[260] See “truth and real existence” in the Republic, 508 D—Jowett’s rendering of ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν (“over which truth and real existence are shining”). Also further in the same place, “The cause of science and of truth,” αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας. In 389 E we read that a “high value must be set on truth.” Of course to Plato “truth” is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence, as when he says (Rep. 585), “that which has less of truth will also have less of essence.” But in any case truth always means more for him than “mere being,” or existence, or “appearance,” it is the highest form of being, the object of “science,” the great discovery of the higher reason.
[261] To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.
[262] The Poetry of the Old Testament, Professor A. R. Gordon.
[263] Ibid. p. 4.
[264] The Poetry of the Old Testament, p. 160.
[265] Ibid. pp. 183–184.
[266] It is this false conception of truth as a “datum” or “content” that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley’s argument in Appearance and Reality. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor Boyce Gibson (Eucken’s Philosophy of Life, p. 109) in respect of the attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal. “The ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinctness of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to it, nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which our freedom gains from its dependence upon God.”
[267] It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of philosophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not allowing for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world through the insight of individuals and through the actions and the creations of original men.
[268] There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot but think at this point, and which so far at least as the rationalist-pragmatist issue is concerned is really one of the deepest and most instructive ideas in the whole history of philosophy. It is one of Aristotle’s troublesome additional statements in reference to something that he has just been discussing—in this case the “object of desire” and the “object of thought.” And what he adds in the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7): “The primary objects of these two things are the same”—τούτων τὰ πρῶτα τὰ αὐτά—rendered by Smith and Ross “the primary objects of thought and desire are the same.” The translation, of course, is a matter of some slight difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of τὰ πρῶτα, “the first things,” although, of course, the student soon becomes familiar with what Aristotle means by “first things,” and “first philosophy,” and “first in nature,” and “first for us,” and so on. Themistius in his commentary on this passage (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, vol. v. i-vi; Themistius in Metaphysica, 1072 and 17–30) puts it that “in the case of immaterial existences the desirable and the intelligible are the same—in primis vero principiis materiae non immixtis idem est desiderabile atque intelligibile.” I am inclined to use this great idea of the identity of the desirable and the intelligible—for conscious, intelligent beings as the fundamental principle of the true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in search. It is evidently in this identity that Professor Bosanquet also believes in when he says: “I am persuaded that if we critically understand what we really want and need, we shall find it established by a straightforward argument” (Preface to Individuality and Value. See the eighth chapter of this book). It is certainly true that the constructive philosophy of which we are in search to-day must leave no gap between thought and desire.
[269] I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the “good,” which is no doubt a “predicate” of our total thought and feeling and volition. “Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is God in man; and insists on omniscience” (Victorian Age in Literature, p. 246—italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a belief in an active goodness greater than our own; and it does raise a desire for a comprehension of things.