Truth is not one of these Names.

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by means of these; and every clear definition or explanation must be at length reducible to these elements. We have now to ask, Does Truth belong to any of the three classes which we have discovered? If it do not, it seems clear that a definition is required, and that after all it was the duty of the philosophers to have given us one. Yet to whom is it not manifest that that which we all mean by Truth is something utterly different from any of those things of which we have treated? It can be neither simple emotion nor action, and to attempt to identify it with any external, sensible object, or even with any quality or relation of such sensible objects, would be an absurdity into which no sane man would fall. Our philosophers, then, were dealing disingenuously with us; unless it be that, having ascended so high to the mountain top, they had forgotten the difficulties of the first slope, and the arts by which they themselves overcame them and mounted up aloft.

I will bring the matter between us to a very simple issue by a homely illustration. Suppose our philosopher wrecked on some unknown land, inhabited by a race as far advanced in civilization, and in all intellectual and moral development, as ourselves, but every word of whose language was unknown to him. Let us see how he would set about learning their language, and what words he would understand first. Surely he

would touch sensible objects as a sign that he wished to know their names, and would learn them. He would rub his stomach to signify the pain of hunger, and open and shut his mouth to show his desire to eat, and would be taught the names of the feeling and of the action. Thus he would rapidly enlarge his knowledge of all the names of the three classes which we have mentioned, and would soon be fully equipped with all the language of common life. But how and when would he discourse to them of Truth, his proper subject? Not, I imagine, until he was familiar with their methods of combining that fund of elemental words with which we have supposed him already stocked. Through some such combination, and thus only, could he convey an idea of the subject of his discourse. This combination of words would then be the natural explanation or definition of Truth in that language. That such a natural definition must exist in all languages, and that without it the notion of Truth will for ever remain vague, appears to me so apparent from our foregoing discourse, that I shall put myself at no further pains to prove it.

Let us seek then for some combination of our elemental names, which will give us, if it may be, a clear notion of that which is said to be the final aim of all science, and all philosophy. But first let us look again whether among the vast company of the philosophers, there be not one who has given us that for which we seek. Plato

Definitions of Truth.

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talks of Truth as the Science of the Ever-existent, but I fear me the terms of the definition are not in any way reducible to our three classes, while it is obvious that it excludes almost the whole of what humbler mortals consider true. For instance, that Victoria is Queen of England, is clearly not a statement falling ⋆ within this definition. In sober sadness the master was thinking, not of that humdrum work-a-day Truth with which we are at present concerned, but of that airy spirit of Truth which is pursued and captured only by philosophers.

I am inclined to think that Aristotle meant simply to give a definition of Truth in a sentence to which most of his interpreters assign a much more lofty aim; where he says, He that thinketh of the separate as separate, and of the conjoint as conjoint, is in truth, but he is in falsehood whose thoughts are not in accordance with facts.' This definition, if it be a definition, is obviously intended to explain that same earthly truth with which we are concerned, but it seems open to objection, both for its vagueness and for its narrowness. We cannot precisely determine what our author intended by the expressions 'the separate,' and 'the conjoint,' and, although we might be able to enlarge and explain the sentence in such a way as should render it an adequate definition of Truth as we conceive it, yet we could only achieve this at the cost of the commission of the most

serious, although the most common, offence of historians of philosophy, to wit, the reading into the text of an author, ideas and forms of thought which are in reality the product of the mind of the critic. This at least we may say, that the only Truth here spoken of is that of thought, which, as I shall hope to show, is not the only, nor even the most proper sense of the word which we seek to define.

After Aristotle, we may pass over a host of writers, ancient and modern, from whom some sort of definition of Truth may be indirectly abstracted; and a few who make grotesque attempts at a direct explanation of the term. Of these latter, perhaps the most simple, but by no means the most absurd, is the booby who was the author of that list of definitions which some cruel editor attributed to Plato, but which certainly has borrowed more from Aristotle in its form, and nothing from either in its spirit. Truth,' quoth he, ‘is a habit in affirmation and denial; or a knowledge of true things.' O marvellous discovery!

There remains yet one definition of truth for us to consider—a definition so infinitely superior in value to any of its predecessors, that it seems almost presumption to criticize it, one, indeed, from which I differ rather in matter of form and extraneous adjuncts, than as to the substance or spirit which underlies it. I mean that of Locke, one of the greatest because the humblest

Definitions of Truth.

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of philosophers, who carried the method of Bacon into the intellectual world with a consistency which Bacon himself at times fell short of. He, following the order of nature, and not attempting to prune her to fit systems or theories, discovered that the notion of Truth was a complex one, and could only be properly explained after the examination of all those simpler elements of thought whose names are capable of a non-verbal explanation, and which he classifies-although from a somewhat different point of view-in a fashion which accords sufficiently well with that which we have given.

In the fifth chapter of the fourth and most glorious book of his 'Essay on the Human Understanding,' he gives us the following passage. "What is truth?' was an enquiry many ages since; and it being that which all mankind either do or pretend to search after, it cannot but be worth our while carefully to examine wherein it consists; and so acquaint ourselves with the nature of it, as to observe how the mind distinguishes it from falsehood.

"Truth then seems to me, in the proper import of the word, to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs as the things signified by them do agree or disagree one with another. The joining or separating of signs here meant, is what by another name we call 'proposition.' So that truth properly belongs only to