Truth

Truth (Anglo-Saxon tr�ow, tryw, truth, preservation of a compact,
from a Teutonic base Trau, to believe) is a relation which holds
(1) between the knower and the known -- Logical Truth; (2) between
the knower and the outward expression which he gives to his
knowledge -- Moral Truth; and (3) between the thing itself, as it
exists, and the idea of it, as conceived by God -- Ontological
Truth. In each case this relation is, according to the Scholastic
theory, one of correspondence, conformity, or agreement
(adoequatio) (St. Thomas, Summa I:21:2).

I. ONTOLOGICAL TRUTH

Every existing thing is true, in that it is the expression of an
idea which exists in the mind of God, and is, as it were, the
exemplar according to which the thing has been created or
fashioned. Just as human creations -- a cathedral, a painting, or
an epic -- conform to and embody the ideas of architect, artist,
or poet, so, only in a more perfect way, God's creatures conform
to and embody the ideas of Him who gives them being. (Q. D., De
verit., a. 4; Summa 1:16:1.) Things that exist, moreover, are
active as well as passive. They tend not only to develop, and so
to realize more and more perfectly the idea which they are created
to express, but they tend also to reproduce themselves.
Reproduction obtains wherever there is interaction between
different things, for an effect, in so far as it proceeds from a
given cause, must resemble that cause. Now the cause of knowledge
in man is -- ultimately, at any rate -- the thing that is known.
By its activities it causes in man an idea that is like to the
idea embodied in the thing itself. Hence, things may also be said
to be ontologically true in that they are at once the object and
the cause of human knowledge. (Cf. IDEALISM; and Summa, I:16:7 and
1:16:8; m 1. periherm., 1. III; Q.D., I, De veritate, a. 4.)

II. LOGICAL TRUTH

A. The Scholastic Theory

To judge that things are what they are is to judge truly. Every
judgment comprises certain ideas which are referred to, or denied
of, reality. But it is not these ideas that are the objects of our
judgment. They are merely the instruments by means of which we
judge. The object about which we judge is reality itself -- either
concrete existing things, their attributes, and their relations,
or else entities the existence of which is merely conceptual or
imaginary, as in drama, poetry, or fiction, but in any case
entities which are real in the sense that their being is other
than our present thought about them. Reality, therefore, is one
thing, and the ideas and judgments by means of which we think
about reality, another; the one objective, and the other
subjective. Yet, diverse as they are, reality is somehow present
to, if not present in consciousness when we think, and somehow by
means of thought the nature of reality is revealed. This being the
case, the only term adequate to describe the relation that exists
between thought and reality, when our judgments about the latter
are true judgments, would seem to be conformity or correspondence.
"Veritas logica est adaequatio intellectus et rei" (Summa,
I:21:2). Whenever truth is predicable of a judgment, that judgment
corresponds to, or resembles, the reality, the nature or
attributes of which it reveals. Every judgment is, however, as we
have said, made up of ideas, and may be logically analyzed into a
subject and a predicate, which are either united by the copula is,
or disjoined by the expression is not. If the judgment be true,
therefore, these ideas must also be true, i.e. must correspond
with the realities which they signify. As, however, this objective
reference or significance of ideas is not recognized or asserted
except in the judgment, ideas as such are said to be only
"materially" true. It is the judgment alone that is formally true,
since in the judgment alone is a reference to reality formally
made, and truth as such recognized or claimed.

The negative judgment seems at first sight to form an exception to
the general law that truth is correspondence; but this is not
really the case. In the affirmative judgment both subject and
predicate and the union between them, of whatever kind it may be,
are referred to reality; but in the negative judgment subject and
predicate are disjoined, not conjoined. In other words, in the
negative judgment we deny that the predicate has reality in the
particular case to which the subject refers. On the other hand,
all such predicates presumably have reality somewhere, otherwise
we should not talk about them. Either they are real qualities or
real things, or at any rate somebody has conceived them as real.
Consequently the negative judgment, if true, may also be said to
correspond with reality, since both subject and predicate will be
real somewhere, either as existents or as conceptions. What we
deny, in fact, in the negative judgment is not the reality of the
predicate, but the reality of the conjunction by which subject and
predicate are united in the assertion which we implicitly
challenge and negate. Subject and predicate may both be real, but
if our judgment be true, they will be disjoined, not united in
reality.

But what precisely is this reality with which true judgments and
true ideas are said to correspond? It is easy enough to understand
how ideas can correspond with realities that are themselves
conceptual or ideal, but most of the realities that we know are
not of this kind. How, then, can ideas and their conjunctions or
disjunctions, which are psychical in character, correspond with
realities which for the most part are not psychical but material?
To solve this problem we must go back to ontological truth which,
as we saw, implies the creation of the universe by One Who, in
creating it, has expressed therein His own ideas very much as an
architect or an author expresses his ideas in the things that he
creates except that creation in the latter case supposes already
existent material. Our theory of truth supposes that the universe
is built according to definite and rational plan, and that
everything within the universe expresses or embodies an essential
and integral part of that plan. Whence it follows that just as in
a building or in a piece of sculpture we see the plan or design
that is realized therein, so, in our experience of concrete
things, by means of the same intellectual power, we apprehend the
ideas which they embody or express. The correspondence therefore,
in which truth consists is not a correspondence between ideas and
anything material as such, but between ideas as they exist in our
mind and function in our acts of cognition, and the idea that
reality expresses and embodies -- ideas which have their origin
and prototype in the mind of God

With regard to judgments of a more abstract or general type, the
working of this view is quite simple. The realities to which
abstract concepts refer have no material existence as such. There
is no such thing, for instance, as action or reaction in general;
nor are there any twos or fours. What we mean when we say that
"action and reaction are equal and opposite", or that "two and two
make four", is that these laws, which in their own proper nature
are ideal, are realized or actualized in the material universe in
which we live; or, in other words, that the material things we see
about us behave in accordance with these laws, and through their
activities manifest them to our minds.

Perceptual judgments, i.e. the judgments which usually accompany
and give expression to acts of perception, differ from the above
in that they refer to objects which are immediately present to our
senses. The realities in this case, therefore, are concrete
existing things. It is, however, rather with the appearance of
such things that our judgment is now concerned than with their
essential nature or inner constitution. Thus, when we predicate
colours, sounds, odours, flavours, hardness or softness, heat or
cold of this or that object, we make no statement about the nature
of such qualities, still less about the nature of the thing that
possesses them. What we assert is

that such and such a thing exists, and 1. that it has a certain
objective quality, which we call green, or loud, or sweet, or
hard, or hot, to distinguish it from other qualities -- red, or
soft, or bitter, or cold -- with which it is not identical; while
2. our statement further implies that the same quality will
similarly appear to any normally constituted man, i.e. will affect
his senses in the same way that it affects our own.

Accordingly, if in the real world such a condition of things
obtains -- if, that is to say, the thing in question does exist
and has in fact some peculiar and distinctive property whereby it
affects my senses in a certain peculiar and distinctive way -- my
judgment is true.

The truth of perceptual judgments by no means implies an exact
correspondence between what is perceived and the images, or
sensation -- complexes, whereby we perceive; nor does the
Scholastic theory necessitate any such view. It is not the image,
or sensation-complex, but the idea, that in judgment is referred
to reality, and that gives us knowledge of reality. Colour and
other qualities of objective things are doubtless perceived by
means of sensation of peculiar and distinctive quality or tone,
but no one imagines that this presupposes similar sensation in the
object perceived. It is by means of the idea of colour and its
specific differences that colours are predicated of objects, not
by means of sensations Such an idea could not arise, indeed, were
it not for the sensations which in perception accompany and
condition it; but the idea itself is not a sensation, nor is it of
a sensation. Ideas have their origin in sensible experience and
are indefinable, so far as immediate experience goes, except by
reference to such experience and by differentiation from
experiences in which other and different properties of objects are
presented Granted, therefore, that differences in what is
technically known as the "quality" of sensation correspond to
differences in the objective properties of things, the truth of
perceptual judgments is assured. No further correspondence is
required; for the correspondence which truth postulates is between
idea and thing, not between sensation and thing. Sensation
conditions knowledge, but as such it is not knowledge. It is, as
it were, a connecting link between the idea and the thing.
Differences of sensation are determined by the causal activity of
things; and from the sensation-complex, or image the idea is
derived by an instinctive and quasi-intuitive act of the mind
which we call abstraction. Thus the idea which the thing
unconsciously expresses finds conscious expression in the act of
the knower, and the vast scheme of relations and laws which are de
facto embodied in the material universe reproduce themselves in
the consciousness of man.

Correspondence between thought and reality, idea and thing, or
knower and known, therefore, turns out in all cases to be of the
very essence of the truth relation. Whence, say the opponents of
our theory, in order to know whether our judgments are true or
not, we must compare them with the realities that are known -- a
comparison that is obviously impossible, since reality can only be
known through the instrumentality of the judgment. This objection,
which is to be found in almost every non-Scholastic book dealing
with the subject, rests upon a grave misapprehension of the real
meaning of the Scholastic doctrine. Neither St. Thomas nor any
other of the great Scholastics ever asserted that correspondence
is the scholastic criterion of truth. To inquire what truth is, is
one question; to ask how we know that we have judged truly, quite
another. Indeed, the possibility of answering the second is
supposed by the mere fact that the first is put. To be able to
define truth, we must first possess it and know that we possess
it, i.e. must be able to distinguish it from error. We cannot
define that which we cannot distinguish and to some extent
isolate. The Scholastic theory supposes, therefore, that truth has
already been distinguished from error, and proceeds to examine
truth with a view to discovering in what precisely it consists.
This standpoint is epistemologieal, not criteriological. When he
says that truth is correspondence, he is stating what truth is,
not by what sign or mark it can be distinguished from error. By
the old Scholastics the question of the criteria of truth was
scarcely touched. They discussed the criteria of valid reasoning
in their treatises on logic, but for the rest they left the
discussion of particular criteria to the methodology of particular
sciences. And rightly so, for there is really no criterion of
universal application. The distinction of truth and error is at
bottom intuitional. We cannot go on making criteria ad infinitum.
Somewhere we must come to what is ultimate, either first
principles or facts.

This is precisely what the Scholastic theory of truth affirms. In
deference to the modern demand for an infallible and universal
criterion of truth, not a few Scholastic writers of late have
suggested objective evidence. Objective evidence, however, is
nothing more than the manifestation of the object itself, directly
or indirectly, to the mind, and hence is not strictly a criterion
of truth, but its foundation. As P�re Geny puts it in his pamphlet
discussing "Une nouvelle th�orie de la connaissance", to state
that evidence is the ultimate criterion of truth is equivalent to
stating that knowledge properly so called has no need of a
criterion, since it is absurd to suppose a knowledge which does
not know what it knows. Once grant, as all must grant who wish to
avoid absolute sceptieism, that knowledge is possible, and it
follows that, properly used, our faculties must be capable of
giving us truth. Doubtless, coherence and harmony with facts are
pro tanto signs of truth's presence in our minds; but what we need
for the most part are not signs of truth, but signs or criteria of
error -- not tests whereby to discover when our faculties have
gone right, but tests whereby to discover when they have gone
wrong. Our judgments will be true, i.e. thought will correspond
with its object, provided that object itself, and not any other
cause, subjective or objective, determines the content of our
thought. What we have to do, therefore, is to take care that our
assent is determined by the evidence with which we are confronted,
and by this alone. With regard to the senses this means that we
must look to it that they are in good condition and that the
circumstances under which we are exercising them are normal; with
regard to the intellect that we must not allow irrelevant
considerations to weigh with us, that we must avoid haste, and, as
far as possible, get rid of bias, prejudice, and an over-anxious
will to believe. If this be done, granted there is sufficient
evidence, true judgments will naturally and necessarily result.
The purpose of argument and discussion, as of all other processes
that lead to knowledge, is precisely that the object under
discussion may manifest itself in its various relations, either
directly or indirectly, to the mind. And the object as thus
manifesting itself is what the Scholastic calls evidence. It is
the object, therefore, which in his view is the determining cause
of truth. All kinds of processes, both mental and physical, may be
necessary to prepare the way for an act of cognition, but in the
last resort such an act must be determined as to its content by
the causal activity of the object, which makes itself evident by
producing in the mind an idea that is like to the idea of which
its own existence is the realization.

B. The Hegelian Theory.

In the Idealism of Hegel and the Absolutism of the Oxford School
(of which Mr. Bradley and Mr. Joachim are the leading
representatives) both reality and truth are essentially one,
essentially an organic whole. Truth, in fact, is but reality qua
thought. It is an intelligent act in which the universe is thought
as a whole of infinite parts or differences, all organically
inter-related and somehow brought to unity. And because truth is
thus organic, each element within it, each partial truth, is so
modified by the others through and through that apart from them,
and again apart from the whole, it is but a distorted fragment, a
mutilated abstraction which in reality is not truth at all.
Consequently, since human truth is always partial and fragmentary,
there is in strictness no such thing as human truth. For us the
truth is ideal, and from it our truths are so far removed that, to
convert them into the truth, they would have to undergo a change
of which we know neither the measure nor the extent.

The flagrantly sceptical character of this theory is sufficiently
obvious, nor is there any attempt on the part of its exponents to
deny it. Starting with the assumption that to conceive is "to hold
many elements together in a connexion necessitated by their
several contents", and that to be conceivable is to be "a
significant whole", i.e. a whole, "such that all its constituent
elements reciprocally determine one another's being as
contributory features in a single concrete meaning", Dr. Joachim
boldly identifies the true with the conceivable (Nature of Truth,
66). And since no human intellect can conceive in this full and
magnificent sense, he frankly admits that no human truth can be
more than approximate, and that to the margin of error which this
approximation involves no limits can be assigned. Human truth
draws from absolute or ideal truth "whatever being and
conservability" it possesses (Green, "Prolegom.", article 77); but
it is not, and never can be, identical with absolute truth, nor
yet with any part of it, for these parts essentially and
intrinsically modify one another. For his definition of human
truth, therefore, the Absolutist is forced back upon the
Scholastic doctrine of correspondence. Human truth represents or
corresponds with absolute truth in proportion as it presents us
with this truth as affected by more or less derangement, or in
proportion as it would take more or less to convert the one into
the other (Bradley, "Appearance and Reality", 363). While,
therefore, both theories assign correspondence as the essential
characteristic of human truth, there is this fundamental
difference between them: For the Scholastic this correspondence,
so far as it goes, must be exact; but for the Absolutist it is
necessarily imperfect, so imperfect, indeed, that "the ultimate
truth" of any given proposition "may quite transform its original
meaning" (Appearance and Reality, 364).

To admit that human truth is essentially representative is really
to admit that conception is something more than the mere "holding
together of many elements in a connexion necessitated by their
several contents". But the fallacy of the "coherence theory" does
not lie so much in this, nor yet in the identification of the true
and the conceivable, as in its assumption that reality, and
therefore truth, is organically one. The universe is undoubtedly
one, in that its parts are inter-related and inter-dependent; and
from this it follows that we cannot know any part completely
unless we know the whole; but it does not follow that we cannot
know any part at all unless we know the whole. If each part has
some sort of being of its own, then it can be known for what it
is, whether we know its relations to other parts or not; and
similarly some of its relations to other parts can be known
without our knowing them all. Nor is the individuality of the
parts of the universe destroyed by their inter-dependence; rather
it is thereby sustained.

The sole ground which the Hegelian and the Absolutist have for
denying these facts is that they will not square with their theory
that the universe is organically one. Since, therefore, it is
confessedly impossible to explain the nature of this unity or to
show how in it the multitudinous differences of the universe are
"reconciled", and since, further, this theory is acknowledged to
be hopelessly sceptical, it is surely irrational any longer to
maintain it.

C. The Pragmatic Theory

Life for the Pragmatist is essentially practical. All human
activity is purposive, and its purpose is the control of human
experience with a view to its improvement, both in the individual
and in the race. Truth is but a means to this end. Ideas,
hypotheses, and theories are but instruments which man has "made"
in order to better both himself and his environment; and, though
specific in type, like all other forms of human activity they
exist solely for this end, and are "true" in so far as they fulfil
it. Truth is thus a form of value: it is something that works
satisfactorily; something that "ministers to human interests,
purposes and objects of desire" (Studies in Humanism, 362). There
are no axioms or self-evident truths. Until an idea or a judgment
has proved itself of value in the manipulation of concrete
experience, it is but a postulate or claim to truth. Nor are there
any absolute or irreversible truths. A proposition is true so long
as it proves itself useful, and no longer. In regard to the
essential features of this theory of truth W. James, John Dewey,
and A. W. Moore in America, F.C.S. Schiller in England, G. Simmel
in Germany, Papini in Italy, and Henri Bergson, Le Roy, and Abel
Rey in France are all substantially in agreement. It is, they say,
the only theory which takes account of the psychological processes
by which truth is made, and the only theory which affords a
satisfactory answer to the arguments of the sceptic.

In regard to the first of these claims there can be no doubt that
Pragmatism is based upon a study of truth "in the making". But the
question at issue is not whether interest, purpose, emotion, and
volition do as a matter of fact play a part in the process of
cognition. That is not disputed. The question is whether, in
judging of the validity of a claim to truth, such considerations
ought to have weight. If the aim of all cognitive acts is to know
reality as it is, then clearly judgments are true only in so far
as they satisfy this demand. But this does not help us in deciding
what judgments are true and what are not, for the truth of a
judgment must already be known before this demand can be
satisfled. Similarly with regard to particular interests and
purposes; for though such interests and purposes may prompt us to
seek for knowledge, they will not be satisfied until we know
truly, or at any rate think we know truly. The satisfaction of our
needs, in other words, is posterior to, and already supposes, the
possession of true knowledge about whatever we wish to use as a
means to the satisfaction of those needs. To act efficiently, we
must know what it is we are acting upon and what will be the
effects of the action contemplated. The truth of our judgments is
verified by their consequences only in those cases where we know
that such consequences should ensue if our judgment be true, and
then act in order to discover whether in reality they will ensue.

Theoretically, and upon Scholastic principles, since whatever is
true is also good, true judgments ought to result in good
consequences. But, apart from the fact that the truth of our
judgment must in many cases be known before we can act upon them
with success, the Pragmatic criterion is too vague and too
variable to be of any practical use. "Good consequences",
"successful operations on reality", "beneficial interaction with
sensible particulars" denote experiences which it is not easy to
recognize or to distinguish from other experiences less good, less
successful, and less beneficial. If we take personal valuations as
our test, these are proverbially unstable; while, if social
valuations alone are admissible, where are they to be found, and
upon what grounds accepted by the individual? Moreover, when a
valuation has been made, how are we to know that it is accurate?
For this, it would seem, further valuations will be required, and
so on ad inflnitum. Distinctively pragmatic criteria of truth are
both impractical and unreliable, especially the criterion of felt
satisfaction, which seems to be the favourite, for in determining
this not only the personal factor, but the mood of the moment and
even physical conditions play a considerable part. Consequently
upon the second head the claim of the Pragmatist can by no means
be allowed. The Pragmatist theory is not a whit less sceptical
than the theory of the Absolutist, which it seeks to displace. If
truth is relative to purposes and interests, and if these purposes
and interests are, as they are admitted to be, one and all tinged
by personal idiosyncrasy, then what is true for one man will not
be true for another, and what is true now will not be true when a
change takes place either in the interest that has engendered it
or in the circumstances by which it has been verified.

All this the Pragmatist grants, but replies that such truth is all
that man needs and all that he can get. True judgments do not
correspond with reality, nor in true judgments do we know reality
as it is. The function of cognition, in short, is not to know
reality, but to control it. For this reason truth is identified
with its consequences -- theoretical, if the truth be merely
virtual, but in the end practical, particular, concrete. "Truth
means successful operations on reality" (Studies in Hum., 118).
The truth-relation "consists of intervening parts of the universe
which can in every particular case be assigned and catalogued"
(Meaning of Truth, 234). "The chain of workings which an opinion
sets up is the opinion's truth" (Ibid., 235). Thus, in order to
refute the Sceptic, the Pragmatist changes the nature of truth,
redefining it as the definitely experienceable success which
attends the working of certain ideas and judgments; and in so
doing he grants precisely what the Sceptic seeks to prove, namely,
that our cognitive faculties are incapable of knowing reality as
it is. (See PRAGMATISM.)

D. The "New" Realist's Theory

As it is a first principle with both Absolutist and Pragmatist
that reality is changed by the very act in which we know it, so
the negation of this thesis is the root principle of "New"
Realism. In this the "New" Realist is at one with the Scholastic.
Reality does not depend upon experience, nor is it modified by
experience as such. The "New" Realist, however, has not as yet
adopted the correspondence theory of truth. He regards both
knowledge and truth as unique relations which hold immediately
between knower and known, and which are as to their nature
indefinable. "The difference between subjeet and object of
consciousness is not a differenee of quality or substanee, but a
differenee of office or place in a configuration" (Journal of
Phil. Psychol. and Scientific Meth., VII, 396). Reality is made up
of terms and their relations, and truth is just one of these
relations, sui generis, and therefore reeognizable only by
intuition. This account of truth is undoubtedly simple, but there
is at any rate one point whieh it seems altogether to ignore,
viz., the existence of judgments and ideas of which, and not of
the mind as such, the truth-relation is predicable. We have not on
the one hand objects and on the other bare mind; but on the one
hand objects and on the other a mind that by means of the judgment
refers its own ideas to objects -- ideas which as such, both in
regard to their existence and their content, belong to the mind
which judges. What then is the relation that holds between these
ideas and their objects when our judgments are true, and again
when they are false? Surely both logic and criteriology imply that
we know something more about such judgments than merely that they
are different.

Bertrand Russell, who has given in his adhesion to "The Program
and First Platform of Six Realists", drawn up and signed by six
American professors in July, 1910, modifies somewhat the na�vet�
of their theory of truth. "Every judgment", he says (Philos.
Essays, 181), "is a relation of a mind to several objects, one of
which is a relation. Thus, the judgment, 'Charles I died on the
scaffold', denotes several objects or 'objectives' which are
related in a certain definite way, and the relation is as real in
this case as are the other objectives. The judgment 'Charles I
died in his bed', on the other hand, denotes the objects, Charles
I, death, and bed, and a certain relation between them, which in
this case does not relate the objects as it is supposed to relate
them. A judgment therefore, is true, when the relation which is
one of the objects relates the other objects, otherwise it is
false" (loc. cit.). In this statement of the nature of truth:
correspondenee between the mind judging and the objects about
which we judge is distinctly implied, and it is precisely this
correspondcnce which is set down as the distinguishing mark of
true judgments. Russell however, unfortunately seems to be at
variance with other members of the New Realist school on this
point. G.E. Moore expressly rejects the correspondence theory of
truth ("Mind", N. S., VIII, 179 sq.), and Prichard, another
English Realist, explicitly states that in knowledge there is
nothing between the object and ourselves (Kant's Theory of
Knowledge, 21). Nevertheless, it is matter for rejoicing that in
regard to the main points at issue -- the non-alteration of
reality by acts of cognition, the possibility of knowing it in
some respects without its being known in all, the growth of
knowledge by "accretion", the non-spiritual character of some of
the objects of experience, and the necessity of ascertaining
empirically and not by a priori methods, the degree of unity which
obtains between the various parts of the universe -the "New"
Realist and the Scholastic Realist are substantially in agreement.

III. MORAL TRUTH, OR VERACITY

Veracity is the correspondence of the outward expression given to
thought with the thought itself. It must not be confused with
verbal truth (veritas locutionis), which is the correspondence of
the outward or verbal expression with the thing that it is
intended to express. The latter supposes on the part of the
speaker not only the intention of speaking truly, but also the
power so to do, i.e. it supposes (1) true knowledge and (2) a
right use of words. Moral truth, on the other hand, exists
whenever the speaker expresses what is in his mind even if de
facto he be mistaken, provided only that he says what he thinks to
be true. This latter condition however, is necessary. Hence a
better definition of moral truth would be "the correspondence of
the outward expression of thought with the thing as conceived by
the speaker". Moral truth, therefore, does not imply true
knowledge. But, though a deviation from moral truth would be only
materially a lie, and hence not blameworthy, unless the use of
words or signs were intentionally incorrect, moral truth does
imply a correct use of words or other signs. A lie therefore, is
an intentional deviation from moral truth, and is defined as a
locutio contra mentem; i.e. it is the outward expression of a
thought which is intentionally diverse from the thing as conceived
by the speaker. It is important to observe, however, that the
expression of the thought, whether by word or by sign, must in all
cases be taken in its context; for both in regard to words and to
signs, custom and circumstances make a considerable difference
with respect to their interprctation. Veracity, or the habit of
speaking the truth, is a virtue; and the obligation of practising
it arises from a twofold source. First, "since man is a social
animal, naturally one man owes to another that without which human
society could not go on. But men could not live together if they
did not believe one another to be speaking the truth. Hence the
virtue of veracity comes to some extent under the head of justice
[rationem debiti]" (St. Thomas, Summa, II-II:109:5). The second
source of the obligation to veracity arises from the fact that
speech is clearly of its very nature intended for the
communication of knowledge by one to another. It should be used,
therefore, for the purpose for which it is naturally intended, and
lies should be avoided. For lies are not merely a misuse, but an
abuse, of the gift of speech, since, by destroying man's
instinctive belief in the veracity of his neighbour, they tend to
destroy the efficacy of that gift.

Notes

For Scholasticism see: scholastic treatises on major logic, s.v.
Veritas; Etudes sur la V�rit� (Paris, 1909); GENY, Une nouvelle
th�orie de la connaissance (Tournai, 1909); MIVART, On Truth
(London, 1889); JOHN RICKABY, First Principles af Knowledge;
ROUSSELOT, L'Intellectualisme de St. Thomas (Paris, 1909);
TONQUEDEC, La notion de la v�rit� dans la philosophie nouvelle in
Etudes (1907), CX, 721; CXI, 433; CXII, 68, 335; WALKER, Theories
of Knowledge (2d ed., London, 1911); HOBHOUSE, The Theory of
Knowledge (London, 1906).

Absolutism: BRADLEY, Appearance and Reality (London, 1899); IDEM,
Articles in Mind, N.S., LT, LXXI, LXXII (1904, 1909, 1910);
JOACHIM, The Nature af Truth (Oxford, 1906); TAYLOR, Elements of
Metaphysics (London, 1903); Articles in Mind, N.S., LVII (1906),
and Philos. Rev., XIV, 3.

Pragmatism: BERGSON, L'Evolution Cr�atrice (7th ed., Paris, 1911);
DEWEY, Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1903); JAMES,
Pragmatism (London, 1907); IDEM, The Meaning af Truth (London,
1909); IDEM, Some Problems of Philosophy (London 1911); MOORE,
Pragmatism and Its Critics (Chicago, 191O); ABEL REY, La th�orie
de la physique (Paris, 1907); SCHILLER, Axioms as Postulates in
Personal Idealism (London, 1902); IDEM Humanism (London, 1902);
IDEM, Studies in Humanism (London 1907); SIMMEL, Die Philosophie
des Geldes (Leipsig, 1900), iii.

New Realism: Articles in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and
Scientific Methods (1910, 1911), especially VII, 15 (July 1910);
MOORE, The Nature of Judgment in Mind, VIII; PRICHARD, Kant's
Theory af Knowledge (Oxford, 1910); RUSSELL, Philosophical Essays
(London, 1910); IDEM, Articles in Mind N.S., LX (1906), and in
Proceedings af the Aristotelian Society VII.

LESLIE J. WALKER
Transcribed by Kevin Cawley

From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc., P.O. Box 281096, Denver, Colorado, USA, 80228.
([email protected]) Taken from the New Advent Web Page
(www.knight.org/advent).

This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
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