THE MEANING OF TRUTH AND ERROR.
IT is now above two centuries and a half ago that the thinker commonly accounted the initiator of modern philosophy seated himself, as he tells us, by the fire in a winter dressing-gown and attempted, with the vast self-trust and sense of power written in his masterful rugged features, to doubt all things and to rebuild the universe from the foundations. Since Descartes's time it has been widely assumed that no philosophy can be profound which does not begin by being profoundly sceptical. The enterprise on his part, however, which set this fashion cannot be said to have had the best success. The reasons for this are not hard to assign. Goethe, I think, has somewhere said that that doubt only is to be praised which lives to destroy itself. Descartes's doubt in that case must receive a full measure of our laudation, for its suicidal tendencies were from the first irrepressible, and it required constant watching to keep it alive for that formal public execution for which he reserved it. And although Descartes set himself in much seriousness to be sceptical concerning matters of fact, it never occured to him to be sceptical of categories. He could doubt the existence of God, and of his own body, he could question whether two and two are really four, he could conceive that the people on the street whom he watched from the window might be cunningly devised automata, but he was in no wise suspicious of the impostor-term 'perfection,' for example, which plays a leading part in his thought.
The philosophical world in our time has tired a little of affecting in speculation a universal doubt which it does not feel at heart; and it has discovered that the analysis of terms — which Descartes completely neglected — is the most important business of philosophy. Indeed, philosophy is no longer the same science as that which occupied Descartes. He wished to discover the existence or non-existence of certain supposed
