B E N J A M I N P A U L B L O O D
____________________________________from PLURIVERSE
(1920)
from "Self-Relation"
[. . .]
Webster's Dictionary was begun in 1828, and has since been enlarged under the vigilance and assiduity of more than fifty distinguished scholars, all eager, doubtless, to tell the truth; but the reader shall judge, from what should be one of their capital definitions, how little care or sympathy these scholars had for the problem which haunts our troublesome essay. We quote their definition of truth:
"Truth. — The quality of being true; as (a) conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, has been, or shall be."
How happy the philosopher might be if the world-secret could be adroitly told with the dash and abandon of this forthright deliverance!
Does conformity embrace all the possible truth and essence of fact and reality? Has all their matter gone up into form, and left no substance to be identified, realised and lived? Fact and reality cover being alone; they leave out thought and relation and difference, which are not properties of factual things, any more than are illusions and negations and onentities. It might seem a better definition of truth to call it, not conformity, but identity with fact and reality; but when we turn to their definition of identity we receive a slap from Sir William Hamilton: "Identity is a relation between our cognitions of things, not between things themselves." But in any explanation, are not these cognitions to be things of themselves, even if mere spectres? The fact is that philosophers as a class give truth a sinister fling in quotation marks, as a word for the people, and not for the elect. The reason for this is that they find knowledge a gift that has no confirmation of its pretensions — especially none from itself, its only possible critic. It tries, but fails, to focus its faculties upon itself. In identity it finds at best the same, and the same is another: there needs two for sameness. And when all is said, difference has as good an identity as sameness, and sameness has "all the difference in the world" from difference.
Then as truth being "accordance to that which is, has been, or shall be," does it accord in these vital respects, that it has been, or shall be, as really as it is now? And what shall accord to what is — to all that is? Unless all that is can accord to itself in that self-relation which our authorities shall keenly resent. And again as to "accordance to what is, has been or shall be," we might suggest a few things that ought to be, at least in definition of truth. Hegel, in his definition of truth, held frankly to the self-relation: "Science does not seek truth: it is in truth; it is the truth."
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