The Andover review - 1889 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WHAT IS KEALITY? PART III. THE ANSWER OF LIFE. At the close of the last article, the reader was promised a direct answer to our main question. Risking ... more »abruptness, therefore, I will proceed at once to submit a test of reality. It is as follows: The necessity of Living the affirmation of a proposition shows that this proposition expresses a reality. For the sake of antithesis, I have ventured to frame my statement somewhat after the fashion of Mr. Spencer's universal postulate. That postulate, said to be the ultimate criterion of truth, is: " An abortive attempt to conceive the negation of a proposition shows that the cognition expressed is one we are compelled to accept." We have already seen the impracticability of this test as applied to the world of concrete experiences. But it is necessary, at this point in the discussion, to clearly understand why it is impracticable. Mr. Spencer's mistake is in attempting to apply a criterion that is valid within a limited sphere to the whole realm of truth. There is no universal test of truth, for the simple reason that all truth is not of the same kind. On the one hand, there is the truth that expresses the relations between pure abstractions; and, on the other hand, there is the truth that expresses the relations between the concrete realities of life. When we are dealing with the former, the test of the non-conceivability of the opposite may be legitimately applied, because we are here concerned solely with concepts. We have marked off for ourselves a particular sphere of thought by means of definitions and postulates, and within this sphere our knowledge is absolute and complete. It is, so to speak, inclosed within walls, so that there is a perfect rebound for every proposition. We have absolute agreements and disagreements,...« less