viewed apart from judgments, are neither true nor false. Only a judgment can be false. And if a reasoning process is said to be false, the real error lies still in an actual or suppressed assertion. A fallacy is a false assertion that a certain conclusion follows from certain premises. Error is therefore generally defined as a judgment that does not agree with its object. In the erroneous judgment, subject and predicate are so combined as, in the object, the corresponding elements are not combined. And thus the judgment comes to be false. Now, in this definition, nothing is doubtful or obscure save the one thing, uamely, the assumed relation between the judgment and its object. The definition assumes as quite clear that a judgment has an object, wherewith it can agree or not agree. And what is meant by the agreement would not be obscure, if we could see what is meant by the object, and by the possession of this object implied in the pronoun its. What then is meant by its object? The difficulties involved in this phrase begin to appear as soon as you look closer. First then the object of the assertion is as such supposed to be neither the subject nor the pred¬ icate thereof. It is external to the judgment. It has a nature of its own. Furthermore, not all judg¬ ments have the same object, so that objects are very numerous. But from the infinity of real or of pos¬ sible objects the judgment somehow picks out its own. Thus then for a judgment to have an object, there must be something about the judgment that shows what one of the external objects that are be¬ yond itself this judgment does pick out as its own.
But this something that gives the judgment its ob¬ ject can only be the intention wherewith the judg¬ ment is accompanied. A judgment has as object only what it intends to have as object. It has to conform only to that to which it wants to conform. But the essence of an intention is the knowledge of what one intends. One can, for instance, intend a deed or any of its consequences only in so far as he foresees them. I cannot be said to intend the acci¬ dental or the remote or even the immediate conse¬ quences of anything that I do, unless I foresaw that they would follow; and this is true however much the lawyers and judges may find it practically neces¬ sary to hold me responsible for these consequences. Even so we all find it practically useful to regard one of our fellows as in error in case his assertions, as we understand them, seem to us to lead to conse¬ quences that we do not approve. But our criticisms of his opinions, just like legal judgments of his acts, are not intended to be exact. Common sense will admit that, unless a man is thinking of the object of which I suppose him to be thinking, he makes no real error by merely failing to agree with the object that I have in mind. If the knights in the fable judge each other to be wrong, that is because each knight takes the other’s shield to be identical with the shield as he himself has it in mind. In fact neither of them is in error, unless his assertion is false for the shield as he intended to make it his object.
So then judgments err only by disagreeing with their intended objects, and they can intend an object only in so far forth as this object is known to the thought that makes the judgment. Such, it would seem, is the consequence of the common-sense view. But in this case a judgment can be in error only if it is knowingly in error. That also, as it seems, follows from the common-sense suppositions. Or, if we will have it in syllogistic form: — Everything intended is something known. The object even of an erroneous judgment is intended.
The object even of an error is something known.
Or: Only what is known can be erred about. Nor can we yet be content with what common sense will at once reply, namely, that our syllogism uses known ambiguously, and that the object of an erro¬ neous judgment is known enough to constitute it the object, and not enough to prevent the error about it. This must no doubt be the fact, but it is not of itself clear; on the contrary, just here is the problem. As common sense conceives the matter, the object of a judgment is not as such the whole outside world of common sense, with all its intimate interdependence of facts, with all its unity in the midst of diversity.
On the contrary, the object of any judgment is just that portion of the then conceived world, just that fragment, that aspect, that element of a supposed reality, which is seized upon for the purposes of just this judgment. Only such a momentarily grasped fragment of the truth can possibly be present in any one moment of thought as the object of a single as¬ sertion. Now it is hard to say how within this arbi¬ trarily chosen fragment itself there can still be room for the partial knowledge that is sufficient to give to the judgment its object, but insufficient to secure to the judgment its accuracy. If I aim at a mark with my gun, I can fail to hit it, because choosing and hitting a mark are totally distinct acts. But, in the judgment, choosing and knowing the object seem in¬ separable. No doubt somehow our difficulty is solu¬ ble, but we are here trying first to show that it is a difficulty.
400 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OP PHILOSOPHY To illustrate here by a fafniliar case, when we speak of things that are solely matters of personal preference, such as the pleasure of a sleigh-ride, the taste of olives, or the comfort of a given room, and when we only try to tell how these things appear to us, then plainly our judgments, if sincere, cannot be in error. As these things are to us, so they are. We are their measure. To doubt our truthfulness in these cases is to doubt after the fashion of the student who wondered whether the star that the as¬ tronomers call Uranus may not be something else after all, and not really Uranus. Surely science does not progress very far or run into great danger of error so long as it employs itself in discovering such occult mysteries as the names of the stars. But our present question is, How do judgments that can be and that are erroneous differ in nature from these that cannot be erroneous? If astronomers would be equally right in case they should agree to call Ura¬ nus Humpty Dumpty, why are not all judgments equally favored? Since the judgment chooses its own object, and has it only in so far as it chooses it, how can it be in that partial relation to its object which is implied in the supposition of an erroneous assertion?
Yet again, to illustrate the difficulty in another aspect, we can note that not only is error impossible about the perfectly well-known, but that error is equally impossible, save in the form of direct selfcontradiction, about what is absolutely unknown. Spite of the religious awe of some people in t pres¬ ence of the Unknowable, it is safe to say, somewhat irreverently, that about a really Unknowable nobody could make any sincere and self-consistent assertions that could be errors. For self-consistent assertions about the Unknowable would of necessity be mean¬ ingless. And being meaningless, they could not well be false. For instance, one could indeed not say that the Unknowable contemplates war with France, or makes sunspots, or will be the next Presidential candidate, because that would be contradicting one’s self. For if the Unknowable did any of these things, it would no longer be the Unknowable, but would become either the known or the discoverable. But avoid such self - contradiction, and you cannot err about the Unknowable. For the Unknowable is sim¬ ply our old friend Abracadabra, a word that has no meaning, and by hypothesis never can get any. So if T say that the Unknowable dines in vacuo with the chimera, or is Humpty Dumpty, I talk nonsense, and am therefore unable to make a mistake. Non¬ sense is error only when it involves self-contradiction. Avoid that, and nonsense cannot blunder, having no object outside of itself with which it must agree.
But all this illustrates from the other side our diffi¬ culty. Is not the object of a judgment, in so far as it is unknown to that judgment, like the Unknowables for that judgment? To be in error about the application of a symbol, you must have a symbol that symbolizes something. But in so far as the thing symbolized is not known through the symbol, how is it symbolized by that symbol? Is it not, like the Unknowable, once for all out of the thought, so that one cannot just then be thinking about it at all, and so cannot, in this thought at least, be making blun¬ ders about it? But in so far as the thing symbolized is, through the symbol, in one’s thought, why is it not known, and so correctly judged? All this in¬ volves that old question of the nature of symbols. They are to mean for us more than we know that they mean. How can that be? No doubt all that is really possible, but how?
IV.
We follow our difficulty into another department. Let us attempt a sort of provisional psychological description of a judgment as a state of mind. So regarded, a judgment is simply a fact that occurs in somebody’s thought. If we try to describe it as an occurrence, without asking whence it came, we shall perhaps find in it three elements, — elements which are in some fashion described in Ueberweg’s wellknown definition of a judgment as the “ Conscious¬ ness about the objective validity of a subjective union of ideas.” Our interpretation of them shall be this: The elements are: The Stibject, with the ac¬ companying shade of curiosity about it; the Pred¬ icate, with the accompanying sense of its worth in satisfying a part of our curiosity about the subject; and the Sense of Dependence, whereby we feel the value of this act to lie, not in itself, but in its agree¬ ment with a vaguely felt Beyond, that stands out there as Object.
Now this analysis of the elements of a judgment is no explanation of our difficulties; and in fact for the moment only embarrasses us more. But the na¬ ture of the difficulty may come home to us somewhat more clearly, if we try to follow the thread of this analysis a little further. Even if it is a very imper¬ fect account, it may serve to lead us up to the true insight that we seek into the nature of error. Let us make the analysis a little more detailed.
In its typical form then, the judgment as a mental state seems to us to begin with a relatively incom¬ plete or unstable or disconnected mass of conscious¬ ness, which we have called the Subject, as it first be¬ gins to be present to us. This subject-idea is at¬ tended by some degree of effort, namely, of atten¬ tion, whose tendency is to complete this incomplete subject by bringing it into closer connection with more familiar mental life. This more familiar life is represented by the predicate-idea. If the effort is successful, the subject has new elements united to it, assumes in consciousness a definiteness, a coherency with other states, a familiarity, which it lacked at the outset of the act of judgment; and this coherency it gets through its union with the predicate. All this is accompanied further by what one for short may call a sense of dependence. The judgment feels it¬ self not alone, but looks to a somewhat indefinite ob¬ ject as the model after which the present union of ideas is to be fashioned. And in this way we ex¬ plain how the judgment is, in those words of Ueberweg’s definition, “ the consciousness about the objec¬ tive validity of a subjective union of ideas.
Now as a mere completion of subject-idea through the addition of a predicate-idea, the judgment is simply a mental phenomenon, having interest only to the person that experiences it, and to a psychologist. But as true or as false the judgment must be viewed in respect to the indefinite object of what we have called the sense of dependence, whereby the judg¬ ment is accompanied. Seldom in any ordinary judg¬ ment does this object become perfectly full and clear; for to make it so would often require many, perhaps an infinite, series of judgments. Yet, for the one judgment, the object, whether full and clear or not, exists as object only in so far forth as the sense of dependence has defined it. And the judgment is true or false only with reference to this undefined ob¬ ject. The intention to agree with the object is con¬ tained in the sense of dependence upon the object, and remains for this judgment incomplete, like the object itself. Somewhat vaguely this single act in¬ tends to agree with this vague object.
Such being the case, how can the judgment, as thus described, fairly be called false? As mere psy¬ chological combination of ideas it is neither true nor false. As accompanied by the sense of dependence upon an object, it would be false if it disagreed with its imperfectly defined object. But, as described, the only object that the judgment has is this imper¬ fectly defined one. With this, in so far as it is for the moment defined, the judgment must needs agree. In so far as it is not defined, it is however not object for this judgment at all, but for some other one. What the imperfect sense of dependence would fur¬ ther imply if it existed in a complete instead pf in an incomplete state, nobody can tell, any more than one can tell what towns would grow up by a given rain-pool, if it were no pool, but a great lake. The object of a single judgment, being what it is, namely, a vaguely defined object, present to this judgment, is just what it is for this judgment, and the judgment seems once for all to be true, in case it is sincere.
Some one may here at once answer that we neg¬ lect in this description the close interdependence of various judgments. Thought, some one may say, is an organic unity. Separated from all else but its own incompletely defined object, a single judgment cannot be erroneous. Only in the organic unity of a series of judgments, having a common object, is the error of one of them possible. W e reply that all this will turn out to be just our result. But the usual supposition at the outset is that any judgment has by itself its own object, so that thereby alone, apart from other judgments, it stands or falls. And thus far we have tried to show that this natural sup¬ position leads us into difficulty. We cannot see how a single sincere judgment should possibly fail to agree with its own chosen object. But enough of our problem in general. We must consider certain classes of errors more in detail. Let us see how, in these special classes of cases, we shall succeed in ver¬ ifying the natural presupposition of common sense, which regards error as possible only when our object is not wholly present to mind, and which assumes that a judgment can have an object that is yet only partially present to mind. In choosing the classes of cases, we shall first follow common sense as to their definition. We shall take just the assumptions of daily life, and shall show that they lead us into diffi¬ culty. We are not for the first bound to explain why these assumptions are made. That common sense makes them is enough.
But let the reader remember: The whole value of our argument lies in its perfect generality. How¬ ever much we dwell on particular classes of errors, we care nothing for the proof that just those errors are inexplicable, but only for the fact that they il¬ lustrate how, without some entirely new hypothesis, absolutely all error becomes impossible. This or that class of judgments may be one in which all the judgments are relative, but the total relativity of our thought implies an incomprehensible and contra¬ dictory state of things. Any hypothesis about error that makes total relativity the only admissible view, must therefore give place to some new hypothesis. And our illustrations in the following are intended to show that just what constitutes the difficulty in respect of these illustrations, makes the existence of any error inexplicable without some new hypothesis.
y.
The class of errors that we shall first take seems, to common sense, common enough. It is the class known as errors about our neighbor’s states of mind. Let us then, for argument’s sake, assume without proof that our neighbors do exist. For we are not here concerned to answer Solipsism, but merely to exemplify the difficulties about the nature of error. If our neighbors did not exist, then the nature of the error that would lie in saying that they do exist would present almost exactly the same difficulties. W e prefer, however, to begin with the common-sense assumption about ourselves and our neighbors as separate individuals, and to ask how error can then arise in judging of our neighbors’ minds.
In the first place then: Who is my neighbor? Surely, on the assumptions that we all make, and that we made all through the ethical part of our dis¬ cussion, he is no one of my thoughts, nor is any part of him ever any part of my thought. He is not my object, but, in Professor Clifford’s phrase, an “ eject,” wholly outside of my ideas. He is no “ thing in my dream,” just as I am not in his dream.
Yet I make judgments about him, and he makes them about me. And when I make judgments about him, I do so by having in my thought some set of my own ideas that, although not himself, do yet, as I say, represent him. A kind of dummy, a symbol, a graven image of my own thought s creation, a phan¬ tom of mine, stands there in me as the representa¬ tive of his mind; and all I say about my neighbor’s inner life refers directly to this representative. The Scottish philosophy has had much to say to the world about what it calls direct or presentative, as opposed to representative, knowledge of objects. But surely the most obstinate Scottish philosopher that ever ate oatmeal cannot hold so tenaciously by his national doctrine as to say that I have, according to common sense, anything but a representative knowledge of my neighbor’s thoughts and feelings. That is the only sort of knowledge that common sense will regard as possible to me, if so much as that is possible. But how I can know about this outside being is not now our concern. We notice only that our difficulty about error conies back to us in a new form. For how can I err about my neighbor, since, for this com¬ mon-sense view, he is not even partly in my thoughts? How can I intend that as the object of my thought which never can be object for me at all?
But not everybody will at once feel the force of this question. We must be more explicit. Let us take the now so familiar suggestion of our great hu¬ morist about the six people that take part in every conversation between two persons. If John and Thomas are talking together, then the real John and Thomas, their respective ideas of themselves, and their ideas of each other, are all parties to the con¬ versation. Let us consider four of these persons, namely, the real John, the real Thomas, John as Thomas conceives him, and Thomas as John con¬ ceives him. When John judges, of whom does he think? Plainly of that which can be an object to his thoughts, namely, of his Thomas. About whom then can he err? About his Thomas? No, for he knows him too well. His conception of Thomas is his conception, and what he asserts it to be, that it is for him. About the real Thomas? No, for it should seem, according to common sense, that he has nothing to do with the real Thomas in his thought, since that Thomas never becomes any part of his thought at all. u But,” says one, “ there must be some fallacy here, since we are sure that John can err about the real Thomas.” Indeed he can, say we; but ours is not this fallacy. Common sense has made it. Common sense has said: “ Thomas never is in John’s thought, and yet John can blunder about Thomas.” How shall we unravel the knot?
One way suggests itself. Mayhap we have been too narrow in our definition of object. Common sense surely insists that objects axe outside of our thought. If, then, I have a judgment, and another being sees both my judgment and some outside ob¬ ject that was not in my thought, and sees how that thought is unlike the object in some critical respect, this being could say that my assertion was an error. So then with John and Thomas. If Thomas could know John's thoughts about him, then Thomas could possibly see John’s error. That is what is meant by the error in John’s thought.
But mere disagreement of a thought with any ran¬ dom object does not make the thought erroneous. The judgment must disagree with its chosen object. If John never has Thomas in thought at all, how can John choose the real Thomas as his object? If I judge about a penholder that is in this room, and if the next room is in all respects like this, save for a penholder in it, with which my assertion does not agree, who, looking at that penholder in that other room, can say that my judgment is false? For I meant not that penholder when I spoke, but this one. I knew perhaps nothing about that one, had it not in mind, and so could not err about it. Even so, suppose that outside of J ohn there is a real Thomas, similar, as it happens, to John s ideal Thomas, but lacking some thought or affection that 410 THE KELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY John attributes to his ideal Thomas. Does that make John’s notion an error? No, for he spoke and could speak only of his ideal Thomas. The real Thomas was the other room, that he knew not of, the other side of the shield, that he never could con¬ ceive. His Thomas was his phantom Thomas. This phantom it is that he judges and thinks about, and his thoughts may have their own consistency or in¬ consistency. But with the real other person they have nothing to do. The real other is not his ob¬ ject, and how can he err about what is not object for him?
Absurd, indeed, some one will reply to us. John and Thomas have to deal with representative phan¬ toms of each other, to be sure; but that only makes each more apt to err about the real other. And the test that they can err is a very simple one. Suppose a spectator, a third person, to whom John and Thomas were both somehow directly present, so that he as it were included both of them. Then John’s judgment of his phantom Thomas would be by this spectator at once compared with the real Thomas, and even so would Thomas’s judgment of John be treated. If now John’s phantom Thomas agreed with the real Thomas, then John’s ideas would be declared in so far truthful; otherwise they would be erroneous. And this explains what is meant by John’s power to err about Thomas.
The explanation is fair enough for its own pur¬ pose, and we shall need it again before long. But just now we cannot be content with it. Foe what we want to know is not what the judgment of a THE POSSIBILITY OP ERBOK third thinker would be in case these two were some¬ how not independent beings at all, but things in this third being’s thought. For we have started out with the supposition of common sense that John and Thomas are not dreams or thoughts of some higher third i>eing, but that they are independent beings by themselves. Our supposition may have to be given up hereafter, but for the present we want to hold fast to it. And so John’s judgment, which we had supposed to be about the independ¬ ently existing Thomas, has now turned out to be only a judgment about John’s idea of Thomas. But judgments are false only in case they disagree with their intended objects. What, however, is the ob¬ ject of John’s judgment when he thinks about Thomas? Not the real Thomas, who could not pos¬ sibly be an object in another man’s thoughts. John’s real object being an ideal Thomas, he cannot, if sin¬ cere, and if fully conscious of what he means by Thomas, fail to agree in his statements with his own ideal. In short, on this our original supposition, John and Thomas are independent entities, each of which cannot possibly enter in real person into the thoughts of the other. Each may be somehow rep¬ resented in the other’s thoughts by a phantom, and only this phantom can be intended by the other when he judges about the first. For unless one talks nonsense, it should seem as if one could mean only what one has in mind.
Thus, like the characters in a certain Bab ballad, real John, real Thomas, the people in this simple tale, are total strangers to each other. You might as well ask a blind man to make true or false judg¬ ments about the real effects of certain combinations of colors, as to ask either John or Thomas, defined as common sense defines them, to make any judg¬ ments about each other. Common sense will assert that a blind man can learn and repeat verbally cor¬ rect statements about color, or verbally false state¬ ments about color, but, according to the commonsense view, in no case can he err about color-ideas as such, which are never present to him. You will be quite ready to say that a dog can make mistakes about the odors of the numberless tracks on the highway. You will assure us, however, that you cannot make mistakes about them because these odors do not exist for you. According to the com¬ mon-sense view, a mathematician can make blunders in demonstrating the properties of equations. A Bushman cannot, for he can have no ideas correspond¬ ing to equations. But how then can John or Thomas make errors about each other, when neither is more present to the other than is color to the blind man, the odor of the tracks on the highway to the dog’s master, or the idea of an equation to a Bushman? Here common sense forsakes us, assuring us that there is such error, but refusing to define it.
The inconsistency involved in all this commonsense view, and the consequences of the inconsistency, will appear yet better with yet further illustration. A dream is false in so far as it contains the judgment that such and such things exist apart from us; but at least in so far as we merely assert in our dreams about the objects as we conceive them, we make true assertions. But is not our actual life of assertions about actual fellow-beings much like a dream to which there should happen to correspond some real scene or event in the world? Such correspondence would not make the dream really “ true,” nor yet false. It would be a coincidence, remarkable for an outside observer, but none the less would the dreamer be thinking in his dream not about external objects, but about the things in his dream. But is not our supposed Thomas so and only so in the thought of John as he would be if John chanced to dream of a Thomas that was, to an external spectator, like the real one? Is not then the phantom Thomas, John’s only direct object, actually a thing in John’s thought? Is then the independent Thomas an object for John in any sense?
Yet again. Let us suppose that two men are shut up, each in a closed room by himself, and for his whole life; and let us suppose that by a lantern con¬ trivance each of them is able at times to produce on the wall of the other’s room a series of pictures. But neither of them can ever know what pictures he produces in the other’s room, and neither can know anything of the other’s room, as such, but only of the pictures. Let the two remain forever in this re¬ lation. One of them, A, sees on his wall pictures, which resemble more or less what he has seen in his own room at other times. Yet he perceives these to be only pictures, and he supposes them to represent what goes on in another room, which he conceives as like his own. He is interested, he examines the phe¬ nomena, he predicts their future changes, he passes judgment upon them. He may, if you like to con¬ tinue the hypothesis, find some way of affecting them, by himself acting in a way mysterious to him¬ self so as to produce changes in B’s actual room, which again affect the pictures that the real B pro¬ duces in A’s room. Thus A might hold what he would call communication with his phantom room. Even so, B lives with pictures before him that are produced from A’s room. Now one more supposi¬ tion, namely, that A and B have absolutely no other means of communication, that both are shut up alto¬ gether and always have been, that neither has any objects before him but his own thoughts and the changing pictures on the wall of his room. In this case what difference does it make whether or no the pictures in A’s room are actually like the things that could be seen in B’s room? Will that make A’s judgments either true or false? Even if A, acting by means that he himself cannot understand, is able to control the pictures on his wall by some alteration that he unconsciously produces in B’s room and its pictures, still A cannot be said to have any knowledge of the real B and his room at all.
And, for the same reason, A cannot make mistakes about the real room of B, for he will never even think of that real room. He will, like a man in a dream, think and be able to think only of the pic¬ tures on his wall. And when he refers them to an outside cause, he does not mean by this cause the real B and his real room, for he has never dreamed of the real B, but only of the pictures and of his own inter¬ pretation of them. He can therefore make no false