38 HUMANISM n 



And certainly I would not deprive you, Plato, of all 

 men of your &quot; noble lies&quot; 



Nor would you say that the useful and the true were 

 quite the same ? 



Not, except in the ideal state, in which no use could 

 be found but for the whole truth, and all were too reason 

 able and too well educated to desire to pursue seeming 

 &quot; truths &quot; which were useless and therefore to be judged 

 false. But might we not ask Aristotle to tell us all that 

 logically follows from the two propositions which I am 

 maintaining, viz. that whatever is true is useful and that 

 whatever is useless is false ? 



Yes. I think you could assist us greatly, Aristotle, 

 by doing this. 



I shall do so with the greatest pleasure, that, to wit, 

 of logical contemplation. If whatever is true is useful it 

 follows that (i) nothing true is useless, and (2) that nothing 

 useless is true, that (3) whatever is useless is false, that (4) 

 some things useful are true, and (5) not false, while (6) 

 some things false are useless and (7) not useful. But since 

 your second proposition that whatever is useless is false, 

 is the third of those which follow from your first, that 

 whatever is true is useful, being indeed its &quot; obverted 

 contra-positive,&quot; it is clear that in this also all the others 

 are implied. 



What a thing it is to be a formal logician and con 

 versant with the forms of immediate inference ! I myself 

 have never been able to break myself of the habit of 

 trying to convert an universal affirmative simply, and I 

 suppose I ought now to be able to guess how far you are 

 from agreeing with a statement which I found lately in a 

 book by one of your Oxford sophists, 2 who seemed to be 

 discussing much the same questions, that &quot;the false is the 

 same as the theoretically untenable &quot; ? You would rather 

 say that it was &quot; the same as the practically untenable &quot; ? 



Yes, the false is that which fails us, and causes us to 

 fail. For I would go on to say that the theoretically 



1 Repiiblic, 414 C. 

 2 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 155. 



