate, before going on to set forth an absolute idealism as a demonstrable theory.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XI.
On ne sert dignement la philosophie qu’avec le meme feu qu’on sent pour une maitresse. — Rousseau, Nouvelle Heloise.
We have before us our theorem, and an outline of its proof. We are here to expand this argument. We have some notion of the magnitude of the is¬ sues that are at stake. We had found ourselves baffled in our search for a certainty by numerous difficulties. We had found only one way remaining so far quite clear. That was the way of postulat¬ ing what the moral consciousness seems to demand about the world beyond experience. For many thinkers since Kant, that way has seemed in fact the only one. They live in a world of action. “ Doubt,” they say, “ clouds all theory. One must act as if the world were the supporter of our moral demands. One must have faith. One must make the grand effort, one must risk all for the sake of the great prize. If the world is against us, still we will not admit the fact until we are crushed. If the cold reality cares naught for our moral efforts, so be it when we come to know the fact, but meanwhile we will act as if legions of angels were ready to sup¬ port our demand for whatever not our selfish inter¬ est, but the great interest of the Good, requires.”
Such is the view of the men whose religion is founded upon a Postulate.
We, too, felt that such faith is religious. We were willing to accept it, if nothing better could be found. But we were not content with it. Life has its unheroic days, when mere postulates fail us. At such times we grow weary of toiling, evil seems ac¬ tually triumphant, and, worse than all, the sense that there really is any perfect goodness yet unat¬ tained, that there is any worth or reason in our fight for goodness, seems to desert us. And then it will indeed be well if we can get for ourselves some¬ thing more and better than mere postulates. If we cannot, we shall not seek to hide the fact. Better eternal despondency than a deliberate lie about our deepest thoughts and their meaning. If we are not honest, at least in our philosophy, then are we wholly base. To try once more is not dishonest.
So we did make the effort, and, in the last chap¬ ter, we sketched a result that seemed nearly within our reach. An unexpected result this, because it springs from the very heart of skepticism itself. We doubted to the last extremity. We let every¬ thing go, and then all of a sudden we seemed to find that we could not lose one priceless treasure, try as we would. Our wildest doubt assumed this, namely, that error is possible. And so our wildest doubt as¬ sumed the actual existence of those conditions that make error possible. The conditions that determine the logical possibility of error must themselves be absolute truth, that was the treasure that remained to us amid all our doubts. And how rich that treasure is, we dimly saw in the last discussion. That dim insight we must now try to make clearer. Per¬ haps our previous discussion has shown us that the effort is worth making.
Yet of one thing the reader shall be warned. The path that we travel is hereabouts very thorny and stony. It is a path of difficult philosophical inves¬ tigation. Nobody ought to follow it who does not desire to. We hope that the reader will skip the whole of this chapter unless he wants to find even more of dullness than the rest of this sleepy book has discovered to him. For us, too, the arid way would seem hard, were it not for the precious prize at the end of it.
I.
I.
The story of the following investigation shall first be very briefly told. The author had long sought, es¬ pecially in the discussions of Kant’s “ Kritik,” and in the books of the post-Kantians, for help in see¬ ing the ultimate principles that lie at the basis of knowledge. He had found the old and well-known troubles. Experience of itself can give no certainty about general principles. We must therefore, said Kant, bring our own principles with us to experi¬ ence. We know then of causation, because causa¬ tion is a fundamental principle of our thought, whereby we set our experience to rights. And so long as we think, we shall think into experience the connection of cause and effect, which otherwise would not be there. But hereupon the questions arose that have so often been asked of Kant and the Kantians Why just these principles and no others? “ That is inexplicable,” replies Kant. Very well, then, suppose we give up applying to experience those ar¬ bitrary principles of ours. Suppose we choose to stop thinking of experience as causally connected. What then? “But you cannot stop,” says Kant, “ Your thought, being what it is, must follow this one fashion forever.” Nay, we reply, how knowest thou that, Master? Why may not our thought get a new fashion some day? And then what is now a necessary principle, for example, that every event has a cause, would become unnecessary or even non¬ sensical. Do we then know a priori that our a priori principles must always remain such? If so, how come we by this new knowledge?
So Kant leaves us still uncertain about any fun¬ damental principles upon which a sure knowledge of the world can be founded.
Let us, then, examine a little deeper. Are there any certain judgments possible at all? If one is skeptical in a thorough - going way, as the aut or tried to be, he is apt to reach, through an effort to revise Kant’s view, a position something like the fol¬ lowing,— a provisional position of course, but one that results from the effort to accept nothing with¬ out criticism: “ Kant’s result is that our judgments about the real world are founded on an union ot thought and sense, thought giving the appearance o necessity to our judgment, sense giving the materia. The necessity of any judgment amounts then on y o what may be summed up in the words: So the pres¬ ent union of thought and sense makes things opr pear. If either thought or sense altered its charac¬ ter, truth would alter. Hence every sincere judg¬ ment is indeed true for the moment in which it is made, but not necessarily true for other moments. We only postulate that it is true for other moments.’ ” “ And so,” to continue this view, “it is only by means of postulates that our thought even seems to have any unity from moment to moment. We live in the present. If our thought has other truth or falsity than this, we do not know it. Past and fu¬ ture exist not for this present. They are only pos¬ tulated. Save as postulated, they have no present meaning.”
When he held and expressed this view, the author is free to admit that he was not always clear whether he ought to call it the doctrine of the relativity of truth or not. It might have avoided the absurdities of total relativity by taking form as a doctrine that the present moment’s judgment is really true or false, for a real past and future, but that we, being limited to present moments, can never compare our judgments with reality to find whether our judg¬ ments are true or false. But although this inter¬ pretation is possible, this view often did express it¬ self for the author as the doctrine of the total rela¬ tivity of truth. The latter doctrine to be sure has no real meaning, but the author used with many others to fancy that it had.
To apply the view to the case of causal relations. “We continually postulate,” the author used to point out, “ we demand, without being able to prove it, that nature in future shall be uniform.” * So, carrying out this thought, the author used to say: u In fact future nature is not given to us, just as the past is not given to us. Sense-data and thought unite at every instant afresh to form a new judgment and a new postulate. Only in the present has any judgment evident validity. And our postulate of causal relation is just a way of looking at this world of conceived past and future data. Such postulates avoid being absurd efforts to regulate independent facts of sense, because, and only because, we have in experience no complete series of facts of sense at all, only from moment to moment single facts, about which we make single judgments. All the rest we must postulate or else do without them.” Thus one reaches a skepticism as nearly complete as is pos¬ sible to any one with earnest activity of thought in him. From moment to moment one can be sure of each moment. All else is postulate.
From the depths of this imperfectly defined skep¬ ticism, which seemed to him provisionally the only view he could adopt, the author escaped only by ask¬ ing the one question more: “ If everything beyond the present is doubtful, then how can even that doubt be possible? ” With this question that bare relativ¬ ity of the present moment is given up. What are the conditions that make doubt logically intelligible? These conditions really transcend the present mo¬ ment. Plainly doubt implies that the statement doubted may be false. So here we have at least one supposed general truth, namely, “ All but the im¬ mediate content of the present moment’s judgment, being doubtful, we may be in error about it.” But what then is an error t This becomes at once a problem of exciting interest. Attacking it, the au¬ thor was led through the wilderness of the following argument.
II.
II.
Yet before we undertake this special examination of the nature of error, the reader must pardon us for adding yet another explanatory word. The diffi¬ culty of the whole discussion will lie in the fact that we shall be studying the possibility of the plainest and most familiar of commonplaces. Common sense hates to do such things, because common sense thinks that the whole matter is sure from the outset. Com¬ mon sense is willing to ask whether God exists, but unwilling to inquire how it is possible that there can exist an error about anything. But foreseeing that something is to follow from all this, we must beg common sense to be patient. We have not the shadow of doubt ourselves about the possibility of error. That is the steadfast rock on which we build. Our inquiry, ultra-skeptical as it may at moments seem, is into the question: How is the error possi¬ ble? Or, in other words: What is an error t Now there can be little doubt that common sense is not ready with any general answer to such a question. Error is a word with many senses. By error we often mean just a statement that arouses our antipa¬ thy. Yet we all admit upon reflection, that our an¬ tipathy can neither make nor be used to define real error. Adam Smith declares, with common sense on his side, in his “ Theory of the Moral Sentiments,” J 1 Part L, sect, i., chap, iii., near the beginning.
that: “ To approve or disapprove of the opinions of others is acknowledged, by everybody, to mean no more than to observe their agreement or disagree¬ ment with our own.” Yet no one would accept as a definition of error the statement that: Error is any opinion that I personally do not like. Error has thus a very puzzling character. For common sense will readily admit that if a statement is erroneous, it must appear erroneous to every “ right mind ” that is in possession of the facts. Hence the personal taste of one man is not enough to define it. Else there might be as many sorts of error as there are minds. It is only the “ right mind ” whose personal taste shall decide what is an error in any particular case. But what then is a normal mind? Who is the right-minded judge? There seems to be danger that common sense shall run at this point into an infinite regress. I say: That opinion is an error. What do I mean? Do I mean that I do not like that opinion? Nay, I mean more. I mean that I ought not to like or to accept it. Why ought I not? Be¬ cause the ideally right-minded person would not, seeing the given facts, hold that opinion about them. But who is the ideally right-minded person? W ell, common sense may answer, It is my ideal person, the right-minded man as I conceive him. But why is my ideal the true ideal? Because I like it? Nay, because, to the ideal judge, that kind of mind would seem the ideal. But who is the ideal judge?
And so common sense is driven from point to point, unable to get to anything definite.
So much, then, to show in general that common sense does not know what an error is, and needs more light upon the subject. Let common sense not disturb us, then, in our further search, by the con¬ stant and indignant protest that error must some¬ how exist, and that doubt on that subject is nonsense. Nobody has any doubts on that subject. We ask only how error exists and how it can exist.
For the rest, what follows is not any effort to demonstrate in fair and orderly array, from any one principle or axiom, what must be the nature of er¬ ror, but to use every and any device that may offer itself, general analysis, special example, comparison and contrast of cases, — anything that shall lead us to the insight into what an error is and implies. For at last, immediate insight must decide.
We shall study our problem thus. We shall take either some accepted definition of error, or some special class of cases, and we shall ask: How is error in that case, or in accordance with that defi¬ nition, possible? Since error plainly is possible in some way, we shall have only to inquire: What are the logical conditions that make it possible? We shall take up the ordinary suppositions that com¬ mon sense seems to make about what here deter¬ mines the possibility of error. We shall show that these suppositions are inadequate. Then the result will be that, on the ordinary suppositions, error would be impossible. But that result would be absurd, if these were the only possible suppositions. Hence the ordinary suppositions must somehow be supplemented. When, therefore, we seem to say iii the following that error is impossible, we shall mean only, impossible under the ordinary suppositions of common sense. What supplement we need to these suppositions, our argument will show us. In sum we shall find the state of the case to be this: Com¬ mon sense regards an assertion as true or as false apart from any other assertion or thought, and solely in reference to its own object. For common sense each judgment, as a separate creation, stands out alone, looking at its object, and trying to agree with it. If it succeeds, we have truth. If the judgment fails, we have error. But, as we shall find, this view of common sense is unintelligible. A judgment can¬ not have an object and fail to agree therewith, un¬ less this judgment is part of an organism of thought. Alone, as a separate fact, a judgment has no intelli¬ gible object beyond itself. And therefore the pre¬ suppositions of common sense must be supplemented or else abandoned. Either then there is no error, or else judgments are true or false only in reference to a higher inclusive thought, which they presuppose, and which must, in the last analysis, be assumed as Infinite and all-inclusive. This result we shall reach by no mystical insight, by no revelation, nor yet by any mere postulate such as we used in former dis¬ cussions, but by a simple, dry analysis of the mean¬ ing of our own thought.
The most formidable opponent of our argument will be, after all, however, not common sense, but that thought mentioned in the last chapter, — the thought that may try to content itself with some¬ what plausible jargon, and to say that: “ There is no real difference between truth and error at all, only a kind of opinion or consensus of men about a conventional distinction between what they choose to call truth and what they choose to call error." This view, as the author has confessed, he once tried to hold. Still this meaningless doctrine of relativ¬ ity is not the same as the view that contents itself with the postulates before discussed. That view might take, and for the author at one time did take, the possible and intelligible form thus expressible: “ Truth and error, though really distinguishable, are for us distinguished only through our postu¬ lates, in so far as relates to past and future time" Such views, while not denying that there is real truth, despair of the attainability for us of more than momentary truth. But the doctrine of Total Rela¬ tivity, this view above expressed, differs from gen¬ uine skepticism. It tries to put even skepticism to rest, by declaring the opinion, that there is error, to be itself an error. This is not merely a moderate expression of human limitations, but jargon, and therefore formidable, because jargon is always unan¬ swerable. When the famous Cretan declared all statements made by Cretans to be in all cases lies, his declaration was hard to refute, because it was such honest - seeming nonsense. Even so with the statement that declares the very existence of error to be an erroneously believed fancy. No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already. If our skeptical view in previous chapters seemed to regard truth and error as mere objects of our postulates, that was only because, to our skepticism, the real truth, the real error, about any real past and future, seemed beyond our reach, so that we had to content ourselves with postulates. But that real error exists is absolutely indubitable.
This being the case, it is evident that even the most thorough-going skepticism is full of assump¬ tions. If I say, “ There may be no money in that purse yonder,” I assume the existence of the purse yonder in order to make just that particular doubt possible. Of course, however, just that doubt may be rendered meaningless by the discovery of the actual non-existence of that particular purse. If there is no purse yonder, then it is nonsensical either to affirm or to deny that it contains money. And so if the purse of which I speak is an hallucination of mine, then the doubt about whether, as an actu¬ ally existent purse, it has money in it, is deprived of sense. My real error in that case would lie in supposing the purse itself to exist. If, however, I abandon the first doubt, and go on to doubt the real existence of the purse, I equally assume a room, or some other environment, or at all events the universe, as existent, in order to give sense to my question whether the purse has any being in this environment or in this universe. But if I go yet further, and doubt whether there is any universe at all outside of my thought, what does my doubt yet mean? If it is to be a doubt with any real sense, it must be a doubt still with an object before it. It seems then to imply an assumed order of being, in which there are at least two elements, my lonely thought about an universe, and an empty environment of this thought, in which there is, in fact, no universe. But this empty environment, whose nature is such that my thought does wrong to suppose it to be an universe, what is that? Surely if the doubt is to have meaning, this idea needs further examination. The absolute skepticism is thus full of assumptions.
The first European thinker who seems to have discussed our present problem was Plato, in a toomuch-neglected passage of the “ Theaetetus,” 1 where Socrates, replying to the second definition of knowl¬ edge given by Theaetetus, namely, knowledge is True Opinion, answers that his great difficulty has often been to see how any opinion can possibly be false. The conclusion reached by Plato is no very definite one, but the discussion is deeply suggestive. And we cannot do better here than to pray that the shade of the mighty Greek may deign to save us now in our distress, and to show us the true nature of error.
III.
Logicians are agreed that single ideas, thoughts