It has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. But is the True a different category from the Good? Are they not rather one sole identical category? Truth could be maintained in a place quite distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung to that conception of truth which was the agreement of the subject with an assumed external object. But now by truth we understand the value of thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we discover that morality is identical with it. For knowing is acting, but an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal--Duty. And in this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship Truth with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality, which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task which is the Good. If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about his work of creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of culture. FOOTNOTES: [3] "Forest savage, rough, and stern."--Dante, _Inferno_, i. 5. [4] Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, effectively fix their thought on that universality which alone is such, which alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must remember that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality, the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used the expression "really universal".--G. G. CHAPTER VII THE BIAS OF REALISM