If the pragmatist objects that in this argument I have throughout
supposed him to be urging the narrow meaning of utility, namely, that
it is usefulness in the strictly practical sense, whereas he intends it
in the widest possible meaning--a meaning that includes theoretical
usefulness--then the trouble is a different one; it is to know how and
where the pragmatist stops short of the coherence theory of truth, and
wherein his method differs from that of the idealist.
This brings me to the consideration of another theory in which the
concept of utility plays a large, indeed a predominant part. This is
the theory of the relation of knowledge to life that is given to us in
the philosophy of Bergson. I have in one of the volumes of this series
given an account of this philosophy; I am here only dealing with its
relation to this special problem of the nature of truth. It has been
claimed that this philosophy is only a form of pragmatism, but it is
not a theory of truth, and it has this essential difference from
pragmatism that it is the intellect and not truth that is a utility.
Before we consider the question that it gives {64} rise to in regard to
truth, let us first examine the theory of the intellect, and the nature
of its utility. The intellect is a mode of activity, an endowment
acquired in the course of evolution, and which has been retained and
perfected because of its utility. This does not mean that the
intellect directs us to what is useful and inhibits us from courses
fatal to life, neither does it mean that it gives us any power to make
true what is not already true, it means that the power to acquire
knowledge is useful. There is a contrast in our own existence between
our life and our intellect.
To understand the way in which the intellect serves the living creature
endowed with it, we need only regard it from the standpoint of ordinary
experience. We know in ourselves that our life is wider than our
intellect, and that our intellect serves the activity of our life. The
common expressions we employ, such as using our wits, taking an
intelligent interest, trying to think, all imply a utility distinct
from the intellect. So viewed, our life appears as an active principle
within us, maintaining our organism in its relations, active and
passive, and reactive to the reality outside and independent of it.
Our intellect also seems both active and passive. It receives the
influences that stream in upon us from the reality around us, it
apprehends and interprets them, and works out the lines of our possible
action in regard to them. The influences that flow in upon us from the
outside world are already selected before our intellect apprehends
them, for they flow in by the avenues of our senses, and the senses are
natural instruments of selection. If we picture these influences as
vibrations, then we may say that a certain group of vibrations of a
very rapid frequency are selected by the eye and give rise to vision,
that another group of very much lower frequency are selected by the ear
and {65} give the sensation of sound, and other groups are selected by
taste, smell, and touch. Many groups are known indirectly by means of
artificial instruments, and all the infinite series that unite these
groups of the actually experienced vibrations escape our apprehension
altogether--we have no means of selecting them. But all these sense
data, as we may call them, come to us without exertion or activity on
our part; it is the intellect which gives them meaning, which
interprets them, which makes them the apprehension or awareness of
objects or things. And the active part that the intellect plays is
also a process of selection. This is evident if we reflect upon the
universal form which our intellectual activity takes, namely,
attention. It is in the act of attention that we are conscious of
mental activity, and attention is essentially selection--the selection
of an interest. Besides the natural selection that is effected by our
senses and the conscious selection that is manifest in attention, there
is also a more or less arbitrary selection that our intellect performs
in marking out the lines of our practical interest and possible action.
In this work of selection the intellect makes the world conform to the
necessities of our action.
So far we have looked at our intellectual endowment from the standpoint
of ordinary common-sense experience. Let us now consider the
philosophical theory based on this view, which explains the nature of
knowledge by showing its purpose. The intellect not only selects, but
in selecting transforms the reality. It presents us with knowledge
that indeed corresponds with reality, for it is essentially a view of
reality, but also in selecting it marks out divisions, and gives to
reality a form that is determined by practical interest. The same
reality is different to different individuals and to different species
according to their practical interests. {66} The practical end which
the human intellect serves is to present us with a field for our life
activity. This is the real world for us, as we know it, real objects
in a real space. Had we no other way of knowing but that of our
intellect we should not know the life which is active within us as it
is really lived, we should be as those who, standing outside, watch a
movement, and not as those who are carried along in the movement and
experience it from within. In life and intellect we have the
counterpart of reality and appearance. Life is not something that
changes; it is the change of which the something is the appearance.
Life is the reality of which all things, as we understand them, are the
appearances, and on account of which they appear. The solid things in
space and time are not in reality what they appear; they are views of
the reality. The intellect guided by our practical interest presents
reality under this form of solid spatial things. Clearly, then, if
this view be true, the whole world, as it is presented to us and
thought of by us, is an illusion. Our science is not unreal, but it is
a transformed reality. The illusions may be useful, may, indeed, be
necessary and indispensable, but nevertheless it is illusion.
But here there arises a new difficulty in regard to truth. If the
usefulness of the intellect consists in the active production of an
illusion, can we say that the intellect leads us to truth? Is it not
only if we can turn away from the intellect and obtain a
non-intellectual intuition that we can know truth?
{67}
CHAPTER VII
ILLUSION
The doctrine that the world that appears is essentially unlike the
world that is is neither new nor peculiar to any particular theory of
philosophy. It has received a new interest and a new interpretation
lately in the theory that we are now considering, that the clue to the
appearance of the world to us is to be found in the conception of the
nature of the utility of the intellect and in the mode of its activity.
The idea that we are perhaps disqualified by our very nature itself
from beholding reality and knowing truth is illustrated in the
well-known allegory in the _Republic_ of Plato:
"And now let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or
unenlightened. Behold! human beings living in an underground den,
which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the
den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and
necks chained so that they cannot move and can only see before them,
being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above
and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire
and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look,
a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette
players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. And
men are passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and
statues, and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various
materials, which appear over the wall....
"They are strange prisoners, like ourselves, and they see only their
own shadows or the shadows of one another which the fire throws on the
opposite wall of the cave. And so also of the objects carried and of
the passers-by; to the prisoners the truth would be literally nothing
but the shadows of the images.
{68}
"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the
prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when
any of them, is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn
his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer
sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see
the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows.
And then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an
illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being, and his
eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, and
what will be his reply? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he
formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?...
"And suppose that he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is
he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light
his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at
all of what are now called realities."
The thought that Plato has expressed in this wonderful allegory has
entered deeply into all philosophy. What we first take for reality is
merely a shadow world. But in Plato's view it is the intellect which
gives us the means of escape, the power to turn from the illusion to
behold the reality. It is not until now that philosophy has sought the
clue to the illusion in the nature of the intellect itself. The very
instrument of truth is unfitted to reveal to us the reality as it is,
because its nature and purpose is to transform reality, to make reality
appear in a form which, though of paramount importance to us as active
beings, is essentially an illusion. The intellectual bent of our mind
leads us away from, and not towards a vision of reality in its purity.
The more our intellect progresses, and the more and more clearly we
{69} see into a greater and ever greater number of things, the farther
are we from, and not the nearer to a grasp of reality as it is. To
obtain this vision of reality we have to turn away from the intellect
and find ourselves again in that wider life out of which the intellect
is formed. Life, as it lives, is an intuition that is nonintellectual.
"Human intelligence," writes Bergson, "is not at all what Plato taught
in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to look at passing
shadows, nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun.
It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy
task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the
plough, and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are
acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only
in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished
and the furrow that is being ploughed, such is the function of human
intelligence."
The illusion to which our intellectual nature subjects us is the
necessity we are under to regard the things of the universe as more
ultimate, as more fundamental than the movement which actuates the
universe. It seems to us impossible that there could exist movement or
change, unless there already existed things to be moved or changed,
things whose nature is not altered, but only their form and their
external relations, when they are moved or changed. This necessity of
thought seems to have received authoritative recognition in all
attempts, religious and scientific, to conceive origins. Thus we read
in the Book of Genesis:
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth
was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
{70} The matter of the universe, it is felt, must be in existence
before the movement which vivifies it. The dead inert stuff must be
created before it can receive the breath of life. And if God the
creator is conceived as living before the matter which He has created,
it is as an external principle, the relation of which to the creation
is by most religious minds thought to transcend the power of the finite
understanding to conceive.
The same fundamental conception of the primacy of matter over movement
is evident in the scientific theories of the nature and origin of life.
Life appears to science as a form of energy that requires things,
matter occupying space, to support it. According to one view, life is
the result of a certain combination or synthesis of chemical or
physical elements, previously existing separately--a combination of
very great complexity, and one that may possibly have occurred once
only in the long process of nature, but which nevertheless might be,
and some think probably, or even certainly, will be brought about by a
chemist working in his laboratory. This is the mechanistic or
materialist view. On the other hand, there is the theory of vitalism.
Life, it is contended, cannot be due to such a synthesis of material
elements as the mechanistic view supposes, because it is of the nature
of an "entelechy"--that is, an individual existence which functions, as
a whole, in every minutest part of the organism it "vitalises." Life
has supervened upon, and not arisen out of the material organism which
it guides and controls not by relating independent parts, but by making
every part subserve the activity and unity of the whole. But the
vitalist theory, as well as the mechanistic theory, conceives the
movement and change which is life as dependent on the previous
existence of a matter or stuff which is moved or changed. The
philosophical {71} conception differs, therefore, from both these
theories. It is that life is an original movement, and that this
movement is the whole reality of which things, inert matter, even
spatial extension, are appearances. True duration is change, not the
permanence of something amidst change. There are no unchanging things.
Everything changes. Reality is the flux; things are views of the flux,
arrests or contractions of the flowing that the intellect makes. The
appearance of the world to us is our intellectual grasp of a reality
that flows. This original movement is the life of the universe.
Briefly stated, the argument on which the theory is based is that it is
logically impossible to explain change by changelessness, movement by
immobility. Real change cannot be a succession of states themselves
fixed and changeless; real movement cannot be the immobile positions in
which some thing is successively at rest. On the other hand, if
movement is original, the interruption of movement, in whatever way
effected, will appear as things. The experience which confirms this
argument is the insight that everyone may obtain of the reality of his
own life as continuous movement, unceasing change, wherein all that
exists exists together in a present activity. To develop this argument
would exceed the limits of this book, and would be outside its purpose.
It is essential, however, that such a theory should be understood, for
clearly it is possible to hold not only that we are subject to
illusion, but that illusion is of the very nature of intellectual
apprehension. If, then, the understanding works illusion for the sake
of action, is it thereby disqualified as an instrument for the
attainment of truth?
We are brought, then, to the critical point of our inquiry. If
illusion is the essential condition of human activity, if the
intellect, the very instrument of truth, {72} is itself affected, what
is to save us from universal scepticism? If the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? The intellect with its frames
and moulds shapes living change and movement into fixed immobile
states; the process of knowing alters profoundly the reality known.
Must we not conclude that knowledge, however useful, is not true? And
to what shall we turn for truth? There is, indeed, if this be so, a
deeper irony in the question, What is truth? than even Pilate could
have imagined. We have absolutely no practical concern with truth--we
must leave it to the mystic, to the unpractical, the contemplative man
who has turned aside from the stern task of busy life.
It is not so. The problem that seems so fundamental admits a quite
simple solution. Illusion is not error, nor is it falsehood; it is the
appearance of reality. It is the reality that appears, and when we
grasp the principle of utility we understand the shape that the
appearance must assume. This shape may seem to us a distortion, but in
recognising appearance we are in touch with reality, and practical
interest is the key that opens to us the interpretation of intellectual
experience. And it is not only by the intellect that we interpret the
nature of reality, for besides logic there is life, and in life we
directly perceive the reality that in logic we think about.
The intellect, then, does not make truth, neither does it make reality;
it makes reality take the form of spatial things, and it makes things
seem to be the ground of reality. Were our nature not intellectual, if
all consciousness was intuitive, the world would not then appear as
things--there would be no things. But, notwithstanding that our world
is an illusion, it is not the less on that account a true world, and
our science is true knowledge, in the objective meaning of truth, for
{73} once an illusion is interpreted, it becomes an integral part of
the conception of reality. It would be easy to find abundant
illustration of this fact within science itself. Thus in the familiar
case of the straight stick which appears bent when partly immersed in
water, as soon as the illusion is understood as due to the different
refraction of light in media of different density, air and water, it
ceases to be an illusion. We then recognise that if a partly immersed
stick did not appear bent, it would really be bent. Again, the
illusion that clings to us most persistently throughout our experience
is that which is connected with movement and rest. The system of
movement in which we are ourselves carried along appears to us
stationary, while that which is outside it seems alone to move. In
very simple cases, such as viewing the landscape from a
railway-carriage window, habit has long caused the illusion to cease,
but we all remember the child's feeling that the trees and fields were
flying past us. The earth's motion never becomes to us a real
experience of movement, we accept the fact and never doubt the
scientific evidence on which it rests, yet we always speak and think of
sunrise and sunset; and this is not merely due to the accident that our
language was fixed before the nature of the celestial movement was
known, but to a natural illusion which it is far more convenient to
retain than to abandon.
The fact of illusion is not the tenet of any particular philosophy, nor
even of philosophy itself; it is a recognised factor in common life and
in physical science, but in instancing the theory of Bergson's
philosophy I am choosing an extreme case. Berkeley held that illusion
is practically universal; Kant taught that the apparent objectivity of
phenomena is the form that the understanding imposes on things; but
Bergson teaches {74} not only that all material reality is illusion,
but also that this very illusion is the work of the intellect, that the
intellect is formed for this purpose, intellect and matter being
correlative, evolving _pari passu_. To such a doctrine there is of
necessity a positive side, for it is impossible that it can rest on
universal scepticism--scepticism both of knowledge and of the
instrument of knowledge. If the intellectual view of reality as solid
matter in absolute space is illusion, it must be possible to apprehend
the reality from which the judgment that it is illusion is derived. If
the intellect distorts, there must be an intuition which is pure, and
the relation between these will be the relation between reality and
appearance. Neither, then, is reality truth, nor appearance error.
There is a truth of appearance, a truth that is a value in itself, a
truth that is more than the mere negation that appearance is not
reality. The appearance is our hold upon the reality, our actual
contact with it, the mode and direction of our action upon it. What,
then, is error? It cannot consist in the fact that we know appearance
only, not reality, for we can only know reality by its appearance. It
cannot be an appearance behind which there is no reality, for non-being
cannot appear. It cannot be nothing at all or pure non-being, for to
think of absolute nothing is not to think. In error there is some
object of thought which is denied real being. What this is is the
problem of error.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PROBLEM OF ERROR
In the _Theætetus_ of Plato, Socrates has been discussing with
Theætetus what knowledge is, and when at last agreement seems to be
reached in the definition that {75} knowledge is true opinion, a new
difficulty occurs to Socrates:
"There is a point which often troubles me and is a great perplexity to
me both in regard to myself and to others. I cannot make out the
nature or origin of the mental experience to which I refer. How there
can be false opinion--that difficulty still troubles the eye of my
mind. Do we not speak of false opinion, and say that one man holds a
false and another a true opinion, as though there were some natural
distinction between them? All things and everything are either known
or not known. He who knows, cannot but know; and he who does not know,
cannot know.... Where, then, is false opinion? For if all things are
either known or unknown, there can be no opinion which is not
comprehended under this alternative, and so false opinion is excluded."
This difficulty may appear at first sight purely verbal, and we shall
perhaps be inclined to see the answer to it in the double use that we
make of the word knowledge. We use the word in two senses, in one of
which it includes all and everything that is or can be present to the
mind in thinking, and in another and narrower sense the word knowledge
means truth. It was in the narrow sense of the word that whatever is
not true is not knowledge that Socrates interpreted the meaning of the
Delphic oracle that had declared him the wisest of men. His wisdom
must be, he said, that whereas other men seemed to be wise and to know
something, he knew that he knew nothing. All men have opinion, but
opinion is not knowledge, though easily and generally mistaken for it.
His perplexity was to understand what actually this false opinion could
be which passed for knowledge. It could not be nothing at all, for
then it would simply mean ignorance; but in false opinion {76} some
object is present to the mind. Everything that the mind thinks of has
being. A thing may have being that does not exist if by existence is
meant the particular existence of an event in time, for most of the
things we think about are timeless--they are ideas, such as whiteness,
goodness, numbers and the properties of numbers, faith, love, and
such-like. All such ideas are called universals, because their reality
does not mean that they exist at one particular moment and no other,
but they are real, they have being. How, then, can there be anything
intermediate between being and not being, anything that is and also is
not, for this is what false opinion or error seems to be?
There is, then, a problem of error, and it is quite distinct from the
problem of truth. The problem of truth is to know by what criterion we
can test the agreement of our ideas with reality; the problem of error
is to know how there can be false opinion. There is false opinion, of
this no one needs to be convinced; but where its place is in the
fundamental scheme of the mental process, in what precisely it
consists, whether it is purely a negation or whether it has a positive
nature of its own, this is the problem we have now to consider.
There is an important distinction in logic between what is
contradictory and what is contrary. Of two contradictory propositions
one must be true, the other must be false; but of two contrary
propositions one must be false, but both may be false. Of
contradictory propositions one is always a pure negation, one declares
the non-existence of what the other affirms the existence; but of
contrary propositions each has a positive content, and both may be
false. A true proposition may be based on a false opinion, and it is
very important to have a clear idea of what we intend by false opinion.
We do not mean by false opinion such plainly false {77} propositions as
that two and two are five or that there may be no corners in a
square--such propositions are false, because they contradict
propositions that are self-evident. If anyone should seriously affirm
them, we should not, I think, say that such a one had a false opinion,
but that he failed, perhaps through some illusion, to understand the
meaning of the terms he was using. An example of what would now, I
suppose, be unquestionably regarded by everyone as error is that whole
body of opinion that found expression in the theory and practice of
witchcraft. This was once almost universally accepted, and though
probably at no period nor in any country was there not some one who
doubted or disbelieved, still the reasons of such doubt or disbelief
would probably be very different from those reasons which lead us to
reject it to-day. For witchcraft was grounded on a general belief that
spiritual agencies, beneficent and malign, were the cause of material
well-being or evil. This conception has now given place to the
mechanistic or naturalistic theory on which our modern physical science
is based. We interpret all physical occurrences as caused by material
agency. But this belief, quite as much as the belief in spiritual
agencies, is opinion, not knowledge, and it may be false. It is
conceivable that future generations will reject our scientific notions,
self-evident though they seem to us, as completely as we reject the
notions of the dark ages. It is even conceivable that the whole of our
modern science may come to appear to mankind as not even an
approximation to knowledge. Error, like illusion, may be universal.
No one whose opinion counts as a rational belief now holds that
sickness may be caused by the malign influence of the evil eye, and
that this influence may be neutralised by making the sign of the cross;
some, but very few, believe that a {78} sick man may be healed by the
prayers and anointing of righteous men; many believe that material
disease, however malignant, may be expelled from the body by faith;
while the majority of rational men, whatever independent religious
views they hold, regard sickness and disease as material in the
ordinary sense, and expect them to yield to drugs and treatment. Now,
of these various opinions some must be false, while all may be false.
Let us add some illustrations from philosophy. Some philosophers hold,
in common with general opinion, that sense experience is caused by
physical objects; others hold that there are no physical objects, but
that consciousness is the one and only reality; and there are others
who think that the reality that gives rise to our sense experience is
neither physical in the sense of a material thing, nor mental in the
sense of consciousness or thought, but is movement or change--change
that requires no support and is absolute. All these are opinions, and
may be false, and our belief that any one of them is true does not
depend on immediate experience, but on reasons. The best that can be
said in favour of any belief is that there is no reason for supposing
it false, and the worst that can be said against any belief is that
there is no reason for supposing it true. Our problem, then, is to
know what constitutes the nature of error in any one of these examples
if it is, as each one may be, false?
The instances we have given are all of them propositions or judgments,
or else conceptions formed out of propositions or judgments, the
purpose of which is to interpret experience. The actual experience
itself, in so far as it consists of the actual presence of the object
to the mind aware of it, is, as we have seen, neither truth nor error;
it simply is what it is. It is the conceptions by which we interpret
this experience that are {79} true or false. And our problem is that
the meaning or content of a conception, that which is present to the
mind when we make a judgment, is precisely the same whether the
conception is true or false, there is no distinctive mark or feature by
which we can know that in the one case the object of thought is a real
or actual fact, in the other an opinion to which no reality
corresponds. And, further, it seems exceedingly difficult to
understand in what way a non-reality can be present to the mind at all.
Let us now examine some attempts to solve this problem, and first of
all let us take the pragmatist solution. Pragmatism claims that it has
no difficulty in explaining error, because, as we have already seen, it
acknowledges no other test or criterion of truth except a pragmatic
one. Every proposition or judgment that we make must, in order to have
any meaning whatever, be relevant to some human purpose; every such
proposition is a truth-claim; and every truth-claim is tested by its
workability. Consequently, error is simply the failure of a
proposition to establish its claim by the practical test of working.
Propositions marked by such failure are errors. As there is no truth
independent of time, place, and circumstance, no irrelevant truth, no
truth independent of the conditions under which its claim is put
forward, there is no truth that may not become error. No judgment,
according to pragmatism, is an error pure and simple--that is to say,
it cannot come into existence as error, for it comes claiming truth,
and maintaining that claim until challenged; it becomes an error in
retrospect only, and always in relation to another judgment which
corrects it. Error does not characterise a class of judgments; it is
something that happens to a judgment, it is a judgment whose
truth-claim is rejected in reference to another judgment {80} which
succeeds. The essential thing in the pragmatist doctrine of error is
that in claiming to be true a judgment is not challenging comparison
with some independent reality, nor is it claiming to belong to a
timeless order of existence--to be eternal; it is claiming to fulfil
the particular purpose for which it has been called forth, whether that
purpose be practical or theoretical.
Let us now consider the explanation of error offered by the idealist
philosophy. In this view only the whole truth is wholly true; the
Absolute, as a perfect, concrete, individual system, is the ideal, and
all that falls short of it can only possess a degree of truth--a degree
which is greater or less according as it approximates to the ideal.
The degrees of truth are not quantitative, not a mixture of truth and
error, but a nearer or more distant approach to the ideal. There can
be no absolute error, because if truth is the whole, error, if it
exists at all, must in some way be included in truth. Clearly error
cannot as such be truth, and therefore it must follow that, in the
whole, error loses its character of error, and finds reconciliation of
its contradiction to truth. Error, then, if it is something, and not a
pure negation, is partial or incomplete truth; the perplexity and
contradiction that it gives rise to are incidental to our partial view.
Knowledge, it must seem to us, can exist only for omniscience. Unless
we know everything, we know nothing.
These two doctrines are in a sense the exact antithesis of one another.
They agree together in this, that in each the explanation of error
follows as a consequence of the conception of the nature of truth. The
pragmatist theory implies that there is no truth in any real sense, but
only more or less successful error. The idealist theory implies that
there is no real error, but only a variety in the degree of truth.
{81}
Most people, however, are convinced that truth and error are not
related to one another, nor to the circumstances that call forth belief
or disbelief. Let us now examine a theory that recognises this. There
are false judgments, and they need explanation; error has a nature of
its own. If a judgment is false, it is absolutely and unalterably
false; if it is true, it is unconditionally true and with no reserve.
No logical process, no psychological disposition, can make what is
false true. Error must lie in the nature of knowledge, and to discover
that nature we must understand the theory of knowledge and determine
the exact nature of the mental act in knowing. The first essential is
to distinguish the kind of knowledge to which truth and error can
apply. We pointed out in the second chapter that all knowledge rests
ultimately on immediate experience. In immediate experience the
relation between the mental act of knowing and the object that is known
is so simple that any question as to truth or error in regard to it is
unmeaning. To question the truth of immediate experience is to
question its existence; it is to ask if it is what it is, and this is
plainly unmeaning. But thinking, we said, is questioning experience in
order to know its content or meaning, and in thinking, the simplicity
of the relation which unites the mind to its object in immediate
experience is left behind, and a logical process of very great
complexity takes its place. It is in this complexity that the
possibility of error lies.
Let us look at it a little more closely. Knowing is a relation which
unites two things, one the mind that knows, the other the thing known.
In every act of knowing, something is present to the mind; if knowing
is simply awareness of this actually present something, we call it
immediate experience, we are acquainted with the object. But our
knowledge is not only of objects {82} immediately present to the mind
and with which we are therefore acquainted. Knowledge embraces the
past and future and the distant realms of space. Indeed were knowledge
only of what is actually present to the mind, it is difficult to
imagine that we could, in the ordinary meaning of the word, know
anything at all. I may be thinking, for example, of an absent friend;
all that is present to my mind is, it may be, a memory image, a faint
recall of his appearance on some one occasion, or perhaps a
recollection of the tone of his voice, or it may be the black marks on
white paper which I recognise as his handwriting. This image is
present to my mind, but the image is not the object, my friend, about
whom I think and make endless judgments, true and false. So also, if
what is present to the mind is affecting me through the external
senses, if it is a sense impression, it is clear that what is actually
present is not the whole object of which I am aware, but only a very
small part of it, or, it may be, no part of it at all, but something, a
sound, or an odour, that represents it. The immediate data of
consciousness are named by some philosophers sense data, by others,
presentations, by others images, and there is much controversy as to
their nature and existence, but with this controversy we are not here
concerned--we are seeking to make clear an obvious distinction, namely,
the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by
description.
What kind of knowledge is it that we acquire by description? Knowledge
about things with which we are not first acquainted. The most
important knowledge that we possess or acquire is knowledge of objects
which we know only by the knowledge we have about them--objects that we
know about without knowing them. They are not direct impressions on
our senses, {83} nor are they ideas known in actual experience. We
make judgments about them, and the subjects about which we make these
judgments are really composed of these judgments that we make about
them. To go back to our illustrations, we may know a great deal about
the evil eye, a malignant influence, disease, faith, healing,
causality, physical objects, without any acquaintance with them,
without even knowing that they exist. Such knowledge is descriptive,
and the objects are descriptions. Knowledge by description is never
quite simple, and is often very complex, for, besides the relation of
the mental act to the object known, there are the terms and relations
which are the elements in the judgment and the relations of the
judgments themselves. If we analyse a judgment, every word in which it
is expressed, whether it is a noun or a verb or a preposition or a
conjunction, conveys a distinct meaning, indicates a term or a
relation, each of which can be made a distinct object to the mind, and
all of which are combined in the single meaning the judgment expresses.
It is in this complexity that the possibility of error lies, and the
possibility increases as the complexity increases. All the terms and
the relations which a judgment contains depend on the knowledge we have
by acquaintance--that is to say, we are ultimately dependent on our
actual experience for all knowledge whatever, whether it is
acquaintance or description, for we can only describe in terms with
which we are acquainted; but in the judgment these elements are
combined into new objects, or a certain relation is declared to exist
between objects, and it is this combination of the elements of the
judgment that involves its truth or falsehood.
If this view of the nature of the mental act of knowing is accepted, we
are able to understand how false opinion {84} is consistent with the
fact that all knowledge is truth. We escape both the alternatives that
seemed to Socrates the only possible ones. "When a man has a false
opinion, does he think that which he knows to be some other thing which
he knows, and knowing both is he at the same time ignorant of both? Or
does he think of something which he does not know as some other thing
which he does not know?" No, neither; in error he thinks that
something that he knows is in a relation that he knows to some other
thing that he knows, when in fact that relation is not relating the two
things. The false proposition is not one in which the constituent
terms and relations are unknown or non-existent, but one in which a
combination of these terms and relations is thought to exist when in
fact it does not exist; and the true proposition is that in which the
combination thought to exist does exist. We can, therefore, if this
account be true, at least know what false opinion or error can be,
whether or not we have any means of deciding in regard to any
particular opinion that it is false.
There is one other theory, the last we shall notice. It is in one
respect the most important of all, namely, that it is the most direct
attempt to grapple with the problem of error. It is founded on a
theory of knowledge which we owe mainly to the profound and acute work
of a German philosopher (Meinong), and which at the present time is
being keenly discussed. It is an attempt to determine more exactly
than has yet been done the fundamental scheme of the mental life and
development. The brief account that I am now offering, I owe to a
paper by Prof. G. F. Stout on "Some Fundamental Points in the Theory of
Knowledge." We have seen that the problem of error is the difficulty
there is in conceiving how there can be any real thing, any real {85}
object of thought, intermediate between being and not-being. Error
seems to exist and yet to have a nature which is a negation of
existence, and it seems therefore to be a downright contradiction when
we affirm that error or false opinion can _be_--that there is a real
object of thought when we judge falsely. This theory meets the
difficulty directly by distinguishing in the mental act of knowing a
process that is neither perceiving nor thinking of things, and that
involves neither believing nor disbelieving on the one hand nor
desiring or willing on the other: this is the process of supposing.
Corresponding to this mental act of supposing, there is a distinct kind
of object intended or meant by the mind--an object that is neither a
sense datum nor an idea, nor a judgment, but a supposition. Also and
again corresponding to this mental act of supposing and its intended
object the supposition, there is a mode of being which is neither
existence nor non-existence, but is named subsistence. A supposition,
it is said, does not exist--it subsists. This thesis, it will easily
be understood, is based on an analysis, and deals with arguments that
touch the most fundamental problems of theory of knowledge. Moreover,
its presentment is excessively technical, and only those highly trained
in the habit of psychological introspection and skilled in
philosophical analysis are really competent to discuss it. It is not
possible to offer here anything but a simple outline of the part of the
theory that concerns the present problem. The actual experience of
knowing is a relation between two things, one of which is a mental
_act_, the act of perceiving or thinking or having ideas, and the other
is an _object_, that which is perceived or thought of. The act is a
particular mental existence, it is the act of a psychical individual.
The object is not included within the actual experience which is the
knowing of it, it is {86} that which is meant or intended by the
experience. The act, then, is the mental process of meaning or
intending, the object the thing meant or intended. The mental act
differs according to the kind of object intended. The act of
perceiving is the direction of the mind towards sense data and ideas;
the act of judging is the direction of the mind towards judgments or
propositions about things, propositions that affirm or deny relations
between things; the act of supposing is different from both these--it
is the direction of the mind towards suppositions. Suppositions differ
from ideas in this, that they may be either positive or negative,
whereas ideas are never negative. This may seem to contradict
experience. Can we not, for example, have an idea of not-red just as
well as an idea of red? No, the two ideas can easily be seen to be one
and the same; in each case it is red we are actually acquainted with,
and the difference is in affirming or denying existence to the one
idea. The difference is in our judgment, which may be affirmative or
negative. A supposition is like a judgment in this respect; it may be
either affirmative or negative, but it differs from a judgment in
another respect, that while a judgment always conveys a conviction,
always expresses belief or disbelief, a supposition does not--it is
neither believed nor disbelieved.
Before I show the application of this analysis of knowledge to the
problem of error, let me try and clear up its obscurity, for
undoubtedly it is difficult to comprehend. Its difficulty lies in
this, that though all the ideas with which it deals are quite
familiar--suppositions, real and unreal possibilities, fulfilled and
non-fulfilled beliefs--yet it seems to run counter to all our notions
of the extreme simplicity of the appeal to reality. It seems strange
and paradoxical to our ordinary habit {87} of thinking to affirm that
there are real things and real relations between things which though
real yet do not exist, and also that non-existent realities are not
things that once were real but now are nought--they are things that
subsist. Yet this is no new doctrine. The most familiar case of such
realities is that of numbers. The Greeks discovered that numbers do
not exist--that is to say, that their reality is of another kind to
that which we denote by existence. Numbers are realities, otherwise
there would be no science of mathematics. Pythagoras (about 540-500
B.C.) taught that numbers are the reality from which all else is
derived. And there are many other things of the mind that seem indeed
to be more real than the things of sense. It is this very problem of
error that brings into relief this most important doctrine.
Now let us apply this theory of the supposition to the problem of
error, and we shall then see how there can be an object present to the
mind when we judge falsely, and also that the object is the same
whether we judge truly or falsely. Suppositions are real
possibilities; they are alternatives that may be fulfilled or that may
never be fulfilled. These real possibilities, or these possible
alternatives, are objects of thought; they do not belong to the mental
act of thinking; they are not in the mind, but realities present to the
mind. In mere supposing they are present as alternatives; in judging,
we affirm of them or deny of them the relation to general reality that
they are fulfilled. Judgments therefore are true or false accordingly
as the fulfilment they affirm does or does not agree with reality. In
this way, then, we may answer the perplexing question, How can there be
an object of thought in a false judgment? The answer is, that the
objects of thought about which we make judgments are suppositions, and
our judgments {88} concern their fulfilment, and their fulfilment is a
relation external to them--it is their agreement or disagreement with
reality.
CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION
I will now briefly sum up the argument of this book. The problem of
truth is to discover the nature of the agreement between the things of
the mind, our ideas, and the reality of which ideas are the knowledge.
We call the agreement truth. What is it? We have seen that there are
three different answers, namely--(1) That it is a correspondence
between the idea and the reality; (2) That it is the coherence of the
idea in a consistent and harmonious whole; and (3) That it is a value
that we ourselves give to our ideas.
The theory that truth is correspondence we found to offer this
difficulty. To say of an idea that it corresponds with reality
supposes a knowledge of reality in addition to and distinct from the
knowledge that is the idea, and yet the knowledge of reality is the
idea of it. And if it be said that not the idea but the judgment is
what corresponds with reality in truth, this equally supposes a
knowledge of reality that is not a judgment. If, as the common sense
of mankind requires us to believe, the reality that is known by us
exists in entire independence of our relation of knowing to it, how can
we state this fact without falling into contradiction in the very
statement of it? This is the difficulty of a realist theory of knowledge. |
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