For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer
be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the
second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities
are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the
world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter,
Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the
Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from
this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals
alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified
sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his
divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic
mind! I read in an old letter--from a gifted friend who died too
young--these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and
religion, there MUST be one system that is right and EVERY other
wrong." How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of
youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find
the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the
question 'what is THE truth?' is no real question (being irrelative
to all conditions) and that the whole notion of THE truth is an
abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful
summarizing phrase like THE Latin Language or THE Law.
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