or better, in proportion as they present us with truth affected by greater or less derangement. Our judgments hold good, in short, just so far as they agree with, and do not diverge from, the real standard. We may put it otherwise by saying that truths are true, according as it would take less or more to convert them into reality.
We have perceived, so far, that truth is relative and always imperfect. We have next to see that, though failing of perfection, all thought is to some degree true. On the one hand it falls short of, and, on the other hand at the same time, it realizes the standard. But we must begin by enquiring what this standard is.
Perfection of truth and of reality has in the end the same character. It consists in positive, self-subsisting individuality; and I have endeavoured to show, in Chapter xx., what individuality means. Assuming that the reader has recalled the main points of that discussion, I will point out the two ways in which individuality appears. Truth must exhibit the mark of internal harmony, or, again, the mark of expansion and all-inclusiveness. And these two characteristics are diverse aspects of a single principle. That which contradicts itself, in the first place, jars, because the whole, immanent within it, drives its parts into collision. And the way to find harmony, as we have seen, is to re-distribute these discrepancies in a wider arrangement. But, in the second place, harmony is incompatible with restriction and finitude. For that which is not all-inclusive must by virtue of its essence internally disagree; and, if we reflect, the reason of this becomes plain. That which exists in a whole has external relations. Whatever it fails to include within its own nature, must be related to it by the whole, and related externally. Now these extrinsic relations, on the one hand, fall outside of itself, but, upon the other hand,
