All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and
made available for everyone. Hence, we must TALK consistently just
as we must THINK consistently: for both in talk and thought we deal
with kinds. Names are arbitrary, but once understood they must be
kept to. We mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain 'Abel.' If we do,
we ungear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from all its
connexions with the universe of speech and fact down to the present
time. We throw ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of
speech and fact may embody.
The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or
face-to-face verification-those of past history, for example, as of
Cain and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or
verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what
the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and
effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. AS TRUE AS
PAST TIME ITSELF WAS, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were
antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. That
past time itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with everything
that's present. True as the present is, the past was also.
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