'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way
of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the
way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient
in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets
expediently all the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all
farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know,
has ways of BOILING OVER, and making us correct our present
formulas.
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever
alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that
all our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all
fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete
experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be
realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we
can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood.
Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic
metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has
boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only
relatively true, or true within those borders of experience.
'Absolutely' they are false; for we know that those limits were
casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as
they are by present thinkers.
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