Note 143 — Chapter III · SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
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By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon The Nature of Truth, where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”—the “relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (verum est quod ita est, ut videtur),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (adaequatio intellectus et rei), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another” (Essay, iv. 5. 2). How can things “agree” or “disagree” with one another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a “judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations” of two “things.”