difference falls outside our knowledge. But, if so, this unknown modification of our predicate may, in various degrees, destroy its special character. The content in fact might so be altered, be so redistributed and blended, as utterly to be transformed. And, in brief, the predicate may, taken as such, be more or less completely untrue. Thus we really always have asserted subject to, and at the mercy of, the unknown.[1] And hence our judgment, always but to a varying extent, must in the end be called conditional.
But with this we have arrived at the meeting-ground of error and truth. There will be no truth which is entirely true, just as there will be no error which is totally false. With all alike, if taken strictly, it will be a question of amount, and will be a matter of more or less. Our thoughts certainly, for some purposes, may be taken as wholly false, or again as quite accurate; but truth and error, measured by the Absolute, must each be subject always to degree. Our judgments, in a word, can never reach as far as perfect truth, and must be content merely to enjoy more or less of Validity. I do not simply mean by this term that, for working purposes, our judgments are admissible and will pass. I mean that less or more they actually possess the character and type of absolute truth and reality. They can take the place of the Real to various extents, because containing in themselves less or more of its nature. They are its representatives, worse
- ↑ Hence in the end we must be held to have asserted the unknown. It is however better not to call this the predication of an unknown quality (Principles of Logic, p. 87), since “quality” either adds nothing, or else adds what is false. The doctrine of the text seems seriously to affect the reciprocity of ground and consequence, of cause and effect. I certainly agree here that, if the judgments are pure, the relation holds both ways (Bosanquet. Logic, I., pp. 261-4). But, if in the end they remain impure, and must be qualified always by an unspecified background, that circumstance must be taken into consideration.
