46 HUMANISM 



in 



question is raised How are we to know whether or not 

 our truth corresponds or agrees with its real object ? 

 For to decide this question must we not be able to com 

 pare thought and reality, and to contemplate each as 

 it is apart from the other ? This however seems impos 

 sible. Thought and Reality cannot be got apart, and 

 consequently the doctrine of their correspondence has 

 in the end no meaning. We are not aware of any reality 

 except by its representation in our thought, and per 

 contra, the whole meaning of thought resides ultimately 

 in its reference to reality. Again, even if it were 

 assumed that somehow the independent reality mirrored 

 itself in our thought, how should we discover whether 

 or not this image was true, i.e. agreed with the in 

 accessible reality it claimed to represent ? This whole 

 theory of truth therefore would seem futile. Having 

 started from the radically untrue and unworkable 

 assumption that truth and fact, thought and reality, 

 are two things which have to be brought into relation, 

 it is inevitably driven to the admission that no such 

 relation can validly be established. 



(2) A second logical definition looks at first more 

 promising. It conceives truth as essentially systematic 

 coherence, the true being that which fits into a 

 system, the false that which is discrepant with it. 

 This has the immense advantage of not creating the 

 chasm between truth and reality in which the former 

 definition was engulfed. Both these conceptions remain 

 immanent in the process of knowledge, which is the 

 construction of a system of reality known to be true 

 by the coherence of its parts. 



This account undoubtedly brings out important features 

 in the nature of Truth, but as it stands, it is so in 

 complete and misleading that we can hardly follow the 

 fashionable logic of the day in accepting it as all we 

 can reasonably want to know about truth. In fact, when 

 we discount the air of mystery, the obscure phraseology 

 and the pompous magniloquence with which this doctrine 

 is propounded, we shall find that all it comes to is that 



