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 HENEY SIDGWICK, Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations. 89 antecedents of some particular belief, they do not prove the falsity of the belief in question (though they may suggest it) unless they are put forward as reasons for holding it. The destructive effect of sociological inquiry seems therefore without warrant, but what are we to say of its constructive efficacy ? The claim made appar- ently is that a study of the development of opinion yields the sole trustworthy criterion of truth. But is this the case? Let us suppose for a moment that we have ascertained completely the law of development of ethical, political, theological, or philosoph- ical opinion so that we can state accurately the views which will be generally accepted by the coming generation. . . . " Suppose I foresee certainly that a belief will come, I cannot therefore con- clude that it will be a true belief; " or in the case of an ethical belief, " the mere fact that I can foresee that it will come has no tendency to make me judge it good that it should come " (pp. 175-176). Moreover, in tracing the course of development in the past we cannot avoid treating it as a development through error to truth ; but if we thus inevitably assume the truth of our own beliefs, further progress would seem to be a process from truth to error, and so the line of development in the past can hardly give us much insight into the nature of future advance. Sociologists endeavour to meet the last difficulty by saying either that knowledge is 'relative' or that it is 'progressive'. Sidgwick has no difficulty in exposing the vagueness of the first reply and its untenability if strictly understood. If all knowledge is relative, then this one truth at all events is absolutely known the truth, namely, that all truth is relative. " On this point, then, no further change seems possible, unless we suppose future humanity to lapse from knowledge into ignorance on this point. . . . But if no further change is possible, then surely, though in a different way, there must be a profound difference between the past history of belief, in which we trace the succession of generations pursuing absolute truth and mostly holding opinions ethical, political, theological conceived to be absolutely true, and the forecast of its future history, in which the pursuit and the con- sciousness of attainment can only be of relative truth " (p. 181). It is difficult to conceive the pursuit of truth going on at all under such circumstances. " The aim of attaining the true ethical or political ideal, the true view of duty and right and ultimate good, either in private conduct or the constitution of society, appears to me worthy of the sustained ardour and devotion which it has in the past actually aroused in philosophical minds : but I cannot imagine how any one should Scorn delights and live laborious days in Order to pass from the relative truth of the nineteenth century to the relative truth of the twentieth, supposing the latter to be not a jot more true or less merely relative than the former" (p. 182). The words which I have italicised formulate quite fairly the