IV.
We know the moral truth as we know material truth, through its relations. Relation makes the difference between chaos and cosmos. To define any natural object is to place it in its relations. We could not define oxygen without naming the elements to which it is related. To take it out of relation is to take from it any meaning. Error is wrong relation. When the mind assigns a place to an object other than that which really belongs to it, in the order of which it forms a part, we call this error. If, seeing the parts of a house scattered over a field by a storm, we should confound a sleeper with a rafter, we should take it from its proper place and take away its meaning as a part of the building. All of our knowledge is of relations and not of sensations, as Hume taught. Sensations set the mind to classifying and comparing, and the knowledge it comes to is of relations. Take the sensations the mind has when a red object is presented to the eye. Does not the mind begin at once to distinguish this sensation as one of redness from other sensations that are of different colors?
Is not its reality as a particular color constituted for us by its relation to colors, by its place in the scale of colors? If there was but one color, and that color the one we now know as red, how could we know it as such? How could we call it red unless to distinguish it from some other color with which we, for the time being, compared it or contrasted it? So true is it that reality is constituted for us by the sum of its relations, that if the relations of things are maintained, no increase or diminution of the quantity of things related will be detected in our knowledge of them. If the earth were compressed into a sphere no larger than a marble, no one could know it if the relations among the objects which make it up were the same.
Again, the earth might be enlarged until it should be a billion times larger than what it is; yet this could not be known as long as men and gates and spoons and saucers and houses and cuff-buttons were enlarged in the same proportion. The leaf of a man’s dining table might be ten miles square, and the ball of butter on his table as big as the Stone Mountain in Georgia; yet if cook, and cat, and stove, and water-bucket were increased in the same ratio, he would not recognize any difference.