CHAPTER III. 



THE TEST OF TRUTH. 



Having now indicated the limits of human knowledge, 

 and marked out the province of that most highly organized 

 kind of knowledge called philosophy, it becomes us next 

 to inquire what are the sources of knowledge, and what is its 

 guaranty ? What is the test of truth which our philosophy 

 shall recognize as valid ? And first, what is Truth ? 



Truth may be provisionally defined as the exact corre- 

 spondence between the subjective order of our conceptions 

 and the objective order of the relations among things. Now 

 since by the very constitution of the knowing process we 

 are debarred from knowing things in themselves, since our 

 highest philosophy must for ever concern itself with phe- 

 nomena and can never hope to deal with objective realities, 

 the question arises, how can we ever ascertain the objective 

 order of the relations among things ? How can we compare 

 fliis objective order with the subjective order of our concep- 

 tions? And without such comparison, how can we ever 

 be certain that the two orders correspond ? Can we then 

 ever hope to possess an objective canon of truth ? And if 

 we cannot obtain any such canon, are we not irresistibly 

 driven to Idealism or to Scepticism, — to the philosophy 

 which denies the existence of any objective reality, or to the 

 philosophy which denies that truth can be attained at all ? 



