The Problem of Truth

by Herbert Wildon Carr

I have explained this argument, which is of the class called ontological because it is concerned with the fundamental question of being, in order to give an instance of the kind of argument that has given us the theory of the Absolute. I will now try to set that theory before the reader, asking only that he will put himself into the position of a plain man with no special acquaintance with philosophy, but reflective and anxious to interpret the meaning of his ordinary experience.

We have already seen that thinking is the questioning of experience, and that the moment it begins it gives rise to a distinction between appearance and reality. It is the asking what? of every that of felt experience to which the mind attends. The world in which we find ourselves is extended all around us in space and full of things which affect us in various ways: some give us pleasure, others give us pain, and we ourselves are things that affect other things as well as being ourselves affected by them. When we think about the things in the world in order to discover what they really are, we very soon find that we are liable to illusion and error. Things turn out on examination to be very different to what we first imagined them to be. Our ideas, by which we try to understand the reality of things are just so many attempts to correct and set right our illusions and errors. And so the question arises, how far are our ideas about things truths about reality? It is very soon evident that there are some qualities of things that give rise to illusion and error much more readily than others. The spatial qualities of things, solidity, shape, size, seem to be real in a way that does not admit of doubt. We seem able to apply to these qualities a test that is definite and absolute. On the other hand, there seem to be effects of these things in us such as their colour, taste, odour, sound, coldness, or heat, qualities that are incessantly changing and a fruitful source of illusion and error. We therefore distinguish the spatial qualities as primary, and consider that they are the real things and different from their effects, which we call their secondary qualities. And this is, perhaps, our most ordinary test of reality. If, for example, we should think that something we see is an unreal phantom, or a ghost, or some kind of hallucination, and on going up to it find that it does actually occupy space, we correct our opinion and say the thing is real. But the spatial or primary qualities of a thing, although they may seem more permanent and more essential to the reality of the thing than the secondary qualities, are nevertheless only qualities. They are not the thing itself, but ways in which it affects us. It seems to us that these qualities must inhere in or belong to the thing, and so we try to form the idea of the real thing as a substance or substratum which has the qualities. This was a generally accepted notion until Berkeley (1685-1763) showed how contradictory it is. So simple and convincing was his criticism of the notion, that never since has material substance been put forward as an explanation of the reality of the things we perceive. All that he did was to show how impossible and contradictory it is to think that the reality of that which we perceive is something in its nature imperceptible, for such must material substance be apart from its sense qualities. How can that which we perceive be something imperceptible? And if we reflect on it, we shall surely agree that it is so—by the thing we mean its qualities, and apart from the qualities there is no thing. We must try, then, in some other way to reach the reality.

What, we shall now ask, can it be that binds together these sense qualities so that we speak of them as a thing? There are two elements that seem to enter into everything whatever that comes into our experience, and which it seems to us would remain if everything in the universe were annihilated. These are space and time. Are they reality? Here we are met with a new kind of difficulty. It was possible to dismiss material substance as a false idea, an idea of something whose existence is impossible; but space and time are certainly not false ideas. The difficulty about them is that we cannot make our thought of them consistent—they are ideas that contain a self-contradiction, or at least that lead to a self-contradiction when we affirm them of reality. With the ideas of space and time are closely linked the ideas of change, of movement, of causation, of quality and quantity, and all of these exhibit this same puzzling characteristic, that they seem to make us affirm what we deny and deny what we affirm. I might fill this little book with illustrations of the paradoxes that are involved in these ordinary working ideas. Everyone is familiar with the difficulty involved in the idea of time. We must think there was a beginning, and we cannot think that there was any moment to which there was no before. So also with space, it is an infinite extension which we can only think of as a beyond to every limit. This receding limit of the infinitely extensible space involves the character of infinite divisibility, for if there are an infinite number of points from which straight lines can be drawn without intersecting one another to any fixed point there is therefore no smallest space that cannot be further divided. The contradictions that follow from these demonstrable contents of the idea of space are endless. The relation of time to space is another source of contradictory ideas. I shall perhaps, however, best make the meaning of this self-contradictory character of our ordinary ideas clear by following out a definite illustration. What is known as the antinomy of motion is probably familiar to everyone from the well-known paradox of the Greek philosopher Zeno. The flying arrow, he said, does not move, because if it did it would be in two places at one and the same time, and that is impossible. I will now put this same paradox of movement in a form which, so far as I know, it has not been presented before. My illustration will involve the idea of causation as well as that of movement. If we suppose a space to be fully occupied, we shall agree that nothing within that space can move without thereby displacing whatever occupies the position into which it moves. That is to say, the movement of any occupant of one position must cause the displacement of the occupant of the new position into which he moves. But on the other hand it is equally clear that the displacement of the occupant of the new position is a prior condition of the possibility of the movement of the mover, for nothing can move unless there is an unoccupied place for it to move into, and there is no unoccupied place unless it has been vacated by its occupant before the movement begins. We have therefore the clear contradiction that a thing can only move when something else which it causes to move has already moved. Now if we reflect on it we shall see that this is exactly the position we occupy in our three-dimensional space. The space which surrounds us is occupied, and therefore we cannot move until a way is made clear for us, and nothing makes way for us unless we move. We cannot move through stone walls because we cannot displace solid matter, but we can move through air and water because we are able to displace these. The problem is the same. My movement displaces the air, but there is no movement until the air is displaced. Can we escape the contradiction by supposing the displacement is the cause and the movement the effect. Are we, like people in a theatre queue, only able to move from behind forward as the place is vacated for us in front? In that case we should be driven to the incredible supposition that the original cause or condition of our movement is the previous movement of something at the outskirts of our occupied space, that this somewhat moving into the void made possible the movement of the occupant of the space next adjoining, and so on until after a lapse of time which may be ages, which may indeed be infinite, the possibility of movement is opened to us. In fact we must believe that the effect of our movement—namely, the displacement of the previous occupants from the positions we occupy in moving—happened before it was caused. Now it is impossible for us to believe either of the only two alternatives—either that we do not really move but only appear to do so, or that the displacement our movement causes really precedes the movement. When we meet with a direct self-contradiction in our thoughts about anything, we can only suppose that that about which we are thinking is in its nature nonsensical, or else that our ideas about it are wrong.

It may perhaps be thought that the whole difficulty arises simply because what we are trying to think consistently about is a reality that is external to us. Space and time, movement, cause and effect are ideas that apply to a world outside and independent of the mind that tries to think it. May not this be the reason of our failure and the whole explanation of the seeming contradiction? If we turn our thoughts inward upon our own being and think of the self, the I, the real subject of experience, then surely where thought is at home and its object is mental not physical, we shall know reality. It is not so. The same self-contradiction characterises our ideas when we try to present the real object of inner perception as when we try to present the real object of external perception. Not, of course, that it is possible to doubt the reality of our own existence, but that we fail altogether to express the meaning of the self we so surely know to exist in any idea which does not fall into self-contradiction. As in the case of the thing and its qualities, we think that there is something distinct from the qualities in which they inhere and yet find ourselves unable to present to the mind any consistent idea of such thing, so we think that there must be some substance or basis of personal identity, some real self which has the successive changing conscious states, which has the character which distinguishes our actions as personal but which nevertheless is not itself these things. The self-contradiction in the idea of self, or I, or subject, is that it both cannot change and is always changing. As unchanging, we distinguish it from our body, which is an external object among other objects and is different from other objects only in the more direct and intimate relation in which it stands to us. The body is always changing; never for two successive moments is it exactly the same combination of chemical elements. We distinguish also ourself from that consciousness which is memory, the awareness of past experience, from present feelings, desires, thoughts, and strivings—these, we say, belong to the self but are not it. The self must have qualities and dwell in the body, guiding, directing, and controlling it, yet this self we never perceive, nor can we conceive it, for our idea of it is of a reality that changes and is yet unchangeable.

There is, however, one idea—an idea to which we have already alluded—that seems to offer us an escape from the whole of this logical difficulty, the idea that reality is unknowable. May not the contradictoriness of our ideas be due to this fact, that our knowledge is entirely of phenomena, of appearances of things, and not of things as they are in themselves? By a thing-in-itself we do not mean a reality that dwells apart in a universe of its own, out of any relation whatever to our universe. There may or may not be such realities, and whether there are or not is purely irrelevant to any question of the nature of reality in our universe. The thing-in-itself is the unknowable reality of the thing we know. We conceive it as existing in complete abstraction from every aspect or relation of it that constitutes knowledge of it in another. The self-contradiction of such an idea is not difficult to show, quite apart from any consideration of its utter futility as an explanation. The thing-in-itself either is or else it is not the reality of phenomena. If it is, then, inasmuch as the phenomena reveal it, it is neither in-itself nor unknowable. If, on the other hand, it is not, if it is unrelated in any way to phenomena, then it is not only unknowable—it does not exist to be known. It is an idea without any content or meaning, and therefore indistinguishable from nothing. It is simply saying of one and the same thing that it must be and that there is nothing that it can be.

While, then, there is no actual thing that we experience, whether it be an object outside of us or an object within us, of which we can say this is not a phenomenon or appearance of reality but the actual reality itself, we cannot also say that we do not know reality, because if we had no idea, no criterion, of reality we could never know that anything was only an appearance. It is this fact—the fact that we undoubtedly possess, in the very process of thinking itself, a criterion of reality—that the idealist argument lays hold of as the basis of its doctrine. The mere fact seems, at first sight, barren and unpromising enough, but the idealist does not find it so. Possessed of this principle, logic, which has seemed till now purely destructive, becomes in his hands creative, and gives form and meaning to an object of pure reason.

The criterion of reality is self-consistency. We cannot think that anything is ultimately real which has its ground of existence in something else. A real thing is that which can be explained without reference to some other thing. Reality, therefore, is completely self-contained existence, not merely dependent existence. Contradictions cannot be true. If we have to affirm a contradiction of anything, it must be due to an appearance, and the reality must reconcile the contradiction. The idea of reality, therefore, is the idea of perfect harmony. Knowing, then, what reality is, can we say that there is any actual object of thought that conforms to it? And have we in our limited experience anything that will guide us to the attainment of this object? The idealist is confident that we have. Some things seem to us to possess a far higher degree of reality than others, just because they conform in a greater degree to this ideal of harmonious existence. It is when we compare the reality of physical things with the reality of mental things that the contrast is most striking, and in it we have the clue to the nature of the higher reality. Physical reality may seem, and indeed in a certain sense is, the basis of existence, but when we try to think out the meaning of physical reality, it becomes increasingly abstract, and we seem unable to set any actual limit to prevent it dissipating into nothing. In physical science we never have before us an actual element, either matter or energy, in which we can recognise, however far below the limit of perceivability, the ultimate stuff of which the universe is composed. Science has simply to arrest the dissipation by boldly assuming a matter that is the substance and foundation of reality and an energy that is the ultimate cause of the evolution of the universe. On the other hand, when we consider mental existence, the pursuit of reality is in an exactly contrary direction. There, the more concrete, the more comprehensive, the more individual a thing is, the greater degree of reality it seems to have. In the spiritual realm, by which we mean, not some supposed supra-mundane sphere, but the world of values, the world in which ideas have reality, in which we live our rational life, reality is always sought in a higher and higher individuality. The principle of individuality is that the whole is more real than the parts. An individual human being, for example, is a whole, an indivisible organic unity, not merely an aggregation of physiological organs with special functions, nor are these a mere collection of special cells, nor these a mere concourse of chemical elements. The State as a community is an individual organic unity with a reality that is more than the mere total of the reality of individual citizens who compose it. It is this principle of individuality that is the true criterion of reality. It is this principle that, while it leads us to seek the unity in an individuality ever higher and more complete than we have attained, at the same time explains the discrepancy of our partial view, explains contradictions as the necessary result of the effort to understand the parts in independence of the whole which gives to them their reality. Thus, while on the one hand the scientific search for reality is ever towards greater simplicity and abstractness, a simplicity whose ideal limit is zero, the philosophical search for reality is ever towards greater concreteness, towards full comprehensiveness, and its ideal limit is the whole universe as one perfect and completely harmonious individual. This idea of full reality is the Absolute. There are not two realities, one material and the other spiritual; the material and the spiritual are two directions in which we may seek the one reality, but there is only one pathway by which we shall find it.

The Absolute is the whole universe not in its aspect of an aggregate of infinitely diverse separate elements, whether these are material or spiritual, but in its aspect of an individual whole and in its nature as a whole. This nature of the whole is to be individual—only in the individual are contradictions reconciled. Is the Absolute more than an idea? Does it actually exist? Clearly we cannot claim to know it by direct experience, by acquaintance; it is not a that of which we can ask what? It is the object of reason itself, therefore we know that it must be. Also we know that it can be; it is a possible object in the logical meaning that it is not a self-contradictory idea, like every other idea that we can have. It is not self-contradictory, for it is itself the idea of that which is consistent. Therefore, argues the idealist, it is, for that which must be, and can be, surely exists. The reader will now understand why I introduced this account of the Absolute with a description for comparison of the St. Anselm proof of the existence of God.

There is one further question. Whether the Absolute does or does not exist, is it, either in idea or reality, of any use to us? The reply is that its value lies in this, that it reveals to us the nature of reality and the meaning of truth. Logic is the creative power of thought which leads us to the discovery of higher and higher degrees of reality. The Satyr, in the fable, drove his guest from his shelter because the man blew into his hands to warm them, and into his porridge to cool it. The Satyr could not reconcile the contradiction that one could with the same breath blow hot and cold. Nor would he reconcile it ever, so long as he sought truth as correspondence. Truth would have shown the facts coherent by reconciling the contradiction in a higher reality.