mean that its inner character, as ideal, is itself discordant and self-discrepant. But I should prefer not to call error a predicate which contradicts itself. For that might be taken as a statement that the contradiction already is present in the mere predicate, before judgment is attempted; and this, if defensible, would be misleading. Error is the qualification of a reality in such a way that in the result it has an inconsistent content, which for that reason is rejected. Where existence has a “what” colliding within itself, there the predication of this “what” is an erroneous judgment. If a reality is self-consistent, and its further determination has introduced discord, there the addition is the mistake, and the reality is unaffected. It is unaffected, however, solely on the assumption that its own nature in no way suggested and called in the discordant. For otherwise the whole result is infected with falseness, and the reality could never have been pure from discrepancy.[1]
It will perhaps tend to make clearer this general view of error if I defend it against some possible objections. Error is supposed by some persons to be a departure from experience, or from what is given merely. It is again taken sometimes as the confusion of internal image with outward sensation. But any such views are of course most superficial. Quite apart from the difficulty of finding anything merely given, and the impossibility of always using actual present sensation as a test of truth—without noticing the strange prejudice that outward sensations are never false, and the dull blindness which fails to realize that the “inward” is a fact just as solid as the “outward”—we may dismiss the whole objection. For, if the given has a content which is not harmonious, then, no matter in what sense we
- ↑ The doctrine here is stated subject to correction in Chapter xxiv. No finite predicate or subject can really be self-consistent.
