274 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



there are countless individual differences in such reactions. 

 What causes pain to one may be a source of pleasure to 

 another, but the pain and the pleasure are alike, for the time 

 being, facts. If I make a mistake or suffer from a halluci- 

 nation, the mistake or the hallucination are none the less 

 facts within my consciousness. The reply is that they are 

 not irrational as facts but only as judgments. What is 

 essential to truth is that they should be recognised for 

 what they are, that is to say, that the assertion made c I 

 feel pain,' c I see a ghost,' should be recognised as states of 

 the person making the assertion, and dependent on his 

 mental constitution. So recognised, there is nothing false 

 about them. Error comes in when the assertion takes 

 something which depends for its existence on the nature 

 of its own mind for something independent of that consti- 

 tution. If the error is eliminated by allowance for the 

 contributory cause the assertion becomes true. 



A second and more subtle objection is that knowledge of 

 the truth itself depends on our mental make-up.' Know- 

 ledge is a state of mind, and is arrived at by mental pro- 

 cesses, and may even be said to be attained under the 

 influence of feeling or desire viz. by the impulse to 

 investigate and the interest in truth. There is, in this 

 sense, a c subjective factor ' in rational thought which cannot 

 be eliminated without eliminating thought itself. These 

 processes and impulses, however, are ex hypothesi not 

 those c peculiarities of the mental make-up ' which disturb 

 our judgment and cause its assertions to diverge from the 

 real character and relations of the objects asserted, and 

 it is these peculiarities, and these only, which have to be 

 eliminated from the work of rational thought. What is 

 irrational is to maintain any assertion without regard to any 

 peculiarity in the constitution or attitude of the asserting 

 consciousness which might cause divergence from the truth. 

 The implication is that truth is objective, i.e. something 

 independent of any opinion that might be formed about it. 

 Except for the facts of the individual consciousness and the 

 changes which the individual has set up in the outer order, 

 the system of truth would remain unaffected by the removal 

 of the individual from the world. Whatever, then, is at 



