true. We cannot, I think, deny the application of the word truth to this general comprehension, and yet inasmuch as this general comprehension is something over and above the various judgments of isolated historical fact which go to make it up, its truth cannot be established by correspondence alone. Similarly with regard to the truth about a circle. The third book of Euclid contains a number of perfectly true propositions about the circle as such, and it might be possible to increase these so that all the truths about a circle as such were known. But these truths do not constitute the whole truth about a circle. The circle is also a conic section and as such bears relations to hyperbolas, parabolas and to other conic sections. Hence further truths remain to be ascertained about the circle as part of a whole, which are over and above the truths about a circle as such, and these further truths about a circle as a whole cannot be established by the view which regards truth simply as correspondence between judgment and perception of isolated facts. The Truth about a thing is not an aggregate of all the true judgments about it. The true judgments remain true, but they are incomplete, and it is in just that particular respect in which they are incomplete, in that respect in which they fall short of the whole truth about the thing, that the correspondence theory fails. It is for this reason that the correspondence theory is beset with difficulty when we come to consider judgments which involve concepts or universals. A concept must be regarded as something more than the sum of all possible perceptions, and in so far as it is more, the truth of a judgment which involves concepts cannot be established by correspondence. It may of course be argued, as it is argued by psychologists, that a concept has neither value nor existence apart from the perceptions which it represents. I do not think, however, that most philosophers would agree with this view, and if we do not agree with it we must admit that the truth of the "more" involved in a concept must be arrived at by some new test. Let me try to make clear in greater detail what is meant. If I make the judgment "This picture is beautiful, what is the external fact with perception of which my judgment is to correspond? It is not the picture itself, for a beautiful picture is something more than a picture. It is not the dos of beauty, for assuming that a Platonic dos of beauty exists, that ados is not to be found in the picture, we do not perceive the dos when we perceive the picture, and the dos is never completely known. How then is it to be decided whether my judgment is right or wrong? Even if it is judged wrong by the standard of the majority why should I slavishly accept their decision? It is in cases of this kind that the coherence theory becomes useful. The coherence theory holds that the meaning of truth is coherence with the general mass of beliefs about the Universe as a whole. Now if Reality can be regarded as a systematic, organic whole, the parts of which are related teleologically to it, if no cne fact can be understood by itself, but only in relation to the whole of which it forms a part, it is quite obvious that judgments about any part of reality cannot be known to be true, unless we know what the whole means. As this is humanly impossible, it would seem that judgments involving such concepts as truth, justice and beauty cannot ever be known to be completely true. The conclusion is the same if we believe in the existence of the Platonic Forms of truth, justice and beauty. The Forms themselves can never be completely known, so that judgments about particulars which partake of these Forms and which thus comprise an ultimately unknowable element, cannot be known to be quite true. This conclusion squares with practical experi I do not for instance believe that it is possible to pass a true judgment about the meaning of truth, and it is in part the object of this chapter to show that no satisfactory account of this meaning whatever it may be, has yet been arrived at. Similarly in matters of artistic judgment the differences of opinion that exist are chaotic. Questions of taste are notoriously unsuitable for dogmatic decision, and it seems impossible to predicate absolute truth or falsehood for any artistic judgment. It is however argued, and I think justly, that the test of coherence is useful in artistic judgments, not for the purpose of predicating for them absolute truth or falsehood, but as a means by which to discriminate those judgments which are more true from those which are less true. Although it may be urged that there is no external standard, by an appeal to which the judgment of the Chinaman who regarded the preliminary tuning-up as more beautiful than the concert, can be pronounced false, his judgment may be regarded as less likely to be true than that which prefers the concert on the ground that it is admittedly inconsistent with the general consensus of existing opinion on the matter. But even if the superior truth of the consensus as established by the test of coherence be admitted, it constitutes at best a very weak argument in favour of coherence. A consensus of aesthetic opinion is an elusive thing, and not capable of arithmetical summation. Moreover the consensus of any one age has frequently been shown to be wrong by the consensus of the next, which seems to indicate that a judgment which was once true would become false by sheer lapse of time. Even therefore if we allow the test of coherence in aesthetic judgments, we must safeguard ourselves by the proviso that the test is an equivocal one, and the judgments which it seeks to establish are for ever wavering between the true and the false. The truth of judgments involving a priori concepts such as goodness and beauty, which are known, in so far as they are known at all, independently of experience, cannot in fact be established by any test. The correspondence theory breaks down, as we have seen, when applied to them: the coherence theory, even if the validity of its application be admitted, is an uncertain guide, and admits a latitude of scepticism as to its conclusions, which does not attach to judgments of which the truth is established by correspondence. In Plato's language the on all spring from the ἰδέα τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ from which they derive their meaning and their existence, and as we can never completely know the ἰδέα τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, the ειδος of aλnoela must itself be involved in some of that obscurity which shrouds its source. It has been urged that on the coherence theory, and on that theory alone, are we able significantly to deny existence to creatures of the imagination such as centaurs, purple quadratic equations, and triangles whose interior angles are greater or less than two right angles. We refuse to believe in these things, it is said, because a moment's reflection shows that their existence is incompatible with the rest of Reality as we know it. 44 But the words as we know it" give the game away. It is an important and frequently emphasised |