TRUTH, TRUTHFULNESS.
I. Theory of Religious Knowledge. Aristotelian Logie (§ 1). Critique of Kant (§ 2).
Theory of Historical Truth (§ 3). Religion and History (§ 4). The Value-judgment (§ 5). Summary (§ 6).
II. Truthfulness. Historical (§ 1). Candor and Orthodoxy (§ 2). Essentials of Truthfulness (§ 3).
In a treatment consistent with the modern scientific position, truth and truthfulness or reality can no more be separated than ‘ faith which is believed ” and “ faith which believes.” Truthfulness presupposes a “ will for truth.” Such truth has become a possession that discloses itself to the entire man only as he fulfils certain conditions.
I. Theory of Religious Knowledge: For the naive consciousness human knowledge is the inner picture of outer reality. This postulate lies at the
basis of all systems of identity of
1. Aristo- thought and being. The view pre-
telian vailed until the time of Kant, and, Logic. though not wholly overcome, yet since
his day scientific knowledge has come
to be contrasted from the naive as critical. Kant opened his critique upon experience, the classified knowledge of experience, or the mathematical scientific knowledge of nature, a sphere in which the identity of thought and being seemed precisely self-evident. All logic (the science of knowledge till Kant) until then was Aristotelian and the logic of the cognition of nature. There was scarcely the inception of a logic of history. Of the Greeks Socrates turned from nature and founded ethics, and Plato’s ethics came more and more to be religion. Medieval logic, however, stood upon Aristotle; and how seriously it claimed to deal with experience is best shown in the fundamental contentions over the universal and the particular, a problem occupying anew the inquiry of the theory of knowledge to-day. But upon the point that truth was simply a picture of the real experientially there was no disagreement; and historical, ethical, and religious knowledge was logically conceived in forms derived from the cognition of nature. To the truth thus attained by the natural reason was added, in Christian dogmatics, that given by supernatural revelation alone; and yet positively as revelation was preferred, it did not alter the con-
ception of truth as such. There has never been a more unitary universal philosophy than Scholasticism (q.v.), and yet this was but the scientific projection of naive knowing and popular faith. Even the peculiar products of the original knowledge of the mystics, derived by contemplation and ecstasy, were not too remote to be incorporated in the general world-view, under the ruling impression that truth was the image of reality and fundamentally one. The first to waver were the nominalists. William of Occam taught that the most important dogmas contained elements inconsistent with the principle of reason. His pupil, Robert Halcot, was the first to teach the ‘‘ twofold sense,” which the Lateran Council (1515) condemned, namely, that the same thing may be theologically false and philosophically true and vice versa. Luther was a nominalist, repudiated the Aristotelian logic in theology, adhered to the twofold sense, mysticism, and the Bible; he deserved to be recognized as the first theologian of experience, who from his own inner life and conduct arrived at a new conception of truth. Through Melanchthon, reinspired by a new philological, critical edition of Aristotle, the medieval view again gained central place in Protestantism. Meanwhile, philosophy was diverted from dogmatism to become empiricism, sensationalism, or skepticism.
The mathematical physical science of Sir Isaac Newton had attained a degree of certainty, until recently unanticipated and almost unsurpassable. At this point, Kant sought the fundamentals of this drift, and found them by a critical analysis
of human experience. He discovered
2. Critique that the a priori forms of time and of Kant. space and the categories of the intellect were the tools whereby the
reason reaches into and legislates upon the undefined raw materials of sense, thus first making scientific sense-experience possible. Reason, together with what it contributes, alone enforces itself upon sense phenomena, producing knowledge, to which it imparts strict conformity with law, necessity, and universality. In drawing attention to the universal relations that make knowledge possible, Kant removed knowledge from the things in themselves, which recede to an inaccessible remoteness, into the inner sanctum of the active human spirit itself. He did not surrender it to the empirical individual; but, by logical critical deduction, he set forth pure reason as an inner structure of the human sgpirit-life, transcending every form of individuality and all empirical psychology, and possessing its own cohesive laws as well as universal validity. Neither has pure subjectivism any claim here; on the contrary only thus is mathematical physical knowledge made possible. The old naive conception of truth with the indulgence of extravagant suppositions on the part of speculative philosophy had to be destroyed, in order, as he professed, to save faith; for to apply the instruments of pure reason to that which is not subject of experience (sense) would lead to unbelief. The truth of the subjects outside of that experience must be approached by another way, that of faith. This way is by the course of the a priori moral law,
Truth, Truthfulness