Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/218

204 and press, open debate, the habit of challenging, sifting, criticising—these are the conditions which foster the spirit of political veracity; where they do not exist we shall search for it in vain. The famous conversation between Tom Brown and Harry East on the ethics of lying, with the conclusion of the latter that there is nothing wrong in deceiving a master if you can do it with safety, simply expresses in little what is everywhere exhibited at large by the moral history of the world. For the spread, therefore, of this form of truthfulness we must look to the decline of despotic authority and to the democratic habit of unchecked discussion; and we must expect to see it accompanied, on the one hand, by increased self-dependence and insistence on one's own right of thought and speech, and, on the other hand, by a wider and more generous toleration of the opinions of other people.

—This may be defined as the most abstract and disinterested form of truthfulness—the simple love of truth for its own sake. The conditions of its development are complete emancipation from prejudice and party contentiousness, freedom from the disturbing influences of passion, tradition, personal and other kinds of bias, the cultivation of a calm and judicious spirit in all matters of controversy, and that steadiness of mental vision which enables us to envisage without wavering the hardest and most disagreeable facts. It is this pure and unreserved devotion to truth as such—this complete willingness to follow whithersoever it may lead—that more than anything else distinguishes the man of the highest mental character from those of lower types—which marks off the philosopher, properly so called, from the heated partisan, the bigoted sectary, the whole crowd of ignorant, ill-reasoning, or indifferent adherents of churches, classes, schools. It is to be considered as the last and noblest of the intellectual virtues—the very flower and fruitage of the finest developments of thought.

This form of veracity, it is evident, then, is possible only in certain high states of civilization, wherein mental freedom and alertness, a wide interest in every field of inquiry, and the largest and most solid intellectual culture, combine at once to establish the ideal, and to bring about and maintain the conditions necessary to its attainment. But we must not rest content with these rather vague and general statements. We must investigate a little more closely the habits of life and thought, and particularly the kind of mental discipline, by which philosophical veracity is fostered and strengthened.

After all, the question thus introduced is, fortunately, a very simple one. If, remembering that we have here to do with a love of truth as such, with the desire to know all that is to be known about any subject, and with the willingness to accept whatever is proved to