Note 281 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a suggestive and ingenious book (The New Word, by Mr. Allen Upward) lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the meaning of truth, “firm, established, certain, honest, faithful,” connecting it with A.S. tréou, tryw (“preservation of a compact”), Teut. trewa, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., satyas (verus), O. Nor. Sannr, A.S. sóth (sooth).” All this seems to justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of his action—the Microcosmos as quoted in Eisler, article “Wahrheit” in the Wörterbuch. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal “whole” of truth.