#Facts and truth.#
Facts are always single, concrete, and individual. Every fact is a hic and nunc. It is in a special place, and it is as it is, at a certain time. It is definite and of a particular kind. Yet a truth, although representing certain objects or their relations, is never a concrete object, nor is it a hic and a nunc. It possesses a generality applicable to all instances wherever and whenever the objects in their particular relation appear represented in that truth. Truth accordingly possesses as it were an ubiquity; it is omnipresent and eternal.
Truth in one sense is objective; it represents objects or their relations conceived in their objectivity, in their independence of the subject. This means that the representation of certain objective states will under like conditions agree with the experiences of all subjects—i. e., of all feeling beings having the same channels of information.
Truth in another sense is subjective. Truth exists in thinking subjects only. Truth affirms that certain subjective representations of the objective world can be relied upon, that they are deduced from facts and agree with facts. Based upon past experience, they can be used as guides for future experience. If there were no subjective beings, no feeling and comprehending minds, there would be no truth. Facts in themselves, whether they are or are not represented in the mind of a feeling and thinking subject, are real, yet representations alone, supposing they agree with facts, are true.
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#The problem of the origin of mind.#
Mind, or the representation of facts in feeling substance, is the creation of a new and a spiritual realm above the facts of material existence. By spiritual we understand feelings that are representative; and we say that it is a new creation because it does not exist in the isolated facts of the world. It is formed under special conditions. It rises from certain combinations of facts; being built upon those facts which produce in their co-operation the subjective state of feeling. The activity of mind if methodically disciplined is called science. Science attempts to make the mental representations correct: it is the search for truth. The object of all the sciences and of philosophy is to systematise knowledge, i. e., all the innumerable data of experience, so that we can understand and survey the facts of reality in their harmonious interconnection. The most important problem of philosophy has always been the problem of the origin of mind; for we are anxious to comprehend how it is possible that feeling can spring up in a universe of not-feeling objects, and that thinking beings can originate in a world of not-thinking elements.
Dualism assumes that the gulf between the two empires, the thinking and feeling on one side and the not-thinking and not-feeling on the other side, is insurmountable; Monism however maintains that there is no gulf, for there is no reason for such an assumption. Both realms, the feeling and thinking on the one hand, and the unfeeling and unthinking on the other hand, are not at all distinct and separate provinces. The transition from the one to the other takes place by degrees, and there is no boundary line between them. The atoms of oxygen which we inhale at present are not engaged in any action that is accompanied with feeling, but some of them will be very soon active in the generation of our best thought accompanied with most intense consciousness. After that they are thrown aside in the organism and pass out as waste products in the shape of carbonic acid.
#Telepathy.#
The spiritual originates from and disappears into the non-spiritual not otherwise than light originates out of, and dissolves again into, darkness. Light is usually considered as the emblem of mind, for light also discloses to our eye those objects which are so far away that we can never expect to touch them with our hands. So mind, the representation of the objective world in feeling substance, unveils the riddles of the universe and shows the secret connections of most distant things and events.