“Truth is the exact correspondence between the subjective order of our conceptions and the objective order of the relations among things. All things in the universe, as far as we know and have reason to believe, are related to one another in one or more ways. The sun attracts all the planets, and all the planets in turn attract the sun. All the fixed stars are attracted by one another, no matter in what remote region of the universe they may be located. If the matter of only one of the countless stars of the heavens would be annihilated, all the remainder would seek a new position. “The sun radiates heat and light. The radiated heat and light strike the earth. Heat causes evaporation. Absence of heat produces condensation, and condensation causes rain, etc. Rain, heat and light are favorable to vegetable growth. The vegetable assimilates the inorganic into the organic. The animal lives on the vegetable directly or indirectly. Our environment acts on us, and we in turn react on the environment. So we find everything, from the mote to the furthest star, bound together by endless relations. “When I look at the pen which I hold in my hand, it produces an impression on my mind. This mental picture produced on the mind by the attributes of the material pen in my hand, we call an _ideal_ pen. So you see that all things that we know exist in a double form--the idea, or mental picture, of the thing and the thing itself, or the attributes of it, which produced the idea, or mental picture. The material pen in my hand possesses the properties of matter and weighs something; the ideal pen in my mind possesses the properties of mind, or consciousness, and weighs nothing. “When the mental picture of the ideal pen exactly corresponds with the material pen in my hand in _all_ its relations, then I have the whole _truth_ concerning the pen. But, when I know that a pen will write and that the point is split, but do not know that the point of it, when brought with violence against the hand or other parts of the body, will also penetrate the flesh and cause pain, I have only a _partial_ knowledge of a pen. That is, my subjective conceptions do not _exactly_ correspond with the subjective relations among the pen and other things. In this case I would not know the exact relations between the pen’s point and my own organs. I would therefore be partly ignorant on this subject, and my ignorance, on this as well as on all other points, would not unlikely lead me into acts that are attended with pain or misery--acts that are not in tune with facts and relations of the things in the universe; and for the very reason that such acts are attended with pain, we call them _wrong_. There would be no right and no wrong, if there was no happiness and pain.