Herbert Wildon Carr

“ May not the contradictoriness of our ideas be due to this fact, that our knowledge is entirely of phenomena, of appearances of things, and not of things as they are in themselves? By a thing-in-itself we do not mean a reality that dwells apart in a universe of its own, out of any relation whatever to our universe. There may or may not be such realities, and whether there are or not is purely irrelevant to any question of the nature of reality in our universe. The thing-in-itself is the unknowable reality of the thing we know. ”

“ APPEARANCE AND REALITY
Our conscious life is one unceasing change. From the first awakening of consciousness to the actual present, no one moment has been the mere repetition of another, and the moments which as we look back seem to have made up our life are not separable elements of it but our own divisions of a change that has been continuous. And as it has been, so we know it will be until consciousness ceases with death. ”

“ What we first take for reality is merely a shadow world. But in Plato's view it is the intellect which gives us the means of escape, the power to turn from the illusion to behold the reality. It is not until now that philosophy has sought the clue to the illusion in the nature of the intellect itself. The very instrument of truth is unfitted to reveal to us the reality as it is, because its nature and purpose is to transform reality, to make reality appear in a form which, though of paramount importance to us as active beings, is essentially an illusion. ”

“ Consciousness as the unity of knowing and acting is a becoming. The past is not left behind, it is with us in the form of memory; the future is not a predetermined order which only a natural disability prevents us from knowing, it is yet uncreated; conscious life is the enduring present which grows with the past and makes the future.
This reality of consciousness is our continually changing experience. But there is also another reality with which it seems to be in necessary relation and also in complete contrast—this is the reality of the material or physical universe. ”

“ Yet we are absolutely dependent on the reality we know by acquaintance for all our knowledge of these things. Not only is immediate sense experience and the knowledge it gives us by acquaintance the only evidence we have of the greater and wider reality, but we are dependent on it for the terms wherewith to describe it, for the form in which to present it, for the matter with which to compose it. And this is the real ground of the study of philosophy, the justification of its standpoint. ”

“ It is conceivable that future generations will reject our scientific notions, self-evident though they seem to us, as completely as we reject the notions of the dark ages. It is even conceivable that the whole of our modern science may come to appear to mankind as not even an approximation to knowledge. Error, like illusion, may be universal. ”

“ The system of movement in which we are ourselves carried along appears to us stationary, while that which is outside it seems alone to move. In very simple cases, such as viewing the landscape from a railway-carriage window, habit has long caused the illusion to cease, but we all remember the child's feeling that the trees and fields were flying past us. The earth's motion never becomes to us a real experience of movement, we accept the fact and never doubt the scientific evidence on which it rests, yet we always speak and think of sunrise and sunset ”

“ If we look into another person's eye we may see there a picture of the whole field of his vision reflected from his lens. It is true that what we see is not what he sees, for that is on his retina, but the analogy of this with a photographic camera, where we see the picture on the ground glass, seems obvious and natural; and so we think of knowledge, so far as it depends on the sense of vision, as consisting in more or less vivid, more or less faded, copies of real things stored up by the memory. ”

“ There can be no absolute error, because if truth is the whole, error, if it exists at all, must in some way be included in truth. Clearly error cannot as such be truth, and therefore it must follow that, in the whole, error loses its character of error, and finds reconciliation of its contradiction to truth. Error, then, if it is something, and not a pure negation, is partial or incomplete truth; the perplexity and contradiction that it gives rise to are incidental to our partial view. Knowledge, it must seem to us, can exist only for omniscience. Unless we know everything, we know nothing. ”

“ How there can be false opinion—that difficulty still troubles the eye of my mind. Do we not speak of false opinion, and say that one man holds a false and another a true opinion, as though there were some natural distinction between them? All things and everything are either known or not known. He who knows, cannot but know; and he who does not know, cannot know.... Where, then, is false opinion? For if all things are either known or unknown, there can be no opinion which is not comprehended under this alternative, and so false opinion is excluded. ”

“ While, then, there is no actual thing that we experience, whether it be an object outside of us or an object within us, of which we can say this is not a phenomenon or appearance of reality but the actual reality itself, we cannot also say that we do not know reality, because if we had no idea, no criterion, of reality we could never know that anything was only an appearance. It is this fact—the fact that we undoubtedly possess, in the very process of thinking itself, a criterion of reality—that the idealist argument lays hold of as the basis of its doctrine. ”

“ If, as the common sense of mankind requires us to believe, the reality that is known by us exists in entire independence of our relation of knowing to it, how can we state this fact without falling into contradiction in the very statement of it? ”

“ Clearly, if we hold the view that things-in-themselves are unknowable, truth cannot be a correspondence between our ideas and these things-in-themselves. Truth must be some quality of the ideas themselves, and this can only be their logical consistency. Consistency, because the ideas must be in agreement with one another; and logical, because this consistency belongs to the thinking, and logic is the science of thinking. ”

“ We distinguish also ourself from that consciousness which is memory, the awareness of past experience, from present feelings, desires, thoughts, and strivings—these, we say, belong to the self but are not it. The self must have qualities and dwell in the body, guiding, directing, and controlling it, yet this self we never perceive, nor can we conceive it, for our idea of it is of a reality that changes and is yet unchangeable. ”

“ To this objection the pragmatist reply is that if this be the meaning of the truth there is no way shown by which it can be distinguished from error. There is in fact for idealism no error, no illusion, no falsehood; as real facts, there are only degrees of truth. But a theory of truth which ignores such stubborn realities as illusion, falsehood, and error is, from whatever standpoint we view it, useless. On the other hand, pragmatism offers a test by which we can discriminate between true and false—namely, the method of judging conceptions by their practical consequences. ”

“ Truth, it is said, is concerned not with the nature of things themselves but with our judgments about them. Judgment is not concerned with the terms that enter into relation—these are immediately experienced and ultimate—but with the relations in which they stand to one another. Thus, when we say John is the father of James, the truth of our judgment does not consist in the adequacy of our ideas of John and James, nor in the correspondence of our ideas with the realities, but is concerned only with the relation that is affirmed to exist between them. ”

“ Pragmatism is a criticism and a theory. If reality in its full meaning is the Absolute, and if all seeming reality is only a degree of or approximation to this full reality, if the knowledge of this reality only is truth, must it not seem to us that truth is useless knowledge? Useless, not in the sense that it is without value to the mind that cares to contemplate it, but useless in so far as the hard everyday working world in which we have to spend our lives is concerned. We who have to win our existence in the struggle of life, need truth. We need truth in order to act. ”

“ Truth that transcends our temporal needs, truth that is eternal, truth that reconciles illusion and error, that accepts them as a necessary condition of appearance in time, is useless in practice, however it may inspire the poet and philosopher. Truth to serve us must reject error and not reconcile it, must be a working criterion and not only a rational one. Whatever truth is, it is not useless; it is a necessity of life, not a luxury of speculation. Pragmatism therefore rejects the logical criterion of truth because it is purely formal and therefore useless. ”

“ The question What is truth? will probably bring to everyone's mind the words uttered by a Roman Procurator at the supreme moment of a great world-tragedy. Pilate's question is usually interpreted as the cynical jest of a judge indifferent to the significance of the great cause he was trying—the expression of the belief that there is no revelation of spiritual truth of the highest importance for our human nature, or at least that there is no infallible test by which it can be known. It is not this problem of truth that we are now to discuss. ”

“ In physical science we never have before us an actual element, either matter or energy, in which we can recognise, however far below the limit of perceivability, the ultimate stuff of which the universe is composed. Science has simply to arrest the dissipation by boldly assuming a matter that is the substance and foundation of reality and an energy that is the ultimate cause of the evolution of the universe. ”

“ So far we have looked at our intellectual endowment from the standpoint of ordinary common-sense experience. Let us now consider the philosophical theory based on this view, which explains the nature of knowledge by showing its purpose. The intellect not only selects, but in selecting transforms the reality. It presents us with knowledge that indeed corresponds with reality, for it is essentially a view of reality, but also in selecting it marks out divisions, and gives to reality a form that is determined by practical interest. ”

“ New conditions are ever calling forth new ideas, and truths become untrue. Each new idea comes forward with a claim to truth, and its claim is tested by its practicability. Truth is not something we discover, and which was there to be discovered. We verify ideas. To verify is not to find true but to make true.
The pragmatist theory therefore is that truth is made. In all other theories truth is found. But if we make truth we must make reality, for it is clear that if reality is there already, the agreement with it of man-made truth would be nothing short of a miracle. ”

“ Pragmatism therefore rejects both the views that we have examined—the theory that truth is a correspondence of the idea with its object, and the theory that it is the logical coherence and consistency of the idea itself. It proposes instead the theory that truth is always founded on a practical postulate, and consists in the verification of that postulate; the verification not being the discovery of something that was waiting to be discovered, but the discovery that the postulate that claims to be true is useful, in that it works. Truth is what works.
The Absolute is reality and truth. ”

“ I have indicated my own view, that the direction in which the solution lies is in the new conception of life and the theory of knowledge given to us in the philosophy of Bergson. If I am right, the solution is not, like pragmatism, a doctrine of the nature of truth, but a theory of knowledge in which {vi} the dilemma in regard to truth does not arise. But, as always in philosophy, the solution of one problem is the emergence of another. ”

“ Let us now consider the explanation of error offered by the idealist philosophy. In this view only the whole truth is wholly true; the Absolute, as a perfect, concrete, individual system, is the ideal, and all that falls short of it can only possess a degree of truth—a degree which is greater or less according as it approximates to the ideal. The degrees of truth are not quantitative, not a mixture of truth and error, but a nearer or more distant approach to the ideal. ”

“ The best that can be said in favour of any belief is that there is no reason for supposing it false, and the worst that can be said against any belief is that there is no reason for supposing it true. Our problem, then, is to know what constitutes the nature of error in any one of these examples if it is, as each one may be, false? ”

“ It is a common enough experience that ideas prove false though they have exhibited no inherent failure to harmonise with surrounding circumstances nor any self-contradiction. The theory, therefore, requires more than a cursory examination.
Thinking is the activity of our mind which discovers the order, arrangement, and system in the reality that the senses reveal. Without thought, our felt experience would be a chaos and not a world. The philosopher Kant expressed this by saying that the understanding gives unity to the manifold of sense. The understanding, he said, makes nature. ”

“ Whether our working ideas—cause, time, space, movement, things and their qualities, terms and their relations, and the like—are consistent or inconsistent in themselves, they more or less work; and in so far as they work they are useful and serve us, and because they work, and just in so far as they work, they are true. {46} The pragmatist therefore declares that utility, not logical consistency, is the criterion of truth. Ideas are true in so far as they work. The discovery that they serve us is their verification. ”

“ It receives the influences that stream in upon us from the reality around us, it apprehends and interprets them, and works out the lines of our possible action in regard to them. The influences that flow in upon us from the outside world are already selected before our intellect apprehends them, for they flow in by the avenues of our senses, and the senses are natural instruments of selection. ”

“ A theory that condemns any purely logical process as resulting in "useless" knowledge can only justify itself by insisting on an application of the principle of utility that will be found to exclude not merely the Absolute of philosophy but most if not all of the results of pure mathematics and physics, for these sciences apply a method of pure logical deduction and induction indistinguishable from that which pragmatism condemns. The intellectual nature of man is an endowment which sharply distinguishes him from other forms of living creatures. ”

“ There is no criterion, no absolute standard, independent of ideas to which they must conform if they are judged to be true. The value of an idea is its practical usefulness as tested by its workability. Truth is what works. This led us to criticise the concept of utility. We found that it is impossible to identify utility with truth even if we include theoretical utility in its widest meaning, because over and above the usefulness and workability of an idea there always remains the question of its relation to reality. ”

“ This does not mean that the intellect directs us to what is useful and inhibits us from courses fatal to life, neither does it mean that it gives us any power to make true what is not already true, it means that the power to acquire knowledge is useful. There is a contrast in our own existence between our life and our intellect.
To understand the way in which the intellect serves the living creature endowed with it, we need only regard it from the standpoint of ordinary experience. ”

“ There are therefore two attitudes towards the problem of truth and reality—that of the mind which brings a practical test to every question, and that of the mind restless to gain by insight or by speculation a clue to the mystery that enshrouds the meaning of existence. The first attitude seems peculiarly to characterise the man of science, who delights to think that the problem of reality is simple and open to the meanest understanding. ”

“ Truth, we reply, is a property of certain of our ideas; it means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. If I say of anything that it is so, then, if it is so, what I say is true; if it is not so, then what I say is false. This simple definition of truth is one that is universally accepted. No one really can deny it, for if he did he would have nothing to appeal to to justify his own theory or condemn another. The problem of truth is only raised when we ask, What does the agreement of an idea with reality mean? ”