164 F. C. S. SCHILLER : primarily a claim which may or may not turn out to be valid.. It will mean, secondarily, such a claim after it has been tested' and ratified, by processes which it behoves us to examine. In the first sense, as a claim, it will always have to be re- garded with suspicion. For we shall not know whether it is really and fully true, and we shall tend to reserve this honour- able predicate for what has victoriously sustained its claim. And once we realise that a claim to truth is involved in every assertion as such, our vigilance will be sharpened. A claim to truth, being inherent in assertion as such, will come to seem a formal and trivial thing, worth noting once for all, but possessing little real interest for knowledge. A formal logic, therefore, which restricts itself to the registration of such formal claims, we shall regard as solemn trifling ; but it will seem a matter of vital importance and of agonised in- quiry what it is that validates such claims and makes them really true. And with regard to any ' truth ' that is asserted^ our first demand will be to know what is de facto its condition,, whether it sets forth what has been fully validated, or whether it is still a mere, and possibly a random, claim. For this evidently will make all the difference to the meaning and logical value of an assertion. That '2 + 2 = 4' and that 'truth is indefinable' stand, e.g., logically on a very different footing : the one is part of a tried and tested system of arithmetical truth, the other the desperate refuge of a bankrupt or indolent theory. Under such conditions far-reaching confusions could be- avoided only by the unobtrusive operation of a beneficent providence. But that such miraculous intervention should guard logicians against the consequences of their negligence was hardly to be hoped for, and accordingly we find, e.g., Prof. A. E. Taylor first laying it down that " true propositions, are those which have an unconditional claim on our recogni- tion " (of them as valid or merely of their claim ? and then pronouncing that " truth is just the system of propositions which have an unconditional claim to be recognised as valid ".* 1 In his interesting article on "Truth and Practice" in Phil. Rev. for May, 1905, pp. 271, 288. Italics mine. This confusion is repeatedly exemplified; e.g., p. 273, "the truth of a statement means not the actual fact of its recognition " (i.e., its de facto validity), " but its rightful claim on our recognition," p. 274, also on pp. 276 and 278. Prof. Taylor does not distinguish between ' claim ' and ' right ' and so has not seen that the question of truth is one as to when and how a ' claim ' is to be recognised as ' rightful '. But he errs in the company of his master. Tt would be difficult to express the ambiguity we are criticising more com- pactly than Mr. Bradley does in the following sentences (MiND, N.S., 20, p. 470). " About the truth of this Law " (of Contradiction) " so far
