Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/385

 degrees of reality and truth. To possess more the character of reality, and to contain within oneself a greater amount of the real, are two expressions for the same thing.

And the principle on which false appearance can be converted into truth we have already set forth in our chapter on Error. The method consists, as we saw, in supplementation and in re-arrangement; but I will not repeat here our former discussion. A total error would mean the attribution of a content to Reality, which, even when redistributed and dissolved, could still not be assimilated. And no such extreme case seems possible. An error can be total only in this sense that, when it is turned into truth, its particular nature will have vanished, and its actual self be destroyed. But this we must allow, again, to happen with the lower kinds of truth. There cannot for metaphysics be, in short, any hard and absolute distinction between truths and falsehoods. With each assertion the question is, how much will be left of that assertion, if we suppose it to have been converted into ultimate truth? Out of everything that makes its special nature as the predication of this adjective, how much, if anything, will survive? And the amount of survival in each case, as we have already seen, gives the degree of reality and truth.

But it may perhaps be objected that there are judgments without any real meaning, and that there are mere thoughts, which do not even pretend to attribute anything to Reality. And, with these, it will be urged that there can no longer remain the least degree of truth. They may, hence, be adjectives of the Real, but are not judgments about it. The discussion of this objection falls, perhaps, outside the main scope of my work, but I should like briefly to point out that it rests on a mistake. In the first place every judgment, whether positive or