Page:Russell - The Problems of Philosophy, 1912.djvu/218

214 absolute kind of self-evidence, and in these cases the judgment that the terms are so related must be true. Thus this sort of self-evidence is an absolute guarantee of truth.

But although this sort of self-evidence is an absolute guarantee of truth, it does not enable us to be absolutely certain, in the case of any given judgment, that the judgment in question is true. Suppose we first perceive the sun shining, which is a complex fact, and thence proceed to make the judgment "the sun is shining." In passing from the perception to the judgment, it is necessary to analyse the given complex fact: we have to separate out "the sun" and "shining" as constituents of the fact. In this process it is possible to commit an error; hence even where a fact has the first or absolute kind of self-evidence, a judgment believed to correspond to the fact is not absolutely infallible, because it may not really correspond to the fact. But if it does correspond (in the sense explained in the preceding chapter), then it must be true.

The second sort of self-evidence will be that