It is with something of a shock that we realise here that we approach the deep connection between logic and ethics, long ago suggested by Socrates and Plato, discovered anew by Kant and Fichte, but lost sight of by living workers.
A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not A has no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth. Such a creature if endowed with speech will lie without knowing it, without the possibility of knowing it; Veritas norma sui et falsa est. There is nothing more upsetting to a man than to find, when he has discovered a woman in a lie, and has asked her, “Why did you lie about it?” that she simply does not understand the question, but simply looks at him and laughingly tries to soothe him, or bursts into tears.
The subject does not end with the part played by memory. Lying is common enough amongst men. And lies can be told in spite of a full remembrance of the subject which for some purpose some one wishes to be informed about. Indeed, it might almost be said that the only persons who can lie are those who misrepresent facts in spite of a superior knowledge and consciousness of them.
Truth must first be regarded as the real value of logic and ethics before it is correct to speak of deviations from truth for special motives as lies from the moral point of view. Those who have not this high conception should be adjudged as guilty rather of vagueness and exaggeration than of lying; they are not immoral but non-moral. And in this sense the woman is non-moral.
The root of such an absolute misconception of truth must lie deep. The continuous memory against which alone a man can be false, is not the real source of the effort for truth, the desire for truth, the basal ethical-logical phenomenon, but only stands in intimate relation with it.
That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the individual himself quite independently of all social codes (so condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the social life of man). Society recognises the idea of illegality, but not of sin; it presses for punishment without wishing to produce repentance; lying is punished by the law only in its ceremonious form of perjury, and error has never been placed under its ban. Social ethics with its conception of duty to our neighbour and to society, and practical exclusion from consideration of the other fifteen hundred million human beings, cannot extend the realm of morality, when it begins by limiting it in this arbitrary fashion.
What is this “centre of apperception” that is superior to time and change?
It can be nothing less than what raises man above himself (as a part of the world of sense) which joins him to an order of things that only the reason can grasp, and that puts the whole world of sense at his feet. It is nothing else than personality.
The most sublime book in the world, the “Criticism of Practical Reason,” has referred morality to an intelligent ego, distinct from all empirical consciousness. I must now turn to that side of my subject.