About the Work
The Realm of Truth is the third book of George Santayana’s Realms of Being, published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons and bearing a copyright of 1937 and 1938. It is a work of philosophy rather than narrative, and it belongs to the late, systematic phase of Santayana’s long career, when he was occupied with mapping the several “realms” into which he believed being could be divided—essence, matter, spirit, and truth. The present volume takes up the last of these, and it opens with a set of epigraphs that announce its temper: a Latin line from Horace on living in the present and the irrevocability of the past; a sentence from Dr. Johnson holding that whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses, or makes past or future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings; and a couplet from Clough to the effect that it fortifies the soul to know that, though one wanders, Truth is so. These three quotations, gathered at the threshold, set the tone for a book that is at once austere and consoling, concerned with the eternal and yet preoccupied with the dignity of the thinking creature who can glimpse it.
“It fortifies my soul to know That, though I wander, Truth is so.”
The Preface is candid about its audience. Santayana says that an unsophisticated reader will find no difficulty in understanding the sense in which he uses the word “truth”: it is the ordinary conversational sense, and his refinements are meant only to clarify and confirm that plain signification, not to subvert it. He follows common sense—not in its local conventions, its verbal habits, its mythical and contradictory popular dogmas, but in its general momentum and presuppositions, which he takes to be the only possible foundation of science, literature, and human intercourse. Yet philosophers who use common-sense categories must incidentally criticize and reform them, and the category of truth has lately suffered rough usage. Contemporaries, particularly in America, may irritably ask what he can possibly mean by truth, and so he collects his earlier explanations and sets them out at the start.
The book is thus a work of definition and defense as much as of construction. It is written in a prose that is unhurried, often aphoristic, and frequently ironic, and it assumes in its reader a willingness to follow a long and patient argument about the nature of propositions, facts, essences, and the relation between them. It is not a treatise on how to live, though it has much to say about the moral life; it is not a work of epistemology in the narrow sense, though it is deeply concerned with knowledge; it is, rather, an attempt to say what truth is, what it is not, and why the difference matters.
Context
Santayana wrote The Realm of Truth in the late 1930s, in the period of his life when he had withdrawn from academic teaching and was living in Europe, and the book reflects the concerns of a philosopher who had spent decades thinking about the relation between the life of the spirit and the stubborn facts of the material world. The Preface’s remark that contemporaries, “particularly in America,” may irritably ask what he can mean by truth is a pointed one. It situates the book in a moment when the pragmatic and idealist theories of truth were dominant in the English-speaking world, and when the question of what truth is had become, for many philosophers, a question about the utility or coherence of beliefs rather than about their correspondence to an independent reality.
Santayana’s response to this situation is neither to retreat into a naive realism nor to concede the field to his opponents. He insists that truth is not a quality of ideas in the way that redness is a quality of a rose, nor a function of the practical success of a belief, nor a matter of the coherence of a system of propositions. Truth, properly understood, is the sum of all true propositions—what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities and relations that the world has exemplified or will exemplify. It is all things seen under the form of eternity. Every thinking man assumes an actual, comprehensive, largely undiscovered truth of which he reports a portion. What the psychological critic calls truth, wishing to reduce it to a pragmatic function, is not this underlying truth but merely the abstract quality that all true propositions share—correctness.
The book thus belongs to a long tradition of philosophical reflection on truth that runs from Plato through Aquinas and Descartes to the idealists and pragmatists of Santayana’s own time, and it takes its place in that tradition as a defense of a conception of truth that is at once realist and idealist: realist in its insistence that truth is determined by facts independent of the mind, idealist in its insistence that truth itself is not a fact but an essence, a form, a system of relations that subsists eternally whether or not any mind grasps it. The context of the book is also the context of Santayana’s own system, of which it is the third of four parts, and it presupposes the distinctions—between essence and existence, between matter and spirit—that he had developed in the earlier volumes.
Structure of the Book
The book unfolds through a sequence of chapters that move from the most abstract questions about the nature of truth to the most concrete questions about its role in human life. The first chapter, “There Are No Necessary Truths,” opens the argument by challenging the traditional claim that certain propositions—mathematical equations, the principle that everything has a cause, the ontological proof of God’s existence—are necessary truths. Santayana grants that many such propositions may be necessary by virtue of the definitions given to their terms, and that many may be true because the facts of nature confirm them, but he insists that even when a proposition is both logically necessary and materially true, the necessity comes from one quarter and the truth from another. If essences, or possible terms of thought, are infinite in number and variety, it follows that every particular fact is contingent, arbitrary, and logically unnecessary, since infinite alternatives were open to existence. It is precisely this unnecessary, arbitrary, contingent chance or fatality that determines what shall be true: truth being descriptive of existence and existence being contingent, truth will be contingent also.
The second chapter, “Facts Arbitrary, Logic Ideal,” develops this theme by distinguishing between the realm of facts, which is arbitrary and contingent, and the realm of logic, which is ideal and necessary. The chapter opens by noting that one philosopher professing to have proved some metaphysical tenet, and another professing to have refuted it, might leave the reader cold; it is not in those regions that he ordinarily feels sure of the truth. The text asks whether there are no truths obviously necessary to common sense: if I have mislaid my keys, mustn’t they be somewhere? If a child is born, mustn’t he have had a father? “Must” is a curious word, pregnant for the satirist: it seems to redouble the certainty of a fact, while really admitting that the fact is only conjectured. The necessity asserted foolishly parades the helplessness of the mind to imagine anything different. Yet this helplessness, on which dogmatism rests, is shameful, and is secretly felt to be shameful. Spirit was born precisely to escape such limitations, to see the contingency and finitude of every fact, and to imagine as many alternatives and extensions as possible, some of which may be true, and may put that casual fact in its true setting.
The third chapter, “Interplay Between Truth and Logic,” takes up the distinction laid down between logic and truth, and the claim that truth as defined is wholly contingent. Santayana has no desire to quarrel with mankind for using words as they choose, talking of truth where there is only consistency. There is much truth possible regarding ideas: psychological and historical truth, and formal truth in describing an accepted idea in different terms, which may analyse that idea and bring out its essential affinities. Mathematics, logic, and a certain kind of psychology may create a phenomenological science—a faithful description of a field of essence already selected and named. According to the genius of the English language, whatever is faithful and trusty may be called true. This idiomatic use of “true” is semi-moral, turning on not belying one’s professions and being constant to a plighted troth. Serious thought requires this fidelity. We begin by noticing and liking some idea, and the earnestness of attention becomes a pledge not to drop that idea. Truth to it and to ourselves demands making it clearer and more unmistakable; perhaps, by an illusion known to lovers, we attribute to our first intuition a prophetic force, as if it had predestined us to later developments.
The fourth chapter, “Psychological Approaches to Truth,” argues that even if mathematical ideas were less exactly true of the world, possessing them would be indirect evidence of cognitive value. If we would show them false, we must propose truer ideas about the field of action or the dynamic world. If reality were confined to spiritual being, mathematics would be useless and its study idle; a faith founded on logic is acrobatic and insane, as Pascal’s self-torture shows. It was hard practical evidence, not logical necessity, that suggested and confirmed mathematical ideas. Animal faith honours mathematical science for measuring reliably the footsteps of material power. If mathematics measures these footsteps perfectly, it is perfectly true. The reality of psychologists—subjective presence, sensuous or conceptual—belongs to a different moral or aesthetic sphere, not mediated by animal faith and not itself conveying knowledge of truth, though the account of such experience conveyed later by memory or sympathetic fancy may be true; often the art of fiction tells us the truth about the mind’s natural fictions.
The fifth chapter, “Radiation of Truth,” restates that truth is subservient to existence—ontologically secondary and true of something else. Though generated by existence, truth may itself be ideal. The blind flux of existence precipitates a thousand relations and accidents of form by merely flowing. Truth is such a supervening form: not accidental in being avoidable, since by existing the world fatally determines the truth about itself, but accidental in adding an impalpable eternal dimension to transitory being. Events did not intend to be recorded, yet in truth they leave an indelible portrait; even if things escape observation, they cannot escape having been what they were. Existence may also generate beauty or goodness, but not with the same pervasiveness. Beauty and goodness are far more accidental than truth, arising only at certain junctures when streams of events meet and mingle in temporary harmony, which psyches may feel and rejoice in. Truth arises by automatic radiation from every region of fact, since no event can occur without rendering it eternally true that such an event and no other fills that point of space and time.
The sixth chapter, “Conventional Truths,” opens with a concrete illustration: a newspaper reports that on a given day the sun rises at 7:35 a.m. and sets at 3:58 p.m., information supplied by the Greenwich Observatory. Santayana grants this is true and accurate, barring misprints. But good sense forbids taking it absolutely or physically, since the sun of itself never rises or sets; even relative to human observers it seldom rises so late or sets so early—an “extreme wintry laziness.” The proposition is meant historically, not generally or scientifically. Like all historical propositions describing incidental facts, its truth depends on its incidence—fixing the time and place, here London on November 25th, 1935. Nor is it a precise psychological truth about particular individuals’ experiences; probably no Londoner saw the sun rise or set that day. If truth were reduced to truths of experience, there would be no truth in the matter at all. What is meant is that, at that date, astronomical conditions were such that, absent clouds, fog, and smoke, the sun’s first and last rays would have struck London chimney-tops at those hours, or the eyes of any Cockney looking in the requisite direction from his attic window.
The seventh chapter, “Dramatic Truth,” and the eighth, “Moral Truth,” turn from the abstract and the conventional to the passionate and the practical. The dramatic moral climate of human life is not a separate realm from matter but a passionate experience of the same matter. Society and moral life do not present two separable worlds—one of bodies, one of minds. A world of mere minds (a heaven of bodiless angels) exacts no belief from the sceptic, and the author declares himself as far as possible a sceptic, so such a world does not figure in his philosophy. Conversely, a world of mindless automata (like Descartes’s beast-machines) is a violently artificial object conceived in mathematical and mechanical terms, though actually perceived in sensuous and dramatic terms. Bodies do more than amuse the eye: some are noxious beasts, some family members; they suckle or hit, and are known by their works before being distinguished by aspect. Even crude physical forces wear a dramatic aspect when violent or when arousing violent emotion. Spirit then rises or falls, and the cause is felt as the action of spirits and gods—mythical beings not fancifully added to physical beings but moral energies recognized as the core of material facts. That souls exist and move bodies is the primary form in which any sensitive soul conceives natural forces.
The ninth chapter, “Truth Supertemporal,” proposes that the relation of truth to time seems simple: make a complete report of all events in time, and you have the truth. But such a complete event-report is only a pure ideal, pursued in all truth-telling but never attainable. Whether in the witness-box or the laboratory, the “whole truth” we are pledged to tell can never be told: it would take too long, longer than the events took to happen, and our means of observation and expression are limited. Considering the total truth of the universe, the impossibility of knowing it is intrinsic: for even a superhuman survey of history to be complete, the last future event would have had to occur; then an actual survey (a fresh event) could not supervene, or if it did, it could not be all-inclusive, since the survey itself would add an important event to history. Truth therefore forms an ideal realm of being, impersonal and super-existential. Though everything in the panorama of history is temporal, the panorama itself is dateless: the sum and system of events cannot be one of them, cannot occur after or before anything else. Thus the truth about existence differs in ontological quality from existence itself. Life and motion are gone; all scales equally real, all ages equally present; intensity, actuality, suffering have become historical. Truth is like the moon, beautiful but dead. Yet truth is richer than existence at any moment: it retains the essence of all moments equally and contains what no moment can contain—the systems moments form unawares by co-existing and alternating.
The tenth chapter, “Cognition of the Future,” and the eleventh, “Truth and Chance,” and the twelfth, “Love and Hatred of Truth,” bring the book to its close by considering how truth is known, how it relates to chance and destiny, and how human beings regard it. The final chapter, “Love and Hatred of Truth,” examines the ambivalence with which the human mind confronts the truth: the desire to know and the desire to be deceived, the love of truth that is the mark of the philosopher and the hatred of truth that is the mark of the passionate and the proud. The book ends not with a triumphant affirmation but with a recognition of the tragic ambiguity of truth in human life: truth confronts existence with divine authority and an insoluble problem of self-knowledge. It is not congruous with life’s nature that truth be completely revealed to it; glimpses come only in tragic moments or to strangely disinterested minds, and the revelation is dangerous even when entrancing. The world may, like Narcissus, fall in love with its own image seen in truth; but at another moment that image may become a Gorgon and petrify the eye that beholds it.
Inside the Book
Epigraphs and Preface: The Ordinary Sense of Truth
The book opens with three epigraphs that set its temper. Horace is quoted on living in the present and the irrevocability of what is past; Dr. Johnson supplies the thought that whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses, or makes past or future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings; and Clough contributes a couplet on how it fortifies the soul to know that, though one wanders, Truth is so. The title page identifies the work as The Realm of Truth, Book Third of Realms of Being, published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons, with copyright dates of 1937 and 1938.
In the Preface, Santayana insists that an unsophisticated reader will have no difficulty with his sense of “truth”: it is the ordinary conversational sense, and his refinements aim only to clarify and confirm it, not to subvert it. He follows common sense not in its local conventions, verbal myths, or contradictory popular dogmas, but in its general momentum and presuppositions—the only possible foundation of science, literature, and human intercourse. Yet philosophers who use common-sense categories must incidentally criticize and reform them. The category of truth has lately suffered rough usage, and contemporaries, particularly in America, may irritably ask what he can possibly mean by it; he therefore collects his earlier explanations.
Truth properly means the sum of all true propositions—what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities and relations the world has exemplified or will exemplify; it is all things seen under the form of eternity. Every thinking man assumes an actual, comprehensive, largely undiscovered truth of which he reports a portion. What the psychological critic calls truth, wishing to reduce it to a pragmatic function, is not this underlying truth but merely the abstract quality all true propositions share—correctness. The possibility of correctness puzzles the idealist who identifies ideas with their objects. An idea can be correct or incorrect only if “idea” means an opinion, not a datum; an opinion is true if what it talks about is constituted as the opinion asserts. It is not similarity between a passive datum and a hidden object but identity between a fact asserted and a fact existing; if an opinion could not freely leap to its object, it could not even be wrong.
The experience that awakens even the empiricist to the being of truth is other people lying. When falsely accused, one rebels against the contradiction to evident self-knowledge; since the other man calls the liar myself, and a third person might decide against me, I learn that a report may fly in the face of facts. There is a comprehensive standard description for every fact, which truthful reporters partly repeat and liars contradict. Even the liar must recognize the fact somewhat, else it would not be that fact he misrepresents; honest memory and belief are not exhaustive nor themselves the standard, being now clearer, now vaguer, subject to error and correction. That standard comprehensive description, which no man can wholly repeat, is the truth about it.
When “truth” means abstract correctness, another word—”fact” or “reality”—would be needed for the standard description. But a fact is not a description of itself; “reality,” if meaning existence, cannot designate a description, which is an essence only. Facts are transitory; when lapsed, only their essence subsists, and being partially recovered in retrospective judgment can render that judgment true. Opinions are true or false by repeating or contradicting part of the truth about the facts they envisage.
Truth is not an opinion, even an ideally true one: besides limitation in scope, even the most complete opinion would give precedence to some terms and have a direction of survey, which might be changed or reversed without error; truth is the field various true opinions traverse in various directions, not any opinion itself. Discourse is an event with a date not that of its subject-matter, and in humans is conversant almost entirely with the past, whereas truth is dateless and absolutely identical whether opinions arise before or after the event described.
If there were no absolute truth, all-inclusive and eternal, the desultory views of individuals would themselves be absolute, irrelevant to one another and incomparable in truth, each having no object but the essence appearing in it. Views can be more or less correct and complementary because they refer to the same system of nature, whose complete description covering past and future would be absolute truth. This absolute truth is that segment of the realm of essence illustrated in existence. Whether a given essence belongs to this segment—whether a suggested idea is true—has tragic importance for an animal intent on discovering and describing what exists, has existed, or is destined to exist. We seldom dwell on essences apart from their presumable truth; even their beauty and dialectical pattern seem trivial unless significant of facts in the realm of matter controlling destiny. He therefore names this tragic segment the Realm of Truth.
A comprehensive description of any fact includes all its radiations—the perspective of the world of facts and realm of essence obtained by taking this fact as centre and viewing everything else in relation to it. The truth about any fact is infinitely extended, growing thinner as you travel from it to further facts or less relevant ideas; it is the splash a fact makes, the penumbra it spreads by dropping through the realm of essence. No opinion can embrace it all or identify itself with it, nor can it be identified with the facts it relates to, since they are in flux and it is eternal. The eternity of truth is inherent: all truths, not a few grand ones, are equally eternal. Inspired people, too hot to think, identify truth with their own tenets.
There Are No Necessary Truths
The first chapter opens by noting that tradition is rich in maxims called necessary truths, such as that 2+2=4, that space and time are infinitely divisible, that everything has a cause, and that God, or the most real being, necessarily exists. Many such propositions may be necessary by virtue of the definitions given to their terms; many may be true because the facts of nature confirm them; and some may be both necessary logically and true materially—but even then the necessity comes from one quarter and the truth from another.
This conclusion would be evident to anyone who had clearly conceived the nature of infinite Being or the realm of essence—a conception easy and inevitable once attention has lighted upon it. If essences, or possible terms of thought, are infinite in number and variety, it follows that every particular fact is contingent, arbitrary, and logically unnecessary, since infinite alternatives were open to existence. It is precisely this unnecessary, arbitrary, contingent chance or fatality that determines what shall be true: truth being descriptive of existence and existence being contingent, truth will be contingent also.
That 2+2=4, like all mathematics, is an equation making explicit certain essential relations between certain terms. Essential relations are all necessary, being based on the definitions or intuitions which distinguish those related terms; though it is by no means necessary or even possible to explore all the essential relations of the terms selected. In human mathematics there is a human element: each intuitive mind darts in its own congenial direction. If the essences first chosen are not dropped and confused with others, all explorations will help to fill in the same map.
So far truth has not been broached, and mathematics is like music, freely exploring possibilities of form. Yet mathematics holds true of things, hugging and permeating them far more closely than does confused and inconstant human perception. The dream of many exasperated critics of human error has been to assimilate all science to mathematics, so as to make knowledge safe by making it, as Locke wished, direct perception of the relations between ideas. Unfortunately, knowledge would then never touch those matters of fact on which Locke was intent. The only serious value of those logical explorations would lie in their possible relevance to the accidents of existence. The seriousness of mathematics comes precisely of its remarkable and exact relevance to material facts. When once any essence falls within the sphere of truth, all its essential relations do so too; and the necessity of these relations will form a necessary complement to a proposition that happens to be true. This same necessity, however, would have nothing to do with truth if the terms it connects were not exemplified in existence.
Mathematical calculations far outrunning experiment often turn out to be true of the physical world, as if they could be true a priori. But in fact nature, which had to have some form or other, is organized and deployed on principles which, in human language, are called number, shape, and measurable time; categories which have taken root in human language and science. Yet these categories would have no truth or applicability whatever if existence were entirely mental and sentimental. They would then be ideal fictions or games of apperception, with their own sporting rules, like the game of chess, but with no cognitive function in respect to the dynamic world.
There is a psychological sphere to which logic and mathematics do not apply. There, the truth is dramatic. That 2+2=4 is not true of ideas. One idea added to another, in an actual intuition, makes still only one idea, or it makes three: for the combination, with the relations perceived, forms one complex essence, and yet the original essences remain distinct. This holds of all moral, aesthetic, and historical units: they are merged and reconstituted with every act of apperception. Each essence evoked reverts, when lost sight of, to its limbo of latent forms. It cannot contribute genetically or dynamically, being unsubstantial, to compose the next apparition. Although life in plants and animals may be capable of mathematical treatment at one pervasive material level, none of the vital unities or tropes are so capable. Moreover, this is not due altogether to the imagination superposing its views on the flux of existence: for the special organic unity which breeds imagination and will cannot be itself imaginary, since it creates a specific fact—namely, this very will or imagination. There are therefore levels of reality, and these the most important to mankind, that elude all mathematical axioms.
In the second maxim adduced, that space and time are infinitely divisible, we pass to an axiom the truth of which is extremely doubtful, even in the physical world. Specious space and time—extension and duration as given to intuition, and space and time as defined geometrically—are indeed infinitely divisible. Scale in them is elastic and utterly unsubstantial, so that there is room for the most elaborate ideal event or object within the smallest fraction of time or space. But this hardly seems true in the chemical or animal or astronomical spheres, where scale is not variable fantastically: and this for the best of reasons—namely, that in nature empty space and time do not pre-exist, so that existent beings of extensible and unascertainable dimensions may drop into them later; but on the contrary a physical flux, pulsing through natural moments and carrying a definite volume of events with it, creates a real time by its rhythms and a real space by its organic complexity. These native dimensions of the real may indeed be measured and graphically noted in our science, as living music may be measured and noted in a musical score: but the ideal qualities of the medium remain distinct from the living fact.
The Ontological Argument and the Contingency of Existence
The passage opens by contrasting two poles of reflection.
The Pride of Mathematics and the Limits of Logic
The argument begins by locating the cognitive ambition deep in human nature: physically it lives in hunting and fighting, spiritually in a taste for truth, so that being deceived is as hateful to the mind as it is dangerous to the body. But impatience and vanity intervene, and imagination rather than fact comes to dominate human knowledge, lending importance and felt reality to alleged facts. Impetuous thought then claims a double truth—truth to inspiration legitimately, truth to fact abusively—while the vital and moral heat inseparable from thinking renders logic dogmatic and seduces it from ideal cogency into posing as material truth.
The mathematician is granted a justification: his original data are simple and true, tested and clarified in daily life from time immemorial, so his speculative superstructure retains a diminishing affinity to material truth apart from logical validity. Yet the glory of mathematics lies not in that link to contingent fact but in an almost humorous compulsiveness of logical development—whence its reputation for certitude, unmerited in its higher reaches, which can make it, even for an empiricist like Locke, the ideal of knowledge. Here the pride of mathematics, like that of theology, comes before a fall. There is no end of science or learning in both pursuits, but mathematics, like theology, is knowledge of nothing but itself. True knowledge, natural knowledge, should be cognizance that one existing thing takes of another; this is a form of faith, justified in continual physical contacts between knower and known, whereas mathematics and theology trace ideal relations for their own sake and end in the air.
The bad repute into which logic fell at the Renaissance for being tautological might overtake mathematics, were it not for mathematics’ utility in the applied arts. In themselves the higher mathematics, despite or because of their exactitude, have not the direct savour of truth; they are scholastic, almost occult, and the hearty lover of truth distrusts such acrobatic marvels, trusting instead experiment, exploration, and the warm immediacy of action and passion. He would be right to laugh if logic or mathematics pretended to truth—but that claim is foisted on them by the dogmatism of common perception, contrary to their proper genius, like the claim to truth or utility foisted by pedagogues on the fine arts. Philosophy has too long been pedagogical. If liberty has opened a window toward the infinite realm of essence, it has not authorized us to regard that prospect as the truth about nature, much less to set up our visions as moral standards. The order of subordination is the opposite: nature being what she is, certain reaches of essence are obvious to our senses and intellect; sights, sounds, pains, and pleasures assail us, and our leisure develops music, language, mathematics, and religion. This play of ideas will not be sheer truancy: our toys may become instruments, our sensations signs, and part of the truth about nature and ourselves will be revealed directly in emotion, perception, and dramatic sympathy, and indirectly by positing permanent objects.
Psychological Approaches to Truth
Chapter IV argues that even if mathematical ideas were less exactly true of the world, possessing them would be indirect evidence of cognitive value. If we would show them false, we must propose truer ideas about the field of action or the dynamic world. If reality were confined to spiritual being, mathematics would be useless and its study idle; a faith founded on logic is acrobatic and insane, as Pascal’s self-torture shows. It was hard practical evidence, not logical necessity, that suggested and confirmed mathematical ideas. Animal faith honours mathematical science for measuring reliably the footsteps of material power. If mathematics measures these footsteps perfectly, it is perfectly true. The reality of psychologists—subjective presence, sensuous or conceptual—belongs to a different moral or aesthetic sphere, not mediated by animal faith and not itself conveying knowledge of truth, though the account of such experience conveyed later by memory or sympathetic fancy may be true; often the art of fiction tells us the truth about the mind’s natural fictions.
Intuition, simply sensibility focussed and noticing, comes upon essences, not things, because as attention takes notice it suspends the animal faith involved in fear, care, or the impulse to react to a stimulus. When clarified and thoroughly actualized, all data are essences; if spirit could actualize everything it would live in its congenial ideal world, as it does in mathematics, poetry, and music. But in animal life this remains an interlude. Living attention comes upon essences with a bias, from a particular vital angle; they are stepping-stones in a distracted career. Essences do not dictate in what direction their relations shall be traced; they have no movement, selectiveness, or propulsion. The choice of path is made by the animal mind under suasion of casual interests or vegetative growth. Poetry does not make itself; poets must make it, and mathematicians must make mathematics. Narrow paths are opened by accident through the compact thicket of essential Being; later comers may suppose they survey the whole labyrinth and discover the eternal Logos or self-chosen necessary truth. But the labyrinth, being infinite, offers all choices; the pattern actually traced was selected by accident.
Logic is a refined form of grammar. If one obeys a tendency and establishes a rule that nouns be masculine or feminine, and that adjectives match and prolong the gender of their substantives, then propriety requires adjectives and nouns to possess gender and march in couples, girls with girls and boys with boys. This contrast, artificial in things without sex, opens the way to charming assonances and beckonings of word to word, enabling us to pick our way through a minuet of cross-references, as in an ode of Horace. Yet grammar need never have adopted so fantastic a sexual analogy.
Radiation of Truth
Human logic and mathematics are not faulty for being limited; even a reformed intellect with new axioms and ideal systems would not fit all reality, since Nature is in flux. This flux may move in any number of streams by any variety of methods; even an exact formula for everything would become worthless if the flux took a new turn and changed its fluid constitution.
Chapter V begins by restating that truth is subservient to existence—ontologically secondary and true of something else. Though generated by existence, truth may itself be ideal. The blind flux of existence precipitates a thousand relations and accidents of form by merely flowing. Truth is such a supervening form: not accidental in being avoidable, since by existing the world fatally determines the truth about itself, but accidental in adding an impalpable eternal dimension to transitory being. Events did not intend to be recorded, yet in truth they leave an indelible portrait; even if things escape observation, they cannot escape having been what they were.
Existence may also generate beauty or goodness, but not with the same pervasiveness. Beauty and goodness are far more accidental than truth, arising only at certain junctures when streams of events meet and mingle in temporary harmony, which psyches may feel and rejoice in. Truth arises by automatic radiation from every region of fact, since no event can occur without rendering it eternally true that such an event and no other fills that point of space and time.
Truth, though only a field of essence, radiates from contingent fact and is determined and limited by it; truth in turn establishes harmonies and distinctions dominating the realm of thought. Thought is originally aroused by events and directed upon them; it is indicative. Even when most slumberous, consciousness in man is partly cognitive and interested in truth. Truth becomes the arbiter of success in intelligent adjustment of living beings to their conditions. This adjustment is physical, but its token for the spirit comes in foresight, sane imagination, and sentiments pertinent to the facts. Consciousness must aspire to possess the truth. Truth is declared, however partially, by any opinion that prophesies an event before it arises, describes it while occurring, or reports it after. Such opinions are incidental to truth and reproduce it in part; the truth in its wholeness outruns and completes their several deliverances and is the standard they conform to insofar as they are true.
The possible discovery of truth is often confused with truth itself, as if truth were like error, the moral quality of some idea or judgment. But an idea or judgment is only true if it reports the truth, and false if it contradicts the truth. That which is true is the proposition, relation, or other essence actually illustrated in the facts. If asserted in a judgment, the judgment is true by participation. This participation is neither an ontological reproduction by the judgment of the object, nor a vital compatibility with all other judgments. Not the assertion as a psychological fact is true, but only that which it asserts. The difference between true and false ideas as states of mind is a moral difference: true ideas being safer, probably clearer and more humorous, marking success in understanding the world; false ideas marking failure. Even this moral quality is not intrinsic; a scent, olfactory or intellectual, may be a true scent discriminating objects in important practical relations, whereas the clearest images and definitions may be of mere essences and not at all true.
The term “idea” is trebly ambiguous: it may mean an essence (the theme or internal object of a feeling or thought); the feeling or thought itself (the moment of living intuition); or a feeling or thought raised to the self-transcendent value of a belief or judgment affirming the given essence to be true of some further object. In the third sense, an idea means an opinion and may be called true or false by assimilation or contrariety to the truth of its object. But an idea that is an innocent feeling or thought, asserting nothing, cannot be true or false: it is a pure intuition of an essence. Much less can the essences given in such intuition be true or false in themselves. An idea in the third sense can be true or false only if it reports or contradicts some part of the truth; to do this it must be other than an inert essence and more than a pure feeling or thought—it must be a judgment affirming a given essence of an ulterior object, in which that essence may or may not be exemplified.
Truth, though descriptive of existence, has no existence of its own and remains an ideal standard for any opinions professing to be true. The empirical relations which an opinion may have in the world have nothing to do with its truth. If an idea is useful, it is useful, not true; if beautiful or comforting, not therefore true; if harmonious with another idea, both together may be a worse illusion. Nor would perfect coherence in the longest of dreams make the dream true, although if it contained intelligent mutual descriptions of one part by another, those parts would report a part of the truth about one another. Yet the total truth about that dream would be that it was a dream and all sheer illusion. To reduce truth to coherence is to deny truth and usurp that name for a certain comfort and self-complacency in mere thinking.
Here appears a curious self-degradation latent in egotism: one seems to make oneself and one’s experience absolute, yet by that arrogance cuts oneself off from all intellectual dominion over anything else, renouncing natural knowledge or genuine truth. This fate overtakes the empiricist or pragmatist no less than the absolute idealist.
Conventional Truths
A newspaper reports that on a given day the sun rises at 7:35 a.m. and sets at 3:58 p.m.
Moral Truth and the Limits of Imperatives
The argument turns to how parties move from fighting enemies in battle to the “envenomed refutation” of the enemies’ feelings as false. Each side embraces its maxims not as its own, worth being true to, but as the only true maxims. This might be dismissed as excusable heat or a technical slip, yet when passion usurps the name of truth, the very idea of truth is tarnished. Usage leads us to speak of truth within logic and convention, and likewise in morals. There are good reasons for acquiescing in this extension: in willing as in knowing there is much substitution and representation. Moral passions, carried by automatic words and ideas, may be deceptive or hollow, passing like storm-clouds over the conscience and misinterpreting the soul’s inmost allegiance. Such passions and the judgments they dictate may be called false, since they blind us to matters of fact and deceive us about our own fundamental needs. Integrity—the clear allegiance of a transparent soul to its radical will—makes a man’s choices true to himself and banishes moral illusions. The same true presentation of latent interests may extend to political action: a government or party may pursue true or false aims, in line with or against the radical and permanent interests of the people. Thus truth and error are possible in morals insofar as they are truths or errors in self-knowledge.
The commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” though hortatory, may be translated into propositions that are true or false. In the sphere of action—which, distinguishing moral from spiritual life, is the sphere of morals—an imperative is an order to a dependent, intended as indirect or suspended compulsion. A commandment to love would be an order to act as if we loved, implying that if we did not, our neighbours and God would act as if they did not love us—a true or false prophecy that might guide the will. But love, spiritually considered, is a feeling, and an imperative in the sphere of feeling becomes nebulous. Love might be awakened by contagion, in return for love, or extended from an object already loved to a kindred object. In terms of pure feeling the precept might run: Love thy neighbour because God loves him, and thou lovest God because God loves thee. Less emotionally: Value others for their own sake, because they too are centres of life and values; consider them, as Kant counselled, always as ends and never merely as means. In fact they are ends to themselves as much as you are to yourself. Here, in respect to all living beings, not merely other men, we reach a necessary truth, since life means precisely the power in organisms to grow and propagate as if they loved their own being.
Yet this ethical truth is not and cannot become a moral commandment. The categorical nerve of every imperative is vital; it expresses an actual movement of the will. Though it is evident that life in every form has intrinsic values, it does not follow that these values are unanimous or that life in one form can adopt, or morally ought to adopt, the interests of life in every other form. This would be the death of all morality, not its perfection. The will of the storm, of Neptune or Jupiter Tonans, cannot with self-knowledge be adopted by the struggling creature about to be destroyed. The will of the enemy cannot be incorporated into that of the soldier; the will of the tempter, the interests of a rival in love, the tastes of the vulgar, cannot be weighed against the constitutive will and radical virtue of one’s own being. Reason may harmonize a soul’s impulses, but it would be self-betrayal to abdicate them in a brotherly compromise with cobras, monkeys, idiots, sophists and villains. Against a threatening deity there is always some protecting deity, or another side of the same deity; licence may be allowed to beasts and barbarians in their own preserves so long as they do not trespass on ours. There is a mystical insight proper to spirit within ourselves—spirit not being specifically human—that perceives the universal innocence of life amid universal war; but this insight cannot impose on the psyche ways contrary to her native ways, nor has impartial spirit reason to wish it. Life is a form of order, a rhythmic self-responsive organization in parcels of matter, arising in a thousand places and forms. If reason or spirit or any mystic influence imposed on each creature the contrary impulses of all others, it would induce not universal harmony but universal death, solving the moral problem only by dissolving all goods, arts, species and individuals.
Because moral life is inwardly grounded, physical truths are the only guide it will willingly accept. A contrary purpose merely arouses hostility, but a contrary fact may inspire caution. The author recalls his nurse’s childhood warning against swallowing cherry-stones: if he did, a cherry-tree would grow out of his mouth. This is the principle on which moralists usually recommend their systems: the preacher, actuated by an unexplained intense sentiment he wishes to propagate, invents startling circumstances to justify it. The method is dangerous: images evoked under such stress are likely to be grotesque, like the traditional picture of hell-torments or atrocities imputed to an enemy in war; and even if the invention were true or the fraud undiscovered, the sentiments aroused in a half-moralized public would lack the intensity and purity of the preacher’s. Where he was all moral enthusiasm or sinister superstition, his flock will be lazy, prudential, or prim. What creates morality is not facts nor their consequences, but human terror or desire feeling its way.
Truth as Timeless and Super-Existential
The relation of truth to time seems simple: make a complete report of all events in time, and you have the truth. But such a complete event-report is only a pure ideal, pursued in all truth-telling but never attainable. Whether in the witness-box or the laboratory, the “whole truth” we are pledged to tell can never be told: it would take too long, longer than the events took to happen, and our means of observation and expression are limited. Considering the total truth of the universe, the impossibility of knowing it is intrinsic: for even a superhuman survey of history to be complete, the last future event would have had to occur; then an actual survey—a fresh event—could not supervene, or if it did, it could not be all-inclusive, since the survey itself would add an important event to history.
Truth therefore forms an ideal realm of being, impersonal and super-existential. Though everything in the panorama of history is temporal, the panorama itself is dateless: the sum and system of events cannot be one of them, cannot occur after or before anything else. Thus the truth about existence differs in ontological quality from existence itself. Life and motion are gone; all scales equally real, all ages equally present; intensity, actuality, suffering have become historical. Truth is like the moon, beautiful but dead. Yet truth is richer than existence at any moment: it retains the essence of all moments equally and contains what no moment can contain—the systems moments form unawares by co-existing and alternating. Truth might figuratively be called the memory of the universe, but is far more, since the universe’s destiny is included. If we call the world’s past “memory,” we must imagine it complete and unmixed with error; regarding the future, truth looms before advancing events with tragic ambiguity, like an oracle heard and known to the infallible but impossible to decipher. Though truth is created by contingent events and secondary to them, and destiny is but the confluence of successive spontaneities, truth confronts existence with divine authority and an insoluble problem of self-knowledge. It is not congruous with life’s nature that truth be completely revealed to it; glimpses come only in tragic moments or to strangely disinterested minds, and the revelation is dangerous even when entrancing. The world may, like Narcissus, fall in love with its own image seen in truth; but at another moment that image may become a Gorgon and petrify the eye that beholds it.
Truth would not be complete if it left unrecorded that asymmetrical lapse and precipitation of motion in which it cannot participate. Change, translated into terms of truth, becomes the genealogy and measure of change; events become the subject-matter of science and history. Constitutional incapacity to change is not a defect in truth but proof of its staunchness and its privilege of permeating existence without forfeiting its ideality. One event cannot be the truth of another. While each fact undergoes change by yielding its place and substance to a new fact, the truth of that occurrence can be only the form of the successive facts with the form of the transition between them.
We should have no notion of change if we did not undergo it; yet it is not by merely passing that facts breed memory or an intuition of change. It is the revealed enrichment, complexity, and multiform tensions of organic life as it flows that enable us to feel life flowing. Intellectual synthesis does not require any existential element to be in two moments at once; but material energies, rich in vital potentialities, can become conscious of changes on foot. This happens when a psyche, organized for growth and sensitive to opportunity, adjusted to past and future, feels at each moment the suspense, duration, and lapse of time. The canvas is then spread for imagination to paint upon, and history and science do nothing but fill it in. At each moment we are accompanied by a sense of prolonged events in their wholeness—as they lie in the realm of truth. For only in the realm of truth can events be unified or divided. The concentration of existence in the moving present prevents contrasts, repetitions, or derivations from disrupting that momentary reality; yet this reality, by continually pulsing and changing, renders such contrasts, repetitions, and derivations true.
It is precisely this continuity of events and these truths about them that intelligence comes to perceive: not imagining and positing those truths falsely, as the enemies of intelligence suggest, but imagining and positing them truly—because if there were no substantial derivation of event from event, and if generation were not bridged by the truth of generation, no proposition could have an existing object, and all signs and beliefs would be equally vain. For example, there could be no identity between the child of A and the father of C, since B would be contiguous with each only under a different aspect; nor could the B who had A for his father be identical with the B whom A had for his son. Each flash of change would be a separate universe; events would have no dates and compose no history.
Such a disruption of nature, or chaos of particulars, is not logically impossible. It might be the truth; but then all sensation and thought would terminate upon mere essence, and the idea of a flux of experience would be false, since between actual moments there would be no transition, and time would be unrolled into a firmament of simultaneous facts. If chronology can be a true science, memory and dramatic imagination must be organs of truth; they must be truly inspired. The prophets of mutation, who say all is change, are against their will shining instances of intelligence: far from sinking with every wave, they perceive the continuity that makes change intelligible.
The Love and Hatred of Truth
If critical and empirical motives governed science absolutely, science would disappear. It would dissolve into autobiography and a “perfect democracy of theories,” each treated as an idle idea varying with mood; and once memory and solipsism were criticized in turn, zeal for truth would end by denying the notion of truth altogether. This would be the mind’s second childhood: not the innocent joy in appearance and language, as if nothing could be false, but a collapse into idiocy, as if nothing could be true.
Rigorous critics and innovators, however, are far from such apathy. They strip off one mask of truth only to substitute another, truer image, often joining elder dogmatists in claiming that their proposed mask perfectly resembles the original. Not all of an honest man’s zeal—traditionalist or reformer—is arrested at the specific doctrines he identifies with truth; the better part pierces the symbol and rests in truth itself, pure and absolute, which wears that mask for the moment. Thus not all partisan or fantastic zeal is hypocrisy: within a fanatical defence of vested illusions there may lie a sacrificial respect for things beyond us. The martyr ready to die on earth for a false opinion may be judged in heaven to have died for the truth. The absurdity or groundlessness of a tenet at least proves imagination at work, groping for an issue from animal darkness; the category of truth has been set up, appearances questioned as deceptive—not merely against a blank background of posited substance known only as force, but in contrast to a possible, more adequate description of that substance and how it produces appearances. Intelligence has begun the pursuit of truth.
Does this pursuit deserve the name of love? There must be a total, exact collocation of facts, and the universe must have a form we call its truth; but why should anyone love that collocation, in its perhaps infinite, certainly inhuman minuteness and extent? Why desire to know this tiresome truth except for human purposes on the scale of gross experience? We may love pleasures, perceptions, dogmas, safety, dominion, victory in argument—but if truth is none of these, why love it? The answer is that there is no reason why we should love the truth; no reason why we should love anything. Causes, according to nature’s strain or routine, bring about love of various things on various occasions. Nature breeds life, life is aflame with love and its opposite; no reason this spiritual passion should stop at bodily concerns or social affairs rather than extend to all relations radiating from bodily life into the realms of truth and essence. This radiation is passive and formal, yet physical organization must take account of it if life is to prosper; this tension of life toward the eventual, distant, past and future becomes conscious and bursts into actuality in spirit. Spirit is a child of truth. Matter in any moment or atom offers no foothold for consciousness, but let certain tropes and cycles be established in matter’s movement, let certain kinds of matter cohere and pulse together in an organism, and consciousness arises. Tropes, cycles, organisms, pulsations, with all laws of nature, are units proper to the realm of truth, bridging the flux of existence and suspended over it, as truth and spirit are suspended. So in conceiving and loving truth, spirit surveys with pleasure the soil and broad reaches of its native country.
Love is not too warm a term for this radical affinity; there is cosmic justification. Love is biologically an emotion proper to generation; generation in the cosmos is genesis or flux. Since Hesiod and Empedocles, love has been the poetic name for instability and fecundity of transitive existence—life passing joyfully from phase to phase, individual to individual. Yet this joyful procreation is tragic: as Lucretius says, nothing is born save by the death of something else. In loving, breeding, and raising the young we unconsciously sacrifice ourselves to posterity. Such is love’s dominance in the realm of matter, where progression is horizontal and the generated thing repeats its parents’ nature. But where the transmitted form is organic and spirit inhabits it, life and love also have a vertical direction and synthetic power: precipitating the future, the present evokes an image of the past and some notion of outlying realities controlling present and future. Life, propagating itself, has also generated knowledge and become aware of the truth.
This by-product or hypostasis of organic life is also tragic, like physical reproduction, and accepts death; but instead of surrendering one life for another of the same kind and level, we now surmount or disregard physical life altogether to define its form and consider its achievements. This consideration or definition of nature is itself a work of nature, occurring in time and requiring material organs; it partakes of the joy proper to all vital functions in their perfection. The beauty of truth is loved as naturally as the beauty of women; ideas are cherished like children. Enthusiasm and inspiration—other names of love addressed to truth—have no less warmth and breed no less heroism than love of home or country. Thus spirit is born and chooses its aims in sympathy with organic life’s movement, simply that movement become emotion and idea. For this radical reason spirit cannot be an independent power coming from nowhere to direct or accelerate animal action. We do not look about us because we love the truth; we love the truth because we look about us. Were it merely a question of keeping alive or controlling matter, business would be expedited if, besides Occam’s razor, we used “Occam’s glasses,” reducing visions to pointer-readings and releasing appropriate reactions without further rhetoric. Ignorance, when not materially dangerous, simplifies the fighting mind and is an economic advantage; it renders courage absolute and disturbs no comfortable illusions. Nature, however, being spontaneous, does not stop there.
Truth as Liberation and Pilate’s Question
Truth liberates. Perfecting each faculty turns it into clear joy, and taking the full measure of anything, especially a living thing, establishes a spiritual dominion over it: one has seen it, seen through it, and seen round it, so it can no longer hold one in weak regard or torture one with useless hatred. Partly lifting ignorance also liberates from avidity for knowledge. Fortune can unveil only a part of truth—such part as is important and digestible. Seen under the form of eternity, this part ceases to be external and becomes a term and familiar rhythm in one’s own life; absorbed in pure intuition, it no longer seems consciously one’s own or concerned with personal fortunes, becoming a light that reveals truth and is lost in the eternity of what it knows.
In the dead season of the mind, when every generous faculty is paralysed, it may become incredible that an immaterial reality, or material unreality, like truth should ever be prized or conceived. This doubt is incidental to intellectual decay, but that fact does not count from the point of view of the decadence, so the position must be examined from within, in its subjective origin and logic. Chapter XIII, “Denials of Truth,” begins with Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” It might be a sincere enquiry assuming the word truth stood for something assignable, asking what that thing exactly was; a sincere answer might be forthcoming, such as is contained in this book. Very likely, however, the original demand would not have concerned so abstract a subject as the ontological nature of truth as a logical category; it would rather have touched what might be true in the concrete, in such a matter as religion or scientific theory, and then an adequate answer would be wellnigh endless, involving all conventional human knowledge. Pilate, and those who have repeated his question, were probably not desirous of learning anything; their question was merely an exclamation of impatience, uttered in mockery or bravado, or perhaps in despair.
If the sentiment were despair, it might be as honest as the innocent desire to know: in both cases we assume the definite reality of the truth—in the one by looking for it hopefully, in the other by thinking of it so grandly and placing it at so great a remove that the hope of possessing it seems chimerical. Yet this honest despair could only be momentary, occasioned by some inordinate ambition to know all truth or the most comprehensive truths infallibly: something not consonant with the nature and station of man. Disappointment, though sharp, would soon yield to contentment with such knowledge as is natural and humanly interesting. Truth near home, in many a detail, is continually revealed: we cannot open a door or receive the answer to a letter without finding verified sundry assumptions made currently by instinct, and being assured that, in some sense, they were true. Among these familiar truths any educated man will place the elements of geography, biology, and history; these, if his mind is open and unprejudiced, will suffice to show him the place of man in nature, the character of his organs of sense, and the images formed by these organs, together with the general history of human opinion. In view of these facts he would become aware that all human knowledge of truth, by virtue of its seat and function, must be relative and subjectively coloured. It expresses the sensations and expectations of a specific animal. It is therefore vastly different both in extent and in texture from the literal and complete truth about the universe.
This relativism no doubt shocks and humbles the spontaneously poetic mind. Spirit is initially addressed to omniscience, as it is to perfect freedom and happiness, and even to absolute power. These sweeping ambitions are involved in the synthetic character of spirit, in its moral warmth and in its cognitive transcendence, in idea, over remote times and places; also in its inevitable isolation or egotism; and the same ambitions are encouraged by the real aesthetic and dialectical fertility of mind, when once an organism has flowered into consciousness and begun to dream. To find itself harnessed to facts it cannot control, helpless and mistaken, is therefore a hard lesson for the spirit. But this chastening is not fatal; on the contrary, it is positively enlightening and steadying. Not only does appropriate knowledge, in picturesque and infinite vistas, remain open, but spirit can now bring order into its own house, and consecrate itself to its essential vocation without being distracted by vain hopes.
Far from denying or doubting the being of truth, such relativism as to knowledge doubly asserts it. On the one hand, it presupposes much true information about nature and human life; because criticism, even if we call it scepticism, is founded on knowledge. On the other hand, the reality of an unknown truth beyond the human sphere is thereby asserted emphatically and even pathetically: we should not need to beweep our ignorance if there were nothing to know. The post-religious agnosticism widespread in the nineteenth century was suffering from the vacuum left by a lost faith in revelation: in pottering about amongst appearances, and talking about science and progress, it felt secretly empty and bereaved. The truth, which had seemed to shine so warm and near upon a former age, had receded to an infinite distance and been eclipsed for ever. The agnostics often felt some tenderness for their lost illusions; what they smiled at bitterly, and regarded as inexcusable, was rather the impudence of lay philosophers who ventured to proclaim the absolute truth of their toy systems. That was a double insult to the wise and the sorrowful.
Main Arguments
The central argument of The Realm of Truth is that truth is contingent, eternal, and ideal—contingent because it is determined by facts that might have been otherwise, eternal because once determined it is determined forever, and ideal because it is not itself a fact or an event but a system of essences that subsists independently of any mind that grasps it. Santayana develops this argument by distinguishing sharply between truth and correctness, between truth and fact, between truth and coherence, and between truth and utility. Each of these distinctions is designed to show that truth is not a quality of our ideas or a function of our practices but an independent reality to which our ideas and practices may or may not correspond.
The first and most fundamental argument is that there are no necessary truths. This is not a skeptical claim but a metaphysical one. Santayana does not deny that we can know many things with certainty; he denies that the necessity we feel in certain propositions is a necessity of existence. Mathematical equations, logical principles, and the ontological proof of God’s existence may all be necessary in the sense that their terms are so defined that the propositions cannot be denied without contradiction, but this necessity is a necessity of essence, not of existence. It tells us nothing about what actually exists. If essences are infinite in number and variety, then every particular fact is contingent, arbitrary, and logically unnecessary, since infinite alternatives were open to existence. It is precisely this unnecessary, arbitrary, contingent chance or fatality that determines what shall be true: truth being descriptive of existence and existence being contingent, truth will be contingent also.
The second argument is that facts are arbitrary and logic is ideal. The realm of facts is the realm of existence, which is characterized by flux, contingency, and arbitrariness. The realm of logic is the realm of essence, which is characterized by necessity, immutability, and ideality. These two realms are not opposed but related: logic is the ideal structure of the possible, and facts are the actual selection from the possible that existence has made. The necessity of logic is not the necessity of fact; it is the necessity of the relations between essences, which hold whether or not those essences are exemplified in existence. When we say that 2+2=4, we are not saying something about the world but about the relations between certain essences; the proposition becomes true of the world only when those essences are exemplified in existence, and then its truth is contingent on that exemplification.
The third argument is that truth and logic, though distinct, are intertwined. Truth is the sum of all true propositions, and a proposition is true if what it asserts is the case. Logic is the system of necessary relations between essences, and it governs the form of propositions but not their truth. A proposition may be logically impeccable and materially false; it may be logically incoherent and materially true. The interplay between truth and logic is thus a delicate one: logic provides the forms in which truth may be expressed, but it does not determine what is true. Truth is determined by facts, and facts are contingent.
The fourth argument is that the psychological approach to truth, which reduces truth to a function of the mind or to a quality of experience, is mistaken. The reality of psychologists—subjective presence, sensuous or conceptual—belongs to a different moral or aesthetic sphere, not mediated by animal faith and not itself conveying knowledge of truth, though the account of such experience conveyed later by memory or sympathetic fancy may be true. Intuition, simply sensibility focussed and noticing, comes upon essences, not things, because as attention takes notice it suspends the animal faith involved in fear, care, or the impulse to react to a stimulus. When clarified and thoroughly actualized, all data are essences; if spirit could actualize everything it would live in its congenial ideal world, as it does in mathematics, poetry, and music. But in animal life this remains an interlude. Living attention comes upon essences with a bias, from a particular vital angle; they are stepping-stones in a distracted career. Essences do not dictate in what direction their relations shall be traced; they have no movement, selectiveness, or propulsion. The choice of path is made by the animal mind under suasion of casual interests or vegetative growth.
The fifth argument is that truth radiates from existence. Truth is subservient to existence—ontologically secondary and true of something else. Though generated by existence, truth may itself be ideal. The blind flux of existence precipitates a thousand relations and accidents of form by merely flowing. Truth is such a supervening form: not accidental in being avoidable, since by existing the world fatally determines the truth about itself, but accidental in adding an impalpable eternal dimension to transitory being. Events did not intend to be recorded, yet in truth they leave an indelible portrait; even if things escape observation, they cannot escape having been what they were. Existence may also generate beauty or goodness, but not with the same pervasiveness. Beauty and goodness are far more accidental than truth, arising only at certain junctures when streams of events meet and mingle in temporary harmony, which psyches may feel and rejoice in. Truth arises by automatic radiation from every region of fact, since no event can occur without rendering it eternally true that such an event and no other fills that point of space and time.
The sixth argument is that much of our knowledge is conventional. A certain and accurate truth may be conveyed in conventional terms that are themselves loose and inaccurate. Implications about physical happenings and hypotheses about possible psychological happenings are placed before the mind by a figure of speech that will not bear pressing, yet is unequivocal enough for human purposes. Almost all our knowledge of nature and history visits the mind in this conventional form, clothed in metaphors and idioms proper to grammar, not seriously misleading action or expectation, though leaving us ignorant or in childish illusion about the texture of facts. An animal vision of the universe is never false in one sense: it is rooted in that animal’s nature, aroused to consciousness by circumstances of the moment. These circumstances, and that endowment, will be expressed in the vision—not passively betrayed, but noted, described, known in some measure, in however subjective terms. The vision claims to be true and possesses truth at least in having a real object, not being an idle mental phenomenon. It is true enough to be false and to require correction.
The seventh argument is that dramatic truth is a form of truth. The dramatic moral climate of human life is not a separate realm from matter but a passionate experience of the same matter. Dramatic intuition springs from the passions—the principles of action. A man may be conscious of his passion, but the passion itself is a physical automatism deeper than his consciousness of it. To put it into words, he is driven to dramatic fictions, to myth or dialectic; the truth facing his passion is a dramatic truth. Here all is expectation, partiality, superstition, hyperbole, rage, and enthusiasm. Accuracy is sacrificed to summary eloquence, yet not without compensation: dramatic genius can afford to be unfair to surface facts, to foreshorten, crowd, and caricature, interested only in great issues and secret tendencies. If facts are to be dramatized, they must be recast selectively and precipitated toward a climax. Yet these relations must not be invented; they must subsist in the realm of truth. Dramatic intuition has many forms, from animism to dialectic and wit, from superstition to natural law. These intellectual unities may be true of the world without being parts of it.
The eighth argument is that moral truth is possible. Usage leads us to speak of truth within logic and convention, and likewise in morals. There are good reasons for acquiescing in this extension: in willing as in knowing there is much substitution and representation. Moral passions, carried by words and ideas that are automatic, may be deceptive or hollow; they may pass like storm-clouds over the conscience, misinterpreting the soul’s inmost allegiance. Such passions and the judgments they dictate may be called false, since they blind us to matters of fact and deceive us about our own fundamental needs. Integrity—the clear allegiance of a transparent soul to its radical will—makes a man’s choices true to himself and banishes moral illusions. The same true presentation of latent interests may extend to political action: a government or party may pursue true or false aims, in line with or against the radical and permanent interests of the people. Thus truth and error are possible in morals insofar as they are truths or errors in self-knowledge.
The ninth argument is that truth is supertemporal. Truth, though about temporal events, is itself timeless and super-existential, and the appearance of truth changing is a verbal or metaphysical illusion. Truth forms an ideal realm of being, impersonal and super-existential. Though everything in the panorama of history is temporal, the panorama itself is dateless: the sum and system of events cannot be one of them, cannot occur after or before anything else. Thus the truth about existence differs in ontological quality from existence itself. Life and motion are gone; all scales equally real, all ages equally present; intensity, actuality, suffering have become historical. Truth is like the moon, beautiful but dead. Yet truth is richer than existence at any moment: it retains the essence of all moments equally and contains what no moment can contain—the systems moments form unawares by co-existing and alternating.
The tenth argument is that the cognition of the future is possible only through the truth of the present. We should have no notion of change if we did not undergo it; yet it is not by merely passing that facts breed memory or an intuition of change. It is the revealed enrichment, complexity, and multiform tensions of organic life as it flows that enable us to feel life flowing. Intellectual synthesis does not require any existential element to be in two moments at once; but material energies, rich in vital potentialities, can become conscious of changes on foot. This happens when a psyche, organized for growth and sensitive to opportunity, adjusted to past and future, feels at each moment the suspense, duration, and lapse of time. The canvas is then spread for imagination to paint upon, and history and science do nothing but fill it in. At each moment we are accompanied by a sense of prolonged events in their wholeness—as they lie in the realm of truth. For only in the realm of truth can events be unified or divided.
The eleventh argument is that truth and chance are not opposed. Truth is determined by facts, and facts are contingent; but the contingency of facts does not make truth arbitrary.
