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or ‘object’ which would have satisfied it, can never be treated in abstraction from the personal aspect of knowing. It cannot be described per se or be represented in merely formal (and therefore verbal) terms. It always implies a relation to something beyond the two ends of the proposition. It is nothing intrinsic in the judgment, it is never to be judged as a purely intellectual thing.
How, on the other hand, does this problem look if we approach it from the aspect of knowledge for the first time seen and emphasized by Protagoras? It will be found that this much-maligned and little understood theory has no difficulty in coping with it. For it starts with human knowing, not with ‘ideals’ of a ‘perfect’ knowledge inaccessible to man. Every judgment is a claim to ‘truth,’ i.e., an experiment with ‘reality’ as it appears to us. But such experiments may fail as well as prosper. If they succeed, we recognize their value and hail them ‘true’. If they fail, wholly or in part, we condemn as ‘false,’ and admitting that we were ‘wrong,’ withdraw the values claimed. Gradually in the course of time there are thus segregated two great realms, of light and darkness, Truth and Error. But between the two will lie much disputed territory, where, either because our experience is not yet adequate or because our experiments have not been decisive, there is ample room for doubt and difference of opinion.
But only a mind thoroughly corrupted with dialectic and corroded with scepticism will base on its existence a charge that to recognize these facts is to abolish the conception of Truth. In reality we are here on the holy ground where, by the continuous revision of values and the rejection of ‘errors,’ Truth is made, where knowledge is alive and growing. And the fertile soil yields the only sort of truth that has use or meaning for man. You cannot, it is true, raise on it any humanly fruitless and unprofitable crop of Platonic Ideas. If the seeds of such sterilities are scattered on the ground by breezes that issue from the bags of Æolus, they will fail to germinate in a soil so richly manured by the heart’s-blood of human desire and the bones of the martyrs of human science. But our loss is nil; for such static forms
