Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 15.djvu/102

 TRUTH

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TRUTH

The negative judgment seems at first sight to form an exception to the general law that truth is correspondence; but this is not really the case. In the affirmative judgment both subject and predicate and the union between them, of whatever kind it may be,, are referred to reality; but in the negative judgment subject and predicate are disjoined, not conjoined. In other words, in the negative judgment we deny that the predicate has reality in the particu- lar case to which the subject refers. On the other hand, all such predicates presumably have reality somewhere, otherwise we should not talk about them. Either they are real quahties or real things, or at any rate somebody has conceived them as real. Consequently the negative judgment, if true, may also be said to correspond with reality, since both subject and predicate will be real somewhere, either as existents or as conceptions. What we deny, in fact, in the negative judgment is not the reality of the predicate, but the reality of the conjunction by which subject and predicate are united in the asser- tion which we implicitly challenge and negate. Sub- ject and predicate may both be real, but if our judg- ment be true, they will be disjoined, not united in reality.

But what precisely is this reality with which true judgments and true ideas are said to correspond? It is easy enough to vmderstand how ideas can corre- spond with realities that are themselves conceptual or ideal, but most of the realities that we know are not of this kind. How, then, can ideas and their conjunctions or disjunctions, which are psychical in character, correspond with realities which for the most part are not psychical but material? To solve this problem we must go back to ontological truth, which, as we saw, implies the creation of the universe by One Who, in creating it, has expressed therein His own ideas very much as an architect or an author expresses his ideas in the things that he creates, except that creation in the latter case supposes already existent material. Our theory of truth supposes that the universe is built according to a definite and rational plan, and that everything within the universe ex-presses or embodies an essential and integral part of that plan. Whence it follows that, just as in a building or in a piece of sculpture we .see the plan or design that is realized therein, so, in our experience of concrete things, by means of the same intellectual power, we apprehend the ideas which they embody or express. The correspondence, therefore, in which truth consists is not a corre- spondence between ideas and anything material as such, but between ideas as they exist in our minds and function in our acts of cognition, and the ideas that reality expresses and embodies — ideas which have their origin and prototype in the mind of God.

With regard to judgments of a more abstract or general type, the working of this view is quite simple. The realities to which abstract concepts refer have no material existence as such. There is no such thing, for instance, as action or reaction in general; nor are there any twos or fours. What we mean when we say that "action and reaction are equal and opposite", or that "two and two make four", is that these laws, which in their own proper nature are ideal, are realized or actualized in the material universe in which we live; or, in other words, that the material things we see about us behave in accordance with these laws, and through their activi- ties manifest them to our minds.

Perceptual judgments, i. e. the judgments which usually accomiiany and give expression to acts of perception, differ from the above in that they refer to objects which are immediately present to our senses. The realiti<'s in this case, therefore, are concrete existing things. It is, however, rather with the appearance of such things that our judgment is

now concerned than with their essential nature or inner constitution. Thus, when we predicate colours, sounds, odours, flavours, hardness or softness, heat or cold of this or that object, we make no statement about the nature of such qualities, still less about the nature of the thing that possesses them, ^^^lat we assert is (1) that such and such a thing exists, and (2) that it has a certain objective quality, which we call green, or loud, or sweet, or hard, or hot, to distin- guish it from other qualities — red, or soft, or bitter, or cold — with which it is not identical; while (3) our statement further implies that the same quality will similarly appear to any normally constituted man, i. e. will affect his senses in the same way that it affects our own. Accordingly, if in the real world such a condition of things obtains — if, that is to say, the thing in question does exist and has in fact some peculiar and distinctive property whereby it affects my .senses in a certain pecuUar and distinctive way — my judgment is true.

The truth of perceptual judgments by no means implies an exact correspondence between what is perceived and the images, or sensation-complexes, wherebj- we perceive; nor does the Scholastic theory necessitate any .such view. It is not the image, or sensation-complex, but the idea, that in judgment is referred to reality, and that gives us knowledge of reality. Colour and other qualities of objective things are doubtless perceived by means of sensations of peculiar and distinctive quality or tone, but no one imagines that this presupposes similar sensations in the object perceived. It is by means of the idea of colour and its specific differences that colours are predicated of objects, not by means of sensations. Such an idea could not arise, indeed, were it not for the sensations which in perception accompany and condition it; but the idea itself is not a sensation, nor is it of a sensation. Ideas have their origin in sensible experience and are indefinable, so far as immediate experience goes, except by reference to such experience and by differentiation from experiences in which other and different properties of objects are presented. Granted, therefore, that differences in what is tech- nically known as the "quality" of sensation corre- spond to differences in the objective properties of things, the truth of perceptual judgments is assured. No further correspondence is required; for the cor- respondence which truth postulates is between idea and thing, not between sensation and thing. Sensation conditions knowledge, but as such it is not knowledge. It is, as it were, a connecting link between the idea and the thing. Differences of sensation are determined by the causal activity of things; and from the sensation-complex, or image, the idea is derived by an instinctive and quasi- intuitive act of the mind which we call abstraction. Thus the idea which the thing unconsciously expresses finds conscious expression in the act of the knower, and the vast scheme of relations and laws which are de facto embodied in the material universe reproduce themselves in the con.sciousness of man.

Correspondence between thought and reality, idea and thing, or knower and known, therefore, turns out in all cases to be of the very essence of the truth- relation. Whence, say the opponents of our theory, in order to know whether our judgments are true or not, we must compare them with the realities that are known — a comparison that is obviously impos- sible, since reality can only be known through the instrumentality of the judgment. This objection, which is to be found in almost every non-Scholastic book dealing with the subject, rests upon a grave misapprehension of the real meaning of the Scholastic doctrine. Neither St. Thomas nor any other of the gi-cat Scholastics ever asserted that correspondence is the scholastic criterion of truth. To inquire what truth is, is oue question; to ask how we know that