Beside absolute truth there is relative truth, useful opinion, and validity, and to this latter world belong so-called non-rational facts.[1]
(c) And any mere conjunction, I go on to urge, is for thought self-contradictory. Thought, I may perhaps assume, implies analysis and synthesis and distinction in unity. Further the mere conjunction offered to thought cannot be set apart itself as something sacred, but may itself properly and indeed must become thought’s object. There will be a passage therefore from one element in this conjunction to its other element or elements. And on the other hand, by its own nature, thought must hold these in unity. But, in a bare conjunction, starting with A thought will externally be driven to B, and seeking to unite these it will find no ground of union. Thought can of itself supply no internal bond by which to hold them together, nor has it any internal diversity by which to maintain them apart. It must therefore seek barely to identify them, though they are different, or somehow to unite both diversities where it has no ground of distinction and union. And this does not mean that the connection is merely unknown and may be affirmed as unknown, and also, supposing it were known, as rational. For, if so, the conjunction would at once not be bare, and it is as bare that it is offered and not as conditional. But, if on the other hand it remains bare, then thought to affirm it must unite diversities without any internal distinction, and the attempt to do this is precisely what contradiction means.
“But,” I shall be told, “you misrepresent the case. What is offered is not the elements apart, nor the elements plus an external bond, but the elements together and in conjunction.”
- ↑ I use “validity” much in the sense in which it was made current, I believe, by Lotze, and in which it has been said, I presume, with some truth, partly to coincide with δόξα. For my own purposes I have tried elsewhere to fix the meaning of the term, and I think it would have been better if Mr. Hobhouse, in his interesting and most instructive volume on The Theory of Knowledge, had remembered, when concerned with myself, that what is self-contradictory may also for me be valid. I should find it in general very difficult to reply to Mr. Hobhouse’s criticisms on my views, because in so many places I have to doubt if I can have apprehended his meaning. I understand him e.g. to urge that a judgment must be categorically true, if its content can be shown to be “contained” in reality. But the question was, I supposed, not in the very least as to whether the content is contained in reality or not, but entirely as to how, being contained there, it is contained, i.e. whether categorically or otherwise. Again Mr. Hobhouse seems to assume that, if a complex (such as the inherence of diverse adjectives or the union of continuity and discretion) is “fact,” it therefore cannot be self-contradictory for thought. But surely the view he is engaged in controverting, holds precisely that to be false here which he, as far as I have seen, without any discussion assumes to be true. So that it is better that I should admit that I must have failed to follow the argument. If Mr. Hobhouse has in general understood the main drift of the view he criticises, I have not been able for the most part to understand his criticism, and I do not doubt that I am the loser.
