pear. If either thought or sense altered its charac¬ ter, truth would alter. Hence every sincere judg¬ ment is indeed true for the moment in which it is made, but not necessarily true for other moments. We only postulate that it is true for other moments.’ ” “ And so,” to continue this view, “it is only by means of postulates that our thought even seems to have any unity from moment to moment. We live in the present. If our thought has other truth or falsity than this, we do not know it. Past and fu¬ ture exist not for this present. They are only pos¬ tulated. Save as postulated, they have no present meaning.”
When he held and expressed this view, the author is free to admit that he was not always clear whether he ought to call it the doctrine of the relativity of truth or not. It might have avoided the absurdities of total relativity by taking form as a doctrine that the present moment’s judgment is really true or false, for a real past and future, but that we, being limited to present moments, can never compare our judgments with reality to find whether our judg¬ ments are true or false. But although this inter¬ pretation is possible, this view often did express it¬ self for the author as the doctrine of the total rela¬ tivity of truth. The latter doctrine to be sure has no real meaning, but the author used with many others to fancy that it had.
To apply the view to the case of causal relations. “We continually postulate,” the author used to point out, “ we demand, without being able to prove it, that nature in future shall be uniform.” * So, THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR carrying out this thought, the author used to say: u In fact future nature is not given to us, just as the past is not given to us. Sense-data and thought unite at every instant afresh to form a new judgment and a new postulate. Only in the present has any judgment evident validity. And our postulate of causal relation is just a way of looking at this world of conceived past and future data. Such postulates avoid being absurd efforts to regulate independent facts of sense, because, and only because, we have in experience no complete series of facts of sense at all, only from moment to moment single facts, about which we make single judgments. All the rest we must postulate or else do without them.” Thus one reaches a skepticism as nearly complete as is pos¬ sible to any one with earnest activity of thought in him. From moment to moment one can be sure of each moment. All else is postulate.
From the depths of this imperfectly defined skep¬ ticism, which seemed to him provisionally the only view he could adopt, the author escaped only by ask¬ ing the one question more: “ If everything beyond the present is doubtful, then how can even that doubt be possible? ” With this question that bare relativ¬ ity of the present moment is given up. What are the conditions that make doubt logically intelligible? These conditions really transcend the present mo¬ ment. Plainly doubt implies that the statement doubted may be false. So here we have at least one supposed general truth, namely, “ All but the im¬ mediate content of the present moment’s judgment, being doubtful, we may be in error about it.” But 390 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY what then is an error t This becomes at once a problem of exciting interest. Attacking it, the au¬ thor was led through the wilderness of the following argument.
II.
Yet before we undertake this special examination of the nature of error, the reader must pardon us for adding yet another explanatory word. The diffi¬ culty of the whole discussion will lie in the fact that we shall be studying the possibility of the plainest and most familiar of commonplaces. Common sense hates to do such things, because common sense thinks that the whole matter is sure from the outset. Com¬ mon sense is willing to ask whether God exists, but unwilling to inquire how it is possible that there can exist an error about anything. But foreseeing that something is to follow from all this, we must beg common sense to be patient. We have not the shadow of doubt ourselves about the possibility of error. That is the steadfast rock on which we build. Our inquiry, ultra-skeptical as it may at moments seem, is into the question: How is the error possi¬ ble? Or, in other words: What is an error t Now there can be little doubt that common sense is not ready with any general answer to such a question. Error is a word with many senses. By error we often mean just a statement that arouses our antipa¬ thy. Yet we all admit upon reflection, that our an¬ tipathy can neither make nor be used to define real error. Adam Smith declares, with common sense on his side, in his “ Theory of the Moral Sentiments,” J 1 Part L, sect, i., chap, iii., near the beginning.
THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR that: “ To approve or disapprove of the opinions of others is acknowledged, by everybody, to mean no more than to observe their agreement or disagree¬ ment with our own.” Yet no one would accept as a definition of error the statement that: Error is any opinion that I personally do not like. Error has thus a very puzzling character. For common sense will readily admit that if a statement is erroneous, it must appear erroneous to every “ right mind ” that is in possession of the facts. Hence the personal taste of one man is not enough to define it. Else there might be as many sorts of error as there are minds. It is only the “ right mind ” whose personal taste shall decide what is an error in any particular case. But what then is a normal mind? Who is the right-minded judge? There seems to be danger that common sense shall run at this point into an infinite regress. I say: That opinion is an error. What do I mean? Do I mean that I do not like that opinion? Nay, I mean more. I mean that I ought not to like or to accept it. Why ought I not? Be¬ cause the ideally right-minded person would not, seeing the given facts, hold that opinion about them. But who is the ideally right-minded person? W ell, common sense may answer, It is my ideal person, the right-minded man as I conceive him. But why is my ideal the true ideal? Because I like it? Nay, because, to the ideal judge, that kind of mind would seem the ideal. But who is the ideal judge? And so common sense is driven from point to point, unable to get to anything definite.
So much, then, to show in general that common 392 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY sense does not know what an error is, and needs more light upon the subject. Let common sense not disturb us, then, in our further search, by the con¬ stant and indignant protest that error must some¬ how exist, and that doubt on that subject is nonsense. Nobody has any doubts on that subject. We ask only how error exists and how it can exist.
For the rest, what follows is not any effort to demonstrate in fair and orderly array, from any one principle or axiom, what must be the nature of er¬ ror, but to use every and any device that may offer itself, general analysis, special example, comparison and contrast of cases, — anything that shall lead us to the insight into what an error is and implies. For at last, immediate insight must decide.
We shall study our problem thus. We shall take either some accepted definition of error, or some special class of cases, and we shall ask: How is error in that case, or in accordance with that defi¬ nition, possible? Since error plainly is possible in some way, we shall have only to inquire: What are the logical conditions that make it possible? We shall take up the ordinary suppositions that com¬ mon sense seems to make about what here deter¬ mines the possibility of error. We shall show that these suppositions are inadequate. Then the result will be that, on the ordinary suppositions, error would be impossible. But that result would be absurd, if these were the only possible suppositions. Hence the ordinary suppositions must somehow be supplemented. When, therefore, we seem to say iii the following that error is impossible, we shall mean THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR only, impossible under the ordinary suppositions of common sense. What supplement we need to these suppositions, our argument will show us. In sum we shall find the state of the case to be this: Com¬ mon sense regards an assertion as true or as false apart from any other assertion or thought, and solely in reference to its own object. For common sense each judgment, as a separate creation, stands out alone, looking at its object, and trying to agree with it. If it succeeds, we have truth. If the judgment fails, we have error. But, as we shall find, this view of common sense is unintelligible. A judgment can¬ not have an object and fail to agree therewith, un¬ less this judgment is part of an organism of thought. Alone, as a separate fact, a judgment has no intelli¬ gible object beyond itself. And therefore the pre¬ suppositions of common sense must be supplemented or else abandoned. Either then there is no error, or else judgments are true or false only in reference to a higher inclusive thought, which they presuppose, and which must, in the last analysis, be assumed as Infinite and all-inclusive. This result we shall reach by no mystical insight, by no revelation, nor yet by any mere postulate such as we used in former dis¬ cussions, but by a simple, dry analysis of the mean¬ ing of our own thought.
The most formidable opponent of our argument will be, after all, however, not common sense, but that thought mentioned in the last chapter, — the thought that may try to content itself with some¬ what plausible jargon, and to say that: “ There is no real difference between truth and error at all, 394 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY only a kind of opinion or consensus of men about a conventional distinction between what they choose to call truth and what they choose to call error." This view, as the author has confessed, he once tried to hold. Still this meaningless doctrine of relativ¬ ity is not the same as the view that contents itself with the postulates before discussed. That view might take, and for the author at one time did take, the possible and intelligible form thus expressible: “ Truth and error, though really distinguishable, are for us distinguished only through our postu¬ lates, in so far as relates to past and future time" Such views, while not denying that there is real truth, despair of the attainability for us of more than momentary truth. But the doctrine of Total Rela¬ tivity, this view above expressed, differs from gen¬ uine skepticism. It tries to put even skepticism to rest, by declaring the opinion, that there is error, to be itself an error. This is not merely a moderate expression of human limitations, but jargon, and therefore formidable, because jargon is always unan¬ swerable. When the famous Cretan declared all statements made by Cretans to be in all cases lies, his declaration was hard to refute, because it was such honest - seeming nonsense. Even so with the statement that declares the very existence of error to be an erroneously believed fancy. No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already. If our skeptical view in previous chapters seemed to regard truth and error as mere objects of our postu- THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR lates, that was only because, to our skepticism, the real truth, the real error, about any real past and future, seemed beyond our reach, so that we had to content ourselves with postulates. But that real error exists is absolutely indubitable.
This being the case, it is evident that even the most thorough-going skepticism is full of assump¬ tions. If I say, “ There may be no money in that purse yonder,” I assume the existence of the purse yonder in order to make just that particular doubt possible. Of course, however, just that doubt may be rendered meaningless by the discovery of the actual non-existence of that particular purse. If there is no purse yonder, then it is nonsensical either to affirm or to deny that it contains money. And so if the purse of which I speak is an hallucination of mine, then the doubt about whether, as an actu¬ ally existent purse, it has money in it, is deprived of sense. My real error in that case would lie in supposing the purse itself to exist. If, however, I abandon the first doubt, and go on to doubt the real existence of the purse, I equally assume a room, or some other environment, or at all events the universe, as existent, in order to give sense to my question whether the purse has any being in this environment or in this universe. But if I go yet further, and doubt whether there is any universe at all outside of my thought, what does my doubt yet mean? If it is to be a doubt with any real sense, it must be a doubt still with an object before it. It seems then to imply an assumed order of being, in which there are at least two elements, my lonely thought about 396 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY an universe, and an empty environment of this thought, in which there is, in fact, no universe. But this empty environment, whose nature is such that my thought does wrong to suppose it to be an universe, what is that? Surely if the doubt is to have meaning, this idea needs further examination. The absolute skepticism is thus full of assumptions.
The first European thinker who seems to have discussed our present problem was Plato, in a too- much-neglected passage of the “ Theaetetus,” 1 where Socrates, replying to the second definition of knowl¬ edge given by Theaetetus, namely, knowledge is True Opinion, answers that his great difficulty has often been to see how any opinion can possibly be false. The conclusion reached by Plato is no very definite one, but the discussion is deeply suggestive. And we cannot do better here than to pray that the shade of the mighty Greek may deign to save us now in our distress, and to show us the true nature of error.
III.
III.
Logicians are agreed that single ideas, thoughts viewed apart from judgments, are neither true nor false. Only a judgment can be false. And if a reasoning process is said to be false, the real error lies still in an actual or suppressed assertion. A fallacy is a false assertion that a certain conclusion follows from certain premises. Error is therefore generally defined as a judgment that does not agree with its object. In the erroneous judgment, sub- THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR ject and predicate are so combined as, in the object, the corresponding elements are not combined. And thus the judgment comes to be false. Now, in this definition, nothing is doubtful or obscure save the one thing, uamely, the assumed relation between the judgment and its object. The definition assumes as quite clear that a judgment has an object, wherewith it can agree or not agree. And what is meant by the agreement would not be obscure, if we could see what is meant by the object, and by the possession of this object implied in the pronoun its. What then is meant by its object? The difficulties involved in this phrase begin to appear as soon as you look closer. First then the object of the assertion is as such supposed to be neither the subject nor the pred¬ icate thereof. It is external to the judgment. It has a nature of its own. Furthermore, not all judg¬ ments have the same object, so that objects are very numerous. But from the infinity of real or of pos¬ sible objects the judgment somehow picks out its own. Thus then for a judgment to have an object, there must be something about the judgment that shows what one of the external objects that are be¬ yond itself this judgment does pick out as its own. But this something that gives the judgment its ob¬ ject can only be the intention wherewith the judg¬ ment is accompanied. A judgment has as object only what it intends to have as object. It has to conform only to that to which it wants to conform. But the essence of an intention is the knowledge of what one intends. One can, for instance, intend a deed or any of its consequences only in so far as he 398 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY foresees them. I cannot be said to intend the acci¬ dental or the remote or even the immediate conse¬ quences of anything that I do, unless I foresaw that they would follow; and this is true however much the lawyers and judges may find it practically neces¬ sary to hold me responsible for these consequences. Even so we all find it practically useful to regard one of our fellows as in error in case his assertions, as we understand them, seem to us to lead to conse¬ quences that we do not approve. But our criticisms of his opinions, just like legal judgments of his acts, are not intended to be exact. Common sense will admit that, unless a man is thinking of the object of which I suppose him to be thinking, he makes no real error by merely failing to agree with the object that I have in mind. If the knights in the fable judge each other to be wrong, that is because each knight takes the other’s shield to be identical with the shield as he himself has it in mind. In fact neither of them is in error, unless his assertion is false for the shield as he intended to make it his object.
So then judgments err only by disagreeing with their intended objects, and they can intend an object only in so far forth as this object is known to the thought that makes the judgment. Such, it would seem, is the consequence of the common-sense view. But in this case a judgment can be in error only if it is knowingly in error. That also, as it seems, follows from the common-sense suppositions. Or, if we will have it in syllogistic form: — Everything intended is something known. The THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR object even of an erroneous judgment is intended.
The object even of an error is something known.
Or: Only what is known can be erred about. Nor can we yet be content with what common sense will at once reply, namely, that our syllogism uses known ambiguously, and that the object of an erro¬ neous judgment is known enough to constitute it the object, and not enough to prevent the error about it. This must no doubt be the fact, but it is not of itself clear; on the contrary, just here is the problem. As common sense conceives the matter, the object of a judgment is not as such the whole outside world of common sense, with all its intimate interdependence of facts, with all its unity in the midst of diversity. On the contrary, the object of any judgment is just that portion of the then conceived world, just that fragment, that aspect, that element of a supposed reality, which is seized upon for the purposes of just this judgment. Only such a momentarily grasped fragment of the truth can possibly be present in any one moment of thought as the object of a single as¬ sertion. Now it is hard to say how within this arbi¬ trarily chosen fragment itself there can still be room for the partial knowledge that is sufficient to give to the judgment its object, but insufficient to secure to the judgment its accuracy. If I aim at a mark with my gun, I can fail to hit it, because choosing and hitting a mark are totally distinct acts. But, in the judgment, choosing and knowing the object seem in¬ separable. No doubt somehow our difficulty is solu¬ ble, but we are here trying first to show that it is a difficulty.
400 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OP PHILOSOPHY To illustrate here by a fafniliar case, when we speak of things that are solely matters of personal preference, such as the pleasure of a sleigh-ride, the taste of olives, or the comfort of a given room, and when we only try to tell how these things appear to us, then plainly our judgments, if sincere, cannot be in error. As these things are to us, so they are. We are their measure. To doubt our truthfulness in these cases is to doubt after the fashion of the student who wondered whether the star that the as¬ tronomers call Uranus may not be something else after all, and not really Uranus. Surely science does not progress very far or run into great danger of error so long as it employs itself in discovering such occult mysteries as the names of the stars. But our present question is, How do judgments that can be and that are erroneous differ in nature from these that cannot be erroneous? If astronomers would be equally right in case they should agree to call Ura¬ nus Humpty Dumpty, why are not all judgments equally favored? Since the judgment chooses its own object, and has it only in so far as it chooses it, how can it be in that partial relation to its object which is implied in the supposition of an erroneous assertion?
Yet again, to illustrate the difficulty in another aspect, we can note that not only is error impossible about the perfectly well-known, but that error is equally impossible, save in the form of direct self- contradiction, about what is absolutely unknown. Spite of the religious awe of some people in t pres¬ ence of the Unknowable, it is safe to say, somewhat THE POSSIBILITY OF ERROR irreverently, that about a really Unknowable nobody could make any sincere and self-consistent assertions that could be errors. For self-consistent assertions about the Unknowable would of necessity be mean¬ ingless. And being meaningless, they could not well be false. For instance, one could indeed not say that the Unknowable contemplates war with France, or makes sunspots, or will be the next Presidential candidate, because that would be contradicting one’s self. For if the Unknowable did any of these things, it would no longer be the Unknowable, but would become either the known or the discoverable. But avoid such self - contradiction, and you cannot err about the Unknowable. For the Unknowable is sim¬ ply our old friend Abracadabra, a word that has no meaning, and by hypothesis never can get any. So if T say that the Unknowable dines in vacuo with the chimera, or is Humpty Dumpty, I talk nonsense, and am therefore unable to make a mistake. Non¬ sense is error only when it involves self-contradiction. Avoid that, and nonsense cannot blunder, having no object outside of itself with which it must agree. But all this illustrates from the other side our diffi¬ culty. Is not the object of a judgment, in so far as it is unknown to that judgment, like the Unknowa-