Accordingly, the criterion of truth is the perfect agreement of all facts, of all interpretations and explanations of facts among themselves. If two facts (such as we conceive them) do not agree with each other, we must revise them; and it may be stated as a matter of experience, that our mind will find no peace until a monistic conception is reached. A monistic conception is the perfect agreement of all facts in a methodical system, so that the same law is recognised to prevail in all instances, and the most different events are conceived as acting under different conditions yet in accord with the same law.
* * * * *
It does not lie within the scope of this essay to enter upon the practical application of the principle which we have set forth as the criterion of truth. One hint only may be supplied, to point out the most obvious maxim derivable from it—a maxim that is instinctively obeyed by all scientists and has often been popularly expressed in the sentence: An ounce of fact is worth a hundred pounds of hypothesis, or of any interpretation of facts. All the theories in the world, scientific and economical, our dearest ideals not excepted, and all the most ingenious hypotheses have no value unless they have been derived from, and agree with, the laws that live in the facts of our experience.
The trouble of applying this rule lies mainly in the difficulty of distinguishing between facts and our interpretation of facts. Considering that mind is representativeness in feelings we have to analyse the mind in order to come down to objective facts. The percept of a tree is not the tree; it is an interpretation of a group of facts; it is a mental picture produced by a synthesis of sensations, the latter being caused by sense-impressions. Considering that all the images, ideas, abstract concepts, and theories of which our mind consists are not the facts represented by them but their several interpretations, we at once see how careful we have to be for purposes of philosophical and scientific exactness in the statement of facts.
* * * * *
On this occasion, a few critical remarks concerning the leading essay of this number, "The Architecture of Theories," by Mr. Charles S. Peirce, may be added. Mr. Peirce is one of our subtlest thinkers and logicians, and it is incumbent upon one to reflect twice before criticising any sentence of a man who writes upon the most recondite topics,—upon what I should call the higher mathematics, the differential and integral calculus of logic,—with ease and masterly accuracy. Mr. Peirce's essay "The Architecture of Theories,"[55] presented in this number of The Monist, is the first publication of his in which he propounds not mere criticism or the discussion of abstruse logical subjects, but his own positive opinion, presenting in great and clear outlines the foundations of his philosophy.
[55] The term "architecture of theories" seems inappropriate from the standpoint of a positive conception of the world. Many monisms have been constructed in the way Mr. Peirce so well describes in his comparison of these philosophical systems to the building a house of one and the same material, for instance papier mâché, with roof of roofing paper, foundations of paste-board, windows of paraffined paper, etc., etc. Philosophy, however, is not a construction of a theory comparable to the building of an edifice; it is rather the mapping out of the house in which we live for the purpose of orientation.
The world-conception of Mr. Peirce agrees in one fundamental maxim with our own, but it disagrees with the latter in the main and most important application of this maxim. Mr. Peirce says, "Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason." This maxim was the guiding star of our inquiry into the fundamental problems of philosophy.[56] The world considered as a universe displaying in all its innumerable actions one and the same law is called a cosmos; if considered as a heap of processes with no common law pervading them it is called a chaos. We found in our inquiry into the forms of existence that the laws of form possess intrinsic necessity. The laws of the form of existence are represented in the laws of formal thought (arithmetic, mathematics, logic, mechanics, and pure natural science). So long as the formal laws hold good, (and we have found in the chapter "Form and Formal Thought" that they will hold good under all circumstances,) any kind of world, whatever materially or dynamically it be, must be a cosmos, and cannot be a chaos. We can imagine that we had a world consisting of some other substance and being different either in the amount or in the action of its energy to this world of ours, but we cannot imagine that a world should exist which does not exhibit the harmony of form, and is not regulated as it were by the formal laws of existence. One plus one would be two in any kind of a world, and obviously all the other more complex statements of formal laws would remain true with the same intrinsic necessity. The truth 'one plus one makes two' contains the universal applicability of causation and of the conservation of matter and energy. Taking this ground we arrived at the conclusion that the world is a cosmos: there is no chaos and there never has been a chaos. A chaos, in the sense of an absolute non-existence of law, is an impossibility.
[56] See the author's Fundamental Problems.
Accordingly, we cannot agree with Mr. Peirce that the occurrence of chance "calls for no particular explanation." There is no chance, if chance means absence of law. Chance, if the word be admissible, is a mere subjective conception produced by limited knowledge and signifying a state of things not determinable with the means of knowledge at our disposal. Law once recognised is the death of chance (in the objective sense of the word); and chance, or sport, or chaos, or indeterminacy, or whatever one may call the absence or at least the imperfect cogency of law, far from "calling for no particular explanation," must be classed prima facie among those theories that are per se impossible: These conceptions whether applied to the world at large or to special processes of nature are in contradiction to those interpretations and systematised statements of facts which are most fundamental, most reliable, most indispensable and universal. Whatever generalisation the theory of evolution may be capable of, it is certainly not capable of being applied to law. The formal order of Nature and especially the mechanical laws of physics cannot be thought of as having been developed out of a state of sportive chance; they must be considered as having always been the same as they are now: they are eternal.[57]