THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE. CONDUCTED BY THE =STUDENTS OF YALE COLLEGE=. [Illustration] “Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque Yalenses Cantabunt Soboles, unanimique Patres.” NO. IV. JUNE, 1836. NEW HAVEN: HERRICK & NOYES. MDCCCXXXVI. CONTENTS. Page. Truth, 129 A Father to his Child, 132 Sir Thomas More’s Works, 133 I Love Thee, 139 The Coffee Club, No. II. 140 Ambition--A Fragment, 150 The Influence of Moral Feeling on the Pleasures of the Imagination, No. II. 151 The Seminole, 154 The Outlaw and His Daughter, 155 I would not Flatter Thee, 161 Ruminations of a Bovine Gentleman, 163 A Rhyming Mood, 165 Greek Anthology, No. IV. 166 THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE. VOL. I. JUNE, 1836. NO. 4. TRUTH. What is truth? “Truth,” says a standard logician, “signifies nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them do agree or disagree with one another;” that is, in making propositions. These are divided into mental and verbal. Truth then consists in ideal or verbal sentences, or, in other words, in a certain arrangement of ideas and words. This view of the subject may answer for a mere definition; but it is not satisfactory. We are disposed to make truth consist in _things_, and not alone in their representatives. It is the reality of things; using the term thing as it is, the most universal of any in the language, including every object of sense or conception, objects past, present, and future, objects terrestrial and celestial, objects of all space and all duration, objects possible and impossible; in a word, every-thing. There are propositions concerning things; we have ideas of things, and things themselves exist independently of both. The verbal statement, and the mental apprehension, may accord with the reality of the thing, and be true, or figuratively speaking, the truth. But can it be strictly said that the truth consists in them, and them only? But this train of remark avails little in resolving the momentously practical question, What is truth? To give this a reply worthy of itself, would lead us beyond our present design, and each reader must be left to judge for himself.