20 LESSONS FEOM NATURE. [CHAP. I. 



to each one who thinks, while he thinks, the proposition 

 A further &quot; thought is,&quot; is a necessary truth. 1 maintain, how- 

 consequence. everj that this proposition can be proved to carry 

 with it (if it is to have any meaning] a store of objective 

 truth, amply sufficient to establish the validity of all first 

 truths. I further maintain that it is impossible intelligently 

 to utter the monosyllable &quot;thought&quot; without thereby lay 

 ing implicitly the foundations of the whole of philosophy, 

 a whole system of universal and necessary truth. 



For the word &quot; thought,&quot; intelligently uttered, must at the 

 what the very least contain the conception of &quot; existence,&quot; 

 ^thought&quot; and involve a psychological judgment which, ex- 

 impiies. pii c ity evolved, is the judgment &quot; thought is.&quot; But 

 a &quot;judgment&quot; has no meaning without both a &quot;subject&quot; and 

 an &quot; object,&quot; and the first of these two words is meaningless 

 without the conception of an &quot; Ego&quot; and &quot; its states,&quot; and the 

 term &quot; object &quot; necessarily carries with it the conception of 

 the &quot; non-Ego actual or possible.&quot; Again, the exclamation 

 &quot; thought,&quot; since it necessarily involves the conception of ex 

 istence or being, carries with it, by necessary correlation, the 

 conception &quot; not being ;&quot; and this, again, necessarily involves 

 &quot; relation &quot; and the principle of contradiction, and therefore 

 the idea &quot; truth ;&quot; and &quot; truth &quot; is meaningless, unless we 

 accept the co-existence of objective being&quot; and &quot;an intel 

 lect,&quot; together with a relation of conformity between the two. 

 What For &quot; truth &quot; is nothing else but a relation of con- 



&quot; formity between some existence and some being that 

 knows such existence. To say that anything is true, as, e.g., 

 that &quot; Mr. Disraeli is our Prime Minister,&quot; is to assert a con 

 formity between the mental judgment so expressed and the 

 really existing external facts signified by that proposition. 



Quite lately * indeed truth has been defined as &quot; the equi 

 valence of the terms of a proposition,&quot; but this definition seems 

 a defective one. When a proposition is declared to be true, 

 it is not its &quot; terms &quot; only which are referred to, but what those 



* See Lewes s Problem* of Life and Mind, vol. ii. p. 88. 



