145. OBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH.

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Our main concern hitherto

in the course of our inquiries has been to vindicate the objectivity

of knowledge, to show that knowledge can and does attain to

reality as its object. But truth is something more than object

ivity ; for even though the objects apprehended by intellectual

conception through sense perception be real, even though the

root-concepts and derivative concepts which we use in all our

judgments or interpretations of reality be themselves derived

from reality and be aspects of reality, nevertheless our judgments

are not always and necessarily true, not all of them represent

reality accurately. Error is possible. And so the question

arises as to the possibility and the means of assuring ourselves

that our knowledge is true, of distinguishing with certitude

between truth and error : the question of the tests or criteria of

truth and the grounds or motives of certitude.

By the objectivity of knowledge Kant meant, as we have

seen, the necessity, universality, uniformity, with which its

judgments impose themselves on all minds : these judgments

revealing "objects" or "phenomena " which were to be regarded

as joint products of the unknowable, extramental reality and

certain a priori forms of the mind. Thus reality is ^& partial

excitant of knowledge, but not the term or object of knowledge.

For scholastics, on the contrary, knowledge is objective in the

sense that extramental reality is not only its partial excitant,

but is also its object or term. That is to say that in sense per

ception the reality, by its action on the conscious subject, pro

duces a conscious process or state by means of which the

percipient is made aware of the reality present and given. This

real sense datum is always concrete and complex. Its presence

to consciousness arouses the activity of other cognitive faculties

of the knowing subject : imagination, sensuous association and

unification, sense memory. By means of these the knowing

245

246 THEOR Y OF KNO W LEDGE

subject is capable of becoming aware of the perceived reality

even in its absence. In this imagination-and-memory process

what the subject immediately contemplates is a mental substitute

of the reality, a mental " image " or " representation " of the tem

porally or spatially absent sense datum. But in man the

presence of sense data arouses furthermore the higher or in

tellectual cognitive activity. This is essentially a power of

analysing the concrete, complex sense data into abstract aspects

called concepts or thought-objects. From the dawn of rational

activity the human individual, concomitantly with acquiring the

use of language, is laying up an ever increasing mental store of

these thought-objects, and, associating them with language, is

learning to use them as predicates whereby he interprets, in

the rational process of judgment, the realities presented to him

throughout the course of his experience. Now the individual s

"concepts," whether in the subjective sense of "conception-

processes" or in the objective sense of " thought-objects " (73),

are not always actually in consciousness. But the processes

certainly leave behind them, as psychic effects, some sort of

intellectual modifications, by way of dispositions or habits, which

account for what we call habitual knowledge. And the thought-

objects themselves, from the simplest aspects revealed by

abstractive analysis (i.e. the highest "categories") to the most

complex intellectual syntheses resulting from the process of

judgment, are thus possessed and retained by the subject as the

content of all his "habitual" knowledge.

Now about all these thought-objects revealed to the individual

intellect by the analytic and synthetic processes of conception

and judgment, and about these processes themselves (or, rather,

about the mental states, conditions, endowments, "products,"

resulting from the processes), we may inquire (i) whether, or in

what sense, these thought-objects are real, are realities? and

(2) whether, or in what sense, the mental possession of them,

through the processes of conception and judgment, constitutes

truth, or true knowledge of reality ?

We have already shown that all thought-objects are real in

the sense that the most simple and unanalysable of them, those

of which our more complex concepts are rational syntheses and

into which these are resolvable, are themselves aspects of reality.

And we have also already expressed the view that these aspects

of reality, whenever they are actually thought of, ZVQ factors of

TRUTH AND EVIDENCE 247

reality immediately present to intellect : that it is themselves, and

not any intellectual " representations " or " substitutes " of them,

that are the objects of the mind s contemplation : : that the

"species intelligibilis expressa " or "verbum mentale" is, so far as

these ultimate aspects of the real are concerned, not a mental

substitute for them, an " objectum quod concipitur" but a " medium

quo" a psychic means whereby they are consciously present to

and apprehended by intellect (78).

But the mere conscious presence of such aspects of reality to

intellect does not constitute knowledge. We have, accompany

ing mere conception, the process of judgment or interpretation,

the process whereby the intellect is constantly analysing the

concrete, complex reality, presented in direct conscious aware

ness, into intelligible aspects, factors, thought-objects, abstract

concepts, and these again into simpler factors, thus amassing

a mental store of predicates ; whereby it is constantly comparing

these factors with one another and reuniting or synthesizing

them into fuller and richer intelligible objects ; whereby it

affirmatively or negatively predicates them of one another and

of the successively occurring and recurring individual data of

direct conscious experience, thus interpreting intellectually the

nature of these data ; whereby it asserts certain tentative com

plexes to be impossible and therefore unreal, and others to be

possible and therefore real ; whereby it asserts certain of them

to be actually experienced and existing, and others to be unex

perienced and not actually existent. Some of these judgments

assert or deny the actual existence of certain conceived objects ;

others abstract from the actual existence or non-existence of

1 Since the faculty of thought proper, the intellect or reason or understanding,

is a spiritual faculty, i.e. apprehends realities, which are its objects, apart from the

time-and-space conditions of their actual material existence, it follows that in the

process of conception (as also in judgment and reasoning) these realities can be

immediately present as objects to intellect even though in their actual existence they

be spatially and temporally remote from the thinker. When I lliink of the battle

of Waterloo, or of my own death, or of the falls of Niagara, or the Seven Hills of

Rome, there are, no doubt, corresponding imagination images in my sense con

sciousness. It is not these, however, but the real events and things themselves,

that are immediately present to my intellect as objects of thought > though the real

things are spatially distant, and the real events temporally remote in the past and

in the future respectively, so that none of them can be present to sense. This

immediate presence to intellect^ of realities which cannot be present to sense, is

possible simply because the "presence of reality as object to intellect " is a mode

of presence which transcends and is independent of the time-and-space limitations

under which alone realities can be " present to sense ".

248 THEOR Y OF KNO WLEDGE

these, and make assertions about their nature or essence, their

possibility or impossibility. Again, some judgments assert their

objects (which are relations of necessity or incompatibility be

tween concepts) to be absolutely necessary and universal ; others

assert their objects to be contingent, definite, limited matters of

fact. 1 But however we may classify judgments logically, it will

be apparent from the nature of the judgment itself that it is a

process of interpreting, and so representing, intelligibly reproduc

ing or reconstructing, by successive intellectual analyses and

syntheses, the whole domain of the real which is being gradually

given or presented to us in the course of our direct conscious

experience. In external and internal sense perception, and in

direct intellectual intuition or consciousness (96), the real is being

constantly presented to us as a vast problem for interpretation,

to have its significance gradually unfolded and rendered intel

ligible by our understanding through the intellectual processes

of judgment and reasoning. If our judgments, so far as they

go, represent reality rightly and accurately, i.e. represent it as

it really is and really demands to be represented and really ought

to be represented, thus putting the mind into conformity, con

cord, harmony with reality, then our judgments are true. A

judgment which, so far as it goes, represents reality otherwise

than it is, and, so far, puts the mind into a condition of positive

disconformity or discord with reality, is on the contrary false.