Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 15.djvu/103

 TRUTH

75

TRUTH

we have judged truly, quite another. Indeed, the possibility of answering the serond is supposed by the mere fad that Ihe first is put. To be able to define truth, we nuist first possess it and know that we possess it, i. e. must be al)l<' to distinguish it from error. We cannot define that whieh we rannot dis- tinguish and to .some e.xtent isolate. The Scholastic theory sujiposes, therefore, that truth has already been distinguished from error, and proceeds to exam- ine truth with a view to discovering in what precisely it con.sists. His standpoint is cpisteniological, not criteriologieal. When he says that truth is corre- spondence, he is stating what truth is, not by what sign or mark it can be distinguished from error. By the old Scholastics the question of the criteria of truth was scarcely touched. They discussed the criteria of valid reasoning in their treatises on logic, but for the rest they left the discussion of particular criteria to the methodology of particular sciences. And rightly so, for there is really no criterion of universal application. The distinction of truth and error is at bottom intuitional. We cannot go on making criteria ad infinitum. Somewhere we mast come to what is ultimate, either first principles or facts. .This is precisely what the Scholastic theory of truth affirms. In deference to the modern demand for an infallible and universal criterion of truth, not a few Scholastic writers of late have suggested objective evidence. Objective evidence, however, is nothing more than the manifestation of the object itself, di- rectly or indirectly, to the mind, and hence is not strictly a criterion of truth, but its foundation. As Pdre Geny puts it in his pamphlet discussing "Une nouvelle thc'orie de la connaissance", to state that evidence is the ultimate criterion of truth is equiva- lent to stating that knowledge properly so called has no need of a criterion, since it is absurd to suppose a knowledge which does not know what it knows. Once grant, as all must grant who wish to avoid abso- lute scepticism, that knowledge is possible, and it fol- lows that, properly used, our faculties must be capable of giving us truth. Doubtless, coherence and har- mony with facts are pro tanto signs of truth's presence in our minds; but what we need for the most part are not signs of truth, but signs or criteria of error — not tests whereby to discover when our faculties have gone right, but tests whereby to discover wlien they have gone wrong. Our judgments will be true, i. e. thought will correspond with its object, providetl that object itself, and not any other cau.se, subjective or objective, determines the content of our thought. What we have to do, therefore, is to take care that our assent is de- termined by the evidence with which we are con- fronted, and by this alone. With regard to the senses this means that we must look to it that they are in good condition and that the circumstances under which we are exercising them are normal; with regard to the intellect that we must not allow irrele\'ant con- siderations to weigh with us, that we must avoid ha.ste, and, as far as possible, get rid of bias, prejudice, and an over-anxious will to believe. If this be done, granted there is sufficient evidence, true judgments will naturally and necessarily result. The purpose of argument and discu.ssion, as of all other processes that lead to knowledge, is precisely that the object under discu.ssion may manifest itself in its various relations, either directly or indirectly, to the mind. And the object as thus manifesting itself is what the Scholastic calls evidence. It is the object, therefore, which in his view is the determining cau.se of truth. All kinds of i)rocesses, both mental and physical, may be necessary to [)reparc the way for an act of cogni- tion, but in the last resort such an act must be deter- mined as to its content by the cau.sal activity of the object, which makes it.self evident bv producing in the mind an idea that Ls like to the idea of which its own existence is the realization.

B. The Hegplinn Theory. — In the Idealism of Hegel and the Absolutism of the Oxford School (of which Mr. Bradley and Mr. .loachim are the leading rep- resentatives) both reality and truth are es.sentially one, essentially an organic whole. Truth, in fact, is but reahty qua thought. It is an intelligent act in which the universe is thought as a whole of infinite parts or differences, all organically inter-related and somehow brought to unity. .\nd because truth is thus organic, each element within it, each partial truth, is so modified by the others through and through that apart from them, and again apart from the whole, it is but a distorted fragment, a mutilated abstraction which in reality is not truth at all. Con- sequently, since human truth is always partial and fragmentary, there is in strictness no .such thing as human truth. For us the truth is ideal, and from it our truths are so far removed that, to convert them into the truth, they would have to undergo a change of which we know neither the measure nor the extent.

The flagrantlj- sceptical character of this theory is sufficiently obvious, nor is there any attempt on the part of its ex-ponents to denj- it. Starting with the assumption that to conceive is "to hf)ld many ele- ments together in a connexion necessitated by their several contents", and that to be conceivable is to be "a significant whole", i. e. a whole, "such that all its constituent elements reciprocally determine one an- other's being as contributory features in a single con- crete meaning". Dr. Joachim boldly identifies the true with the conceivable (Nature of Truth, 66). And since no human intellect can conceive in this full and magnificent sense, he frankly admits that no human truth can be more than approximate, and that to the margin of error which this approximation involves no limits can be assigned. Human truth draws from absolute or ideal truth "whatever being and con- servability" it possesses (Green, "Prolegom.", §77); but it is not, and never can be, identical with absolute truth, nor yet with any part of it, for these parts essen- tially and intrinsically modify one another. For his definition of human truth, therefore, the .Absolutist is forced back upon the Scholastic doctrine of corre- spondence. Human truth represents or corresponds wdth absolute truth in proportion as it presents us with this truth as affected by more or less derangement, or in proportion as it would take more or less to convert the one into the other (Bradley, ".Appearance and Reality", 363). While, therefore, both theories as- sign correspondence as the essential characteristic of human truth, there is this fundamental difference be- tween them: For the Scholastic this correspondence, so far as it goes, must be exact ; but for the .Absolutist it is necessarily imperfect, .so imperfect, indeed, that "the ultimate truth" of any given proposition "may quite transform its original meaning" (Appearance and Reality, 3t)4).

To admit that human truth is essentially repre- sentative is really to admit that concc]>tion is some- thing more than the mere "holding together of many elements in a connexion necessitated by their several contents". But the fall.acj' of the "coherence- theory" does not lie so much in this, nor yet in the identification of the true and the conceivable, as in its assumption that reality, and therefore truth, is or- ganically one. The universe Ls undoubtedly one, in that its parts are inter-related and inter-dependent; and from this it follows that we cannot know any part complelelj' unless we know the whole; but it does not follow that we cannot know any part at all unless we know the whole. If each part has some sort of being of its own, then it can be known for what it is, whether we know its relations to other parts or not; and similarly some of its relations to other parts can be known without our knowing them all. Nor is the individuality of the parts of the universe destroyed by their inter-dependence; rather it is thereby sustained.