about sensible things and logically proceeds to inferential judgments
about similar things beyond sense, and, on the other hand, cannot
logically go beyond the similar. These are the limits within which
logical inference works, because its nature essentially consists in
proceeding from two judgments to another about similar things, existing
or not.
6. _Truth._--Finally, though sensory judgment is always true of its
sensible object, inferential judgments are not always true, but are true
so far as they are logically inferred, however indirectly, from sense;
and knowledge consists of sense, memory after sense and logical
inference from sense, which, we must remember, is not merely the outer
sense of our five senses, but also the inner sense of ourselves as
conscious thinking persons. We come then at last to the old
question--what is truth? Truth proper, as Aristotle said in the
_Metaphysics_, is in the mind: it is not being, but one's signification
of being. Its requisites are that there are things to be known and
powers of knowing things. It is an attribute of judgments and
derivatively of propositions. That judgment is true which apprehends a
thing as it is capable of being known to be; and that proposition is
true which so asserts the thing to be. Or, to combine truth in thought
and in speech, the true is what signifies a thing as it is capable of
being known. Secondarily, the thing itself is ambiguously said to be
true in the sense of being signified as it is. For example, as I am
weary and am conscious of being weary, my judgment and proposition that
I am weary are true because they signify what I am and know myself to be
by direct consciousness; and my being weary is ambiguously said to be
true because it is so signified. But it will be said that Kant has
proved that real truth, in the sense of the "agreement of knowledge with
the object," is unattainable, because we could compare knowledge with
the object only by knowing both. Sigwart, indeed, adopting Kant's
argument, concludes that we must be satisfied with consistency among the
thoughts which presuppose an existent; this, too, is the reason why he
thinks that induction is reduction, on the theory that we can show the
necessary consequence of the given particular, but that truth of fact is
unattainable. But Kant's criticism and Sigwart's corollary only derive
plausibility from a false definition of truth. Truth is not the
agreement of knowledge with an object beyond itself, and therefore _ex
hypothesi_ unknowable, but the agreement of our judgments with the
objects of our knowledge. A judgment is true whenever it is a belief
that a thing is determined as it is known to be by sense, or by memory
after sense, or by inference from sense, however indirect the inference
may be, and even when in the form of inference of non-existence it
extends consequently from primary to secondary judgments. Thus the
judgments "this sensible pressure exists," "that sensible pressure
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