The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. I, No. 4, June 1836)

CONDUCTED BY THE STUDENTS OF YALE COLLEGE .
“Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque Yalenses Cantabunt Soboles, unanimique Patres.”
NO. IV.
JUNE, 1836.
NEW HAVEN: HERRICK & NOYES.
MDCCCXXXVI.
What is truth? “Truth,” says a standard logician, “signifies nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them do agree or disagree with one another;” that is, in making propositions. These are divided into mental and verbal. Truth then consists in ideal or verbal sentences, or, in other words, in a certain arrangement of ideas and words. This view of the subject may answer for a mere definition; but it is not satisfactory. We are disposed to make truth consist in things , and not alone in their representatives. It is the reality of things; using the term thing as it is, the most universal of any in the language, including every object of sense or conception, objects past, present, and future, objects terrestrial and celestial, objects of all space and all duration, objects possible and impossible; in a word, every-thing. There are propositions concerning things; we have ideas of things, and things themselves exist independently of both. The verbal statement, and the mental apprehension, may accord with the reality of the thing, and be true, or figuratively speaking, the truth. But can it be strictly said that the truth consists in them, and them only?
But this train of remark avails little in resolving the momentously practical question, What is truth? To give this a reply worthy of itself, would lead us beyond our present design, and each reader must be left to judge for himself.
“Truth is consistent with itself.” This is a common saying, and regarded as axiomatic in its nature. It is not intended for the identical proposition, Truth is truth; but that whatever is truth in one subject, can in no way be rendered nugatory or false, by what is truth in any other subject; and that one truth in the same subject is not weakened or diminished by any other truth in the same subject. Truth, as before intimated, may be considered in a three-fold aspect; in itself; in regard to the verbal propositions embracing it; in respect to our own conceptions of it.