Force ^ Energy, and Will 245 



lo hypothesis can a knowledge of 'truth/ in this extreme 

 sense, be always desirable. The utility of informing Pitt on 

 his deathbed of the battle of Austerlitz cannot be very 

 apparent, nor probably would any one affirm that to tell any 

 dying man, with no property to dispose of, that the children 

 he loved were not really his, would be a praiseworthy action. 

 Of course we need not suppose that our friends who are so 

 zealous for truth would go to this extreme, and yet the 

 language used has sometimes been so strong as almost to 

 justify the inference that they would do so, and to imply the 

 existence of a sort of superstitious awe, as if truth was some- 

 thing almost supernatural. Yet 'truth' is but a relation of 

 conformity between mind and objective existence, and if 

 objective existence happens to be itself undesirable, can 

 mental conformity to it be always the reverse ? But granting 

 that by ' truth ' is meant scientific truth only — a knowledge 

 of the facts of nature and her laws — what is meant by 

 ' desirable ' ? That is surely ' desirable ' which each man 

 desires, and most men desire their own well-being, and that 

 of those they care for. Now it is not difficult to imagine 

 cases in which some people might not think a knowledge of 

 certain scientific truths, such as those of toxicology, ' desir- 

 able ' for the sharers even of their bed and board. 



But it will probably be replied that ' desirable ' means 

 * desirable for the human race ' ; and we may therefore pro- 

 ceed at once upon the amiable fiction, that the one supreme 

 desire of the mass of mankind is the welfare of the race, and 

 that there are really very many good enough to agree with 

 Mr. Harrison in really caring about remote generations, 

 existing in seons of time after they (if the hypothesis I am 

 considering is right) have faded into what science, as opposed 

 to rhetoric, must, instead of * infinite azure,' call ' very finite 

 mud.' Moreover, on the conscious-automaton hypothesis, a 

 knowledge of truth or falsehood, being a state of conscious- 



