A. B. Macalliun 71 



has been in the past a long series of beliefs and generalizations 

 which for a time worked and then became superstitions. Truth 

 then will have its palaeontology just as life has, with its myriads of 

 forms which have passed away. 



To those who are inclined to accept the intellectualist's teach- 

 ings, this view of Tnith as earth-born rather than heaven-born, 

 appears repellant and degrading. It does not seem possible for 

 them to idealize it as they can idealize what Carlyle calls " The 

 Eternal Verities." They, with Chaucer, may hold that "Truth is 

 the highest thing a man may keep," and they are prone accordingly 

 to Sublimate it, as the intellectualist does, until it has no earthly 

 affinities. They should remember that Truth of the Absolute 

 School has had a repellent history. Men have in the past assumed 

 that they were in the possession of Absolute Truth and they at- 

 tempted to compel all others to accept it also. Not to receive the 

 Absolute Truth, they held, was to murder the soul, and to prevent 

 such murder the extremest cruelty was considered justifiable. Hence 

 arose persecution, religious wars, death at the stake and on the 

 scafifold, massacres of thousands and relapses into barbarism. 

 Absolute Truth has then its pateontology to remind it that it, like 

 the Truth of Pragmatism, is subject to growth, to evolution and 

 that it may ripen only with the ages. 



From all that I have said it follows that the long discussions on 

 the nature of Truth as the pure intellectualist understands it have 

 been but vain dallyings with illusory ideas. There is no Absolute 

 Truth knowable to the human mind. All that passes for such can, 

 at best, be but a remote approximation to what may, in the final 

 cast of thought in the far-distant future, be a dim limning of the 

 ultimate, the absolute, the fundamental significance of the relations 

 of Reality and Mind. 



Now what is the bearing of all this on Scientific Truth? 



Its significance lies in the fact that the representatives of Sci- 

 ence must always face the question of the validity of its position as 

 an exponent of organized knowledge. There is in the populär mind 

 a notion that the processes by which the facts and generalizations 

 of Science are established are different from those which are em- 

 ployed outside of the laboratory or observatory to establish the 



