HITHERTO THIS STUDY has proceeded on the common assumption that the words used, being in everyday general circulation, were well understood by both writer and reader. But the hidden philosophy, true to its determination to take no assumption for granted, now rises in revolt against such universal complacency and demands that we learn to know more precisely what we are talking about. In fact it stresses immense importance upon the analysis of language and the uncovering of meaning as an essential foundation of the rigorous thinking which enters into its construction.
Nor is the feeling of this need of verbal clarification a peculiarly Asiatic one, although Asia alone has carried its satisfaction not only farther but to the inexorable and logical end. A distinguished Professor of the University of London not long ago made the amazing confession that:
When I undertook the task of expressing my own philosophy in non-philosophic language, I found, with considerable astonishment, how vague was my own apprehension of the real meaning of technical terms which I habitually used with considerable precision. The attempt to discover their meaning proved to be the first philosophical discipline to which I have ever submitted, and of more value for the understanding of philosophy than any scholarly study of classical texts.1
When a famous philosopher makes such a disconcerting discovery—which is tantamount to admitting that he only half-knew what he had been talking about—we should be prepared for even greater shocks when we come to examine the way in which ordinary people habitually use language. Such an examination forms an essential part of this course, because we cannot get away from words; they constitute the medium of communication, thought, study, and understanding. They are the tools with which we work. What will be revealed in this chapter may well make timid people start with surprise or draw back in fear. The student who has survived the humiliations inflicted by the preceding chapter and is yet willing to proceed further may now prepare to have more of his personal idols thrown down. But here the missiles shall be aimed at words!
Thus we are warned to heed the grave importance of verbal expression. It behoves us to be careful indeed in this realm of written or spoken language. For the whole mind writes itself down in the word. Our thinking processes are to a large extent the pensioners of language. We cannot carry on conceptual thought without the help of words. Most of man’s thinking, as distinct from perceiving, is done in words rather than in pictures. They give form to thought and provide the tools which must be used by reason. In the last analysis words are but servants of thought, and like all servants should be kept in their proper places. We may have therefore to become more cautious and hesitant in our free use of words, but we shall be the gainers even though our neighbours may be the losers.
There was once a British Labour Party politician who could get up on a platform and speak fluently and easily on any subject. He went away for a two-year course of study at Ruskin College, where men of his party and class were given the equivalent of part of a university education. After that time he came back a changed man. He now spoke slowly and hesitatingly. Why? The increase of intellectual capital had made him lose his former cocksureness and conviction: hence he became more wary of words.
The next point to note is to avoid the temptation of seemingly saying too much while actually saying too little. Men often disguise the emptiness of their heads in the glamorous profuseness of their flourishing verbiage. Shankara Acharya, an Indian sage of the ninth century, compared the effusive learned among his contemporaries to men who get lost in a forest of long words. Hamlet waxed eloquent in his three-word answer to Polonius’ question as to what he was reading: “Words, words, words.” The parrot-like abuse of language either ties thought and entangles it in thick knots, which must first be unravelled to think rightly, or it produces a treacherous facility of reading which conveys the illusion of progress in knowledge. Those who mistake verbosity for wisdom and volume for truth like to revel in a pretentious maze of words, but those who know how elusive both wisdom and truth are treat words gingerly. They speak before they think, tracing and retracing their steps in constant confusion, whereas the others think before they speak.
On the other hand, it is equally dangerous to accurate comprehension to say too little. Two schoolboys read the word pencil. The first is poor and immediately thinks of a broken wooden stub of lead pencil. The other is rich and at once connotes the word with a gold propelling pencil. The writer of the word was thinking of neither, for he meant a full-length wooden pencil. Thus fragmentary and inconsequential statements cannot lead to correct understanding of communicated experience. Language should be adequate to meaning; when it is not, then we are either left to grope in mental twilight or apt to supply meanings of our own manufacture which may turn out to be false assumptions.
It is a common mistake to assume that the meanings of most words are self-evident. The fact is that many have different nuances of significance. The language of incompleteness is an obstruction to adequate comprehension. It is often said, for instance, that a particular public measure, if passed into law, will be a great boon. But what is a boon to one man may be the reverse to another. If it is a question of driving a railroad through a farmer’s land the proposal might be a boon to the public but an injury to the farmer. Similarly it is quite useless for anyone to say that the world is progressing and to leave it at that. The horrors which have been let loose on humanity during the two major wars of this century indicate technical progress, but they do not indicate any moral progress on the part of those who have perpetrated these horrors, but rather the reverse. It is therefore necessary to particularize the application of such indefinite terms. Unless this is made explicit by extending a statement such terms are useless from the point of view of the inquirer into the truth of a matter, however useful for oratorically impressing and mentally dazzling a thoughtless public.
A word that is read but not thoroughly understood is a word that is dead. Unless completely intelligible meaning flies from the spoken or written word to the mind we are left unprofited. How much more then should we learn to give careful attention to the words we use in important study and serious discussion?
This uncertainty is the real source from which many an unnecessary controversy flows and the real cause of many a useless dispute. Much intellectual disputation about “facts” is really about the actual meaning of words without reference to things, and thus becomes as meaningless as the dispute whether it is the convex or concave side of a circumference that forms a circle. When we move amid ambiguous language we move amid treacherous people of whom we should beware. Century-old bickerings still drag on because of this defect. Nebulous words have been responsible for giving a three-thousand-year-long headache to bewildered metaphysicians. How can two people hope to attain perfect mutual understanding when they use two different thoughts for the same word or two different words for the same thing? How many avoidable disputes, how many unnecessary arguments, have arisen from such a hidden cause?
Suppose someone utters the word man during a discussion in which five other persons are taking part. And suppose that he is thinking of an Indian monk with slim figure, brown skin, and shaven head. What happens in the minds of those who hear him? The first forms a mental picture of an extremely tall man with powerful figure and ruddy complexion. The second sees with his mental eye an extremely short man with stout figure and sallow complexion. The third thinks of a man with middle stature, medium build, and fair complexion. The fourth pictures to himself an old grey-haired man, while the fifth frames in his mind the idea of a young brown-haired man. Which of these five definitions corresponds to the idea held by the speaker himself? None of the six people therefore could give a settled significance to this simple and common word man. This seemingly easy word can give rise to a plethora of different definitions. When hearers react variously to the utterance of such a common word, when they fail to exhibit uniform agreement in such a simple case, it becomes clear that many conflicting meanings are created or found by those who receive words which are never intended by those who utter them. Nor is escape from such ambiguities wholly avoidable. Those who would make man stand everywhere for the same idea must immediately limit it to the single instance of a particular man out of the millions who dwell on this teeming earth and thus leave all the rest unnamed! Such a procedure is quite impracticable. For the everyday affairs of life it usually suffices to use any workable definition of this word, but for the higher affairs of accurate reflection this is a dangerous habit. The only satisfactory method of treating it, then, is to demand or supply a more extended description of the kind of man about whom we are talking.
But this is only an instance of unintelligibility arising out of the incomplete use of a single word. When the same word brings different images to the minds of different persons, what is likely to happen when several words of such ambiguous significance are combined into a number of sentences?
Satisfactory communication is achieved only when a content is communicated and understood by the reader precisely as the writer himself understood it.
The service which a word renders will depend on the significance it is given by those who use it. A word which does not possess a common meaning for all ceases to possess a common value for all. When it is used so indefinitely that it can be used to refer to several mental concepts it becomes dangerous ground on which to tread. How many people talk at cross-purposes, indulge in bitter controversies or argue in vain, merely because the same words mean different things to the minds of different persons! If, therefore, to free language from its interpretational pitfalls and to translate perfectly meaning from one mind to another is infinitely harder than the multitude supposes, how much more difficult must it be when making philosophical inquiries? Socrates was probably the first semantic inquirer outside Asia. We may now understand why he went about questioning teachers and troubling talkers for definitions.
It is therefore not always enough to define the meaning of a word: we must often define the precise application of a word. Otherwise in speaking or reading a word may be given one meaning in the mind of one party but something different may be the thought of another. What seems wealth to a destitute person will seem poverty to one with a large bank balance. In a case like this it is necessary to relate the word “wealth” to a particular sphere in order to bring out its full significance. Although it is more befitting children than grown men to talk without having clear and distinct ideas of what they are talking about, a little inquiry will reveal that people habitually move in a haze of vague thought and unclear notions, merely because they never trouble to go deeply into what their terms signify.
Then, again, meaning fluctuates with every man that uses a word. He can perceive in it only what his past experience and present capacity permit him to perceive. Consequently the same word may mean much to one man and little to another. Let us not be blind to such limitations of language. To the poor peasant in Italy the word America once conjured up a vision of a land where wealth abounded and where he hoped to emigrate in order to get rich quickly. The same word in the mind of an unemployed Italian workman living in Chicago now evokes quite a different meaning. He pictures a land where reigns a merciless struggle for the survival of the fittest and where poverty grinds more harshly than in his native country.
The derivative meaning of a word is nothing. Whatever society or the individual chooses to affix to it becomes its acquired interpretation. Usage alone counts. A meaning may even vary from one century to another and from one author to another. A modern English lexicon may hardly approve of the meaning given by an obsolete one. Thought must inevitably fall into fallacy when it is inconsistent in the use of terms and assigns now one meaning and now a different one to the same word. Not that it is suggested that words shall be fixed in meaning unto all eternity and that they shall never be used except in a single sense. Such a desire would be impossible of fulfilment. Even today with all our dictionaries it has proved impossible. Language is a flux and forever on the move. It adapts and readapts itself as it tries laggardly to catch up with the times. It is not, never has been, and never can be static. It has grown simply because it possesses the characteristic of change, expansion, and loss. It is as subject to the processes of birth and decay as any other form of human activity. But what is desirable is that significance must first be clearly settled by mutual definition and then consistently adhered to whenever such a word is used, if it plays an important part in instruction or discussion. To take for granted that we know what it means is to put on mental blinkers.
No words are really wrong ones and none right. A word becomes so only by the wrong or right use we make of it. It becomes defective only when we understand it defectively. And for everyday use no word is quite meaningless because every word is given a significance by the mind of its user or hearer. Therefore we must separate the intended meaning of a word from the accepted meaning if we would achieve accurate transmission. But it is when we turn to philosophical usage that grave problems arise and we find baffling obscurity and sable darkness where the outside world finds complete clarity and sunlike brilliance.
An act which is beyond question never permissible to any mathematician is the introduction of personal favouritism, emotional bias, or subjective self-interest in either his use or understanding of an algebraic sign or geometric symbol. The student must take a valuable lesson from such a specialist and apply it to his own handling of linguistic signs and symbols, i.e., words. Thus many persons pronounce such a judgment as “This is excellent tea!” when they would be more correct if they confessed, “I regard this as excellent tea.” The difference between these two linguistic forms may be unimportant when mere tea is at stake, but it is vital when philosophic truth is at stake, because it is the wide difference between objective fact and unconscious personal projection upon fact. Indeed, many erroneous popular assumptions are the consequence of such structurally defective language.
Psychopathological factors peep through every phrase used by the undisciplined mind when its speech comes forth. When an object or an event is distasteful to a man he uses quite a different term of reference than he would use were it to his liking. But because in both cases his individual feelings—and not the object or event itself—have dictated the adoption of the particular term, the terms used cannot constitute accurate indicators of the referent. It is dangerous in fact to assume that we know what a word means merely because it stirs strong feelings in us. How careful therefore must the seeker after truth be when he enters this realm of language!
People suit meanings to their personal wishes. When somebody succeeds in overturning a government by violent means he refers to himself as the head of the new government, but to his rivals as traitors. During the struggle for power, however, he was himself referred to by the then existing government as guilty of committing treason and therefore branded as a traitor. If he were then a traitor he could not have ceased to be one afterward, and if he were not, then the former government was using the word in a wholly incorrect sense, or, in plainer language, telling lies. Hence a traitor never succeeds, because when he does he ceases to be one in both law and fact. It is only the unsuccessful who are dubbed traitors! In both cases the word represents a confusion of thought with desire, and has taken on a purely private value.
We colour interpretations of words with personal emotions of like or dislike and thus play false to accuracy. Labour leaders are not infrequently referred to as “agitators” by unsympathetic employers but as “bourgeois conservatives” by workmen who hold extreme views. Thus if we listen to both sides and are too lazy to make a critical analysis for ourselves we shall learn that the definition of labour leader is someone who is simultaneously a revolutionary and a reactionary! From such instances the immense value of verbal analysis becomes clearly apparent, for it assists us to separate stark fact from prejudiced opinion.
When the religious propagandist or the political controversialist uses a name like atheist or radical with such heated scorn as to make the name itself deliver judgment before any rational discussion is possible, it is evident that he is uninterested in reaching the truth about these terms but merely wishes to sway emotion and mesmerize his audience into acceptance. When an innocent term is uttered in tones of contempt or disgust as though it were an abusive epithet the mentally unguarded masses rarely pause to examine fairly the idea which underlies it but fall victim to the subtle psychological suggestion.
Catchwords and slogan-phrases are favourite methods of unprincipled politicians, cheap demagogues, unethical advertisers, and all who care more for gain than for truth. They use such phrases to let loose in large numbers of people’s minds overemphasized emotions, concealed misstatements, deliberate half-truths, or distorted images that obstruct sound judgment. People repeat such slogans under the delusion that they are thinking. However handy these catchphrases are to such propagandists, it is advisable to inquire more closely into their meaning before we may accept them, just as we must look beneath the embellishments of oratory to find its substance.
Superficial conceptions have become so strongly ingrained in our language that truer ones can dislodge them only after meeting with and vanquishing the utmost resistance. The ordinary unthinking loose-lipped man is unwilling to trouble himself with this clash and conflict of significances, so the philosopher must bear the struggle alone. Language—the choice of words and the structure of sentences—may markedly help or hinder the philosophic quest, and that is why the philosopher must be tremendously more careful about its use than others. The irresponsible carelessness of ordinary men becomes utterly unpardonable in him.
The successes of modern science have been chiefly achieved because it deals essentially with facts. The failure of medieval logic or scholasticism arose because it dealt essentially with words. The success of the hidden philosophy in solving the problem of truth has been largely attained because it deals with both facts and words. Medieval theology or scholasticism is filled with numerous pseudoquestions, such as how many angels can rest on the point of a needle, merely because it never took the trouble to find out what it really knew. “Better be ignorant than be a theologian and know so much that is untrue” said an American businessman who worshipped in his own mystical way and knew how to die nobly and high-faithed when the Lusitania was sunk.
The dangers of metaphorical phrases are far better known than the dangers of literal ones. When we shall come to the study of mind we shall discover how the conjunction of a tiny preposition of two letters with an anatomical figure of speech is accountable for much that is wrong in our outlook. For when we speak of a thought being “in my head” we unconsciously force the mind into the bony box of the skull. Thus we give it certain limited dimensions in space without ever having inquired whether it be so located or not. We shall discover at the end of our inquiry that this is not a fact and that the use of this dangerous spatial metaphor misleads us into confusion and error.
Ordinary language is careless language. It tolerates illogicalities, ambiguities, unrealities, illusions, and deceptions. Words, statements, and definitions possess an important bearing on the solution of philosophical problems. Thus the ordinary man is quite rightly content to say, “I see a tree.” This kind of statement is perfectly in order for everyday practical use, but it is insufficient for philosophy. The student has to learn to ask: “What is the correct significance of the statement that I see a tree?” Through this dissection of word and sentence he gains the inestimable benefit of separating fact from assertion and truth from assumption. It is the bringing into the full glare of light the everlasting struggle between what is certain and what is uncertain. It is indeed a solid achievement to find out what he really knows and what he does not know but wrongly thinks he does! Thus he can move forward, but otherwise he is either brought to a standstill or wastes years in pursuing phantoms. Thus he pares away smug notions of assumed knowledge, cuts them to pieces as it were.
Men may unconsciously enshrine their whole attitude toward life in two or three words which they carelessly utter. The individual process of mentation reveals itself in the shortest phrase and the longest sentence. What is our reaction to the word supernatural? It will be piously defined in one way by a clergyman but in quite a different and scornful way by a sceptic. Thus the same word will certainly yield conflicting definitions. Whatever meaning both individuals may arbitrarily associate with this word, they believe that they are getting a definition, but what they really get is a thought that answers to their personal idea of the definition. Hence they will mistakenly suppose that they are interpreting facts when they are only interpreting their own or other people’s imaginations concerning these facts.
In the end the definition which a man gives depends on his individual theory of the universe. Meaning becomes a creation of the mind! Thus the element of personal preconception, against which the philosophical student has already been so strongly warned, will tend to creep again into the most unsuspected places, into his use or understanding of these counters of thought which totalize into language.
Every word has therefore two meanings: the external meaning, which is the objective fact or event in external experience, and the internal meaning, which is the idea of that fact or event which is formed in the mind. The fact itself and the statement of it will always differ and never meet, do what we like. Whatever meaning we may assign to a term, it can never wholly correspond to the thing which it labels. For it is only a preferred abstraction—using the latter term in its technical sense. We all know what Napoleon said to his troops before the Battle of the Pyramids, but nobody knows the precise shade of tone in which his words were spoken and the precise feeling they aroused in each soldier. Therefore we would be more accurate in confessing that we know something about his famous exhortation but we do not and can never know all about the event.
Words tell us what is in our imagination, not what is in the thing itself. They speak about our own imagined definition rather than about what really is. In consequence there is a further snare which lies waiting for the heedless against which we must also be on guard. It is impossible to verify directly any statement made by another concerning his personal experience. We can only accept the truth of his statement on an analogical or inferential basis, i.e., indirectly. Whatever he tells us, all we can do is to imagine the idea that is held by his mind. Therefore where we dupe ourselves into the belief that direct understanding has been reached and duplicate verification achieved, we really get an individual imagination. When we use the same name as others for an object, we are often deceived into thinking that all are concerned with the same object. But no object can possibly be alike in all respects to all observers. The mountain which I see is not the same as that seen by another observer who is standing in a different position, for instance. Yet we both call it by the same designation! Let us be frank with ourselves in such cases and realize that we often entertain mental images different from those of other persons, while both of us apply the same label to these dissimilar entities.
The man who has received news of the death of a most beloved friend may, in response to a question, explain how sad he feels about the event. But his hearer can only get a rough grasp of what he hears, never of what the other man feels. And because powers of verbal expression may be feeble in the other man’s case, even this approximate understanding may be still more imperfect than it would have been in another case. Anyway, the essential point is that there is and must be a gap between what the bereaved man says and what he actually feels. Therefore this gap is a pointer to the fact that verbal meaning is necessarily both incomplete and imperfect meaning, i.e., not strictly accurate!
Hence the word does not and cannot represent all the idea. It tells us something about the idea, it is no more than an excerpt of the total meaning, that is all. The smug satisfaction which we often feel when we speak to express ourselves is a fallacious one. It is and shall ever be only partially supported and supportable by successful communication. Is the meaning of the word table, for instance, the mental image which rises in someone’s mind with its utterance or is it the thought of the particular object at which his hearer sits down to dine? If it is the latter we are then faced with the problem that the particular image which rises in the hearer’s mind may differ largely from the table which was being thought of by the speaker of the word. His may be a three-legged one, whereas the other is four-legged.
Linguistic conventions cannot be trusted. We must evidently go beyond the mere word or its sound if we would get precision. We ought to keep clearly before us the actual relationship between the term and the thing itself. The educated man will irritably assert that he knows what words mean, but really he frequently mistakes his mastery of grammatical correctness and his width of vocabulary for the actual knowledge which this language-structure represents. For words are not things. It is easy to confuse the written word with the actual thing or to forget that the spoken word is only an abstraction made from the thing it signifies. At the best a word will convey only a selective approximation of the thought or emotion, the event or the fact, which is in its speaker’s mind. Such an error may turn the word into a stumbling block, which prevents a proper knowledge of the object itself.
The student of philosophy must therefore take care to separate the word from the thought it stands for and the thought again from the thing it stands for. Then only may he perceive accurately what worth the word has for him. He must analyse individual words and sentence structures by retranslating them into factual rather than imagined referents. This demands probing beneath surfaces as a surgeon probes with his lancet. He must be quite clear on this point: that the meaning of a word may itself be purely verbal, i.e., nothing more than a number of other words, or it may be utterly nonverbal, i.e., an actual thing; and if it is the latter there is the further question of how much of that thing is symbolized by the word. Descriptive sentences tell us something about a part of an object, but they fail to tell us about the whole of it because they are necessarily always abstractions. For this they are not to be blamed as they possess, like all things, their limitations and we ought not to expect them to perform miracles. But, this said, we need not make matters worse by being loose, slipshod, vague, and careless when pouring thought-stuff into the linguistic matrix.
It is customary for most of the untechnical laity, when first presented with these problems of meaning, to brush them aside as being too obvious for special attention or too trivial for prolonged consideration. And even professed students of philosophy are not infrequently highly impatient when subjected to this novel cross-examination of what seems plain and familiar everyday language. They regard it as a waste of time at best and a positive nuisance at worst. They can see neither tangible profit nor particular interest in such a task. Nor can they see its connection with the quest of truth. They ask what has all this preoccupation with mere words to do with philosophy. Is it not the proper concern of the philologist only?
The answer is that the full implication of such semantic study can come only with the fuller unfoldment of this course. Only when this research is well advanced will the student come adequately to realize for himself why the importance of this investigation has been insisted on, in face of the fact that most educated people assume that they understand quite well the words which they habitually use. Nevertheless, even within the limit of the present chapter something of its usefulness will be shown.
The would-be philosopher who has equipped himself psychologically for his expedition will see the whole expanse of existence as his province. He has to set out to explore subsurfaces for the truth of what he hears or reads, as well as what he says or writes, for the truth of the world around him, for the truth of what he thinks and what others think, and for the truth of the world within, i.e., the mind. But he has to start somewhere and it will be most convenient to start at the nearest point, which means that he should begin with words, because all his other knowledge will have to be formulated in words.
His inquiry starts then by making himself as mentally uneasy and as linguistically uncomfortable as possible! He has to go out to do some ghost-laying! For most men, perhaps all men, have been conversing with thin phantoms and dealing with transparent wraiths under the delusive impression that they were solid figures of flesh. In short, he has to find out how much of his word-formulated thought and speech is sheer nonsense and how much is verifiable and veritable fact, how much is mere misunderstanding and how much is authentic interpretation. The more he makes his meanings clear to himself and to others, the nearer he gets to truth. Non-ambiguity is therefore an essential ingredient of the efficient philosophic vocabulary. The arbitrary use of words may often be unimportant in the world of mundane matters, but where the reception or communication of truth is in question he must be extremely careful to fix their precise significance, so as to render them immune to misunderstanding.
With a well-defined set of terms constituting a common language between writer and reader, both may hope to make some progress. Without it both may fall into the old trap of building up an entire philosophical structure out of nothing more substantial than mere ambiguity.
To consider such verbal dissection as pure pedantry is therefore quite wrong. It is part of the essential equipment for ascertaining truth. Whoever will not give time to this preparatory effort is doomed to remain outside the porch of philosophy. Many hope to evade this fatiguing labour and yet gain the slow-growing fruits of philosophy! How little do they know that an appreciative mastery of verbal analysis will later enable them to turn the flanks of specious arguments and false assumptions, thus clearing the ground for their onward progress toward truth! For words grow into sentences, which in their turn develop into entire systems of statements that embody whole trains of thinking. If the words themselves presuppose what is actually false, who can get at truth by mingling them with other words?
If men persist in maintaining an attitude of indifference toward the problems of meaning they render themselves unfit to proceed with further philosophical study. For the psychological effect of their obstinacy is nothing less than the desertion of the labour of thinking and nothing more than an unspoken claim to knowledge, which, in fact, does not really exist inside their heads. It is equivalent to a sudden paralysis of the reasoning faculty. It leads to acceptance of specious arguments. They ignorantly imagine that such problems are purely fanciful and academic and belong to the region of worthless medieval discussions, such as the one already mentioned of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle! In this they are wholly mistaken. The solution of these problems has both a practical and philosophical application, a value quite unsuspected by those who have not deeply delved into them.
This demand for philosophic precision in the handling of terms is not an arbitrary one. It is really a demand for clearing the ground, because progress is impeded by false and misleading notions. It is a demand that we examine words in order to draw a clear line between fact and falsity, detect the fallacies which underlie their use, and lay bare unwarranted or unconscious assumptions. We are thus to watch for unguarded expressions which give a status to meaningless nonsense.
Philosophy is the comprehensive quest of impregnable truth, the underlying significance of all existence. Most men who subscribe to the doctrine of a particular religion, cult, or school of thought lazily adopt an attitude which regards those doctrines as constituting the last word in wisdom, an attitude which is often most impatient of contradiction. The unconscious implication of such an attitude is therefore, “I know that this is true.” But how is it possible for them to be certain that what they know is true if they have not previously examined its very foundations analytically and critically, if they have not made a similar study of all comparative and conflicting doctrines, and above all if they have not still earlier endeavoured to ascertain the proper meaning of truth? We cannot do better, in order to provide a glimpse into one philosophical application of the principles just laid down, than to start examining into the meanings given to this word truth by some contemporaries.
Let us take pains to discover what the learned can inform us about truth. We find it defined in a standard dictionary as “being true or truthful; a true statement; accuracy of representation; the real explanation.” When we turn to the writings of philosophers to ascertain their definition, an interesting variety of theories of truth or opinions of truth is put before us! The Pragmatic school says, with William James, that “the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.” Those who hold to the Correspondence theory say that “truth is that which conforms to fact and corresponds to the actual situation.” The protagonists of the Coherence theory say that truth is consistency. Others say that the word truth is liable to four further interpretations: it may firstly be taken as something that is unopposed. It may secondly be taken as indicating a factual reality; it may thirdly be taken as merely a statement about that factual reality; lastly it may indicate a correct relation existing between two things, two persons or two units as 3 + 2 = 5.
From this medley of mutually conflicting definitions we perceive that the term is so protean that it is strictly no better than a strange jargon, and that the common belief that everyone knows its meaning is merely an erroneous assumption. The differences in connotation are too wide to make clear-cut sense. Yet the world uses this word “truth” glibly and pretends to possess an adequate understanding of its meaning. This is where the world obviously deceives itself. The ordinary man soon falls a victim to the seductive simplicity of this short word and never dreams that it is nothing more than a starting post in the race for philosophic understanding. Yet to him it is the finishing post!
The hardest thing in the world is to reach truth, the easiest to reach its simulacrum. That is why every man fancies he knows the truth. In the philosophical dictionary this word should be assigned the most important place of all, as it is in the best texts of India, but the West has been unable to find a fixed definition to which its thinkers can agree. Generally they have not occupied themselves with the question of defining truth although they are familiar with the importance of the general principle of defining their terms. But it is their common belief that the nature of the ultimate truth cannot be determined and that therefore it is useless to attempt to define the unknowable. But if philosophy is to live up to its professed purpose of ascertaining the meaning of the Whole, i.e., the truth of the Whole, what other fate awaits its writers and readers than a fall into obscurity when this most important word evades uncontradictable definition? Those few, however, who have attempted the task offer such unashamedly different denotations that it is quite clear they are offering mere opinions under elaborate linguistic guise. All the current definitions have their weaknesses and can be overthrown by a keen mentality.
We thus arrive at the appalling position that the meaning of some of the most important words used in the quest of truth is not fixed but is purely relative to their interpretation. Such a discovery helps to explain, however, why Buddha maintained a calm silence when a hearer questioned him as to the nature of Nirvana and why Jesus maintained a similar silence when Pontius Pilate questioned him as to the nature of Truth. Whatever answer either of these two would have given would inevitably have meant something imagined, hence something different, in the mind of the questioner from what it meant in the speaker’s own mind. But the complete explanation of these mysterious silences belongs to the most advanced part of this course.
It will perhaps be asked where is the grave importance of arriving at a universally acceptable and completely uncontradictable definition of the nature of truth before actually arriving at truth itself? The answer must be that we are like explorers in an unknown continent who must have a guide to direct their movements, whether that guide be a living man or a mechanical compass. A trustworthy definition of truth would provide right direction for the efforts of thinkers by showing them the path to be followed for its attainment. It would warn them like the moving needle of a compass whenever they were headed for delusion, error, and deception, and it would encouragingly reassure them whenever they were going forward to the right goal. It would blaze perpetually in the mental sky like the Pole Star so that they need not lose themselves in useless speculation or grope vainly among fanciful theories. Nor is this all. It would prevent them deceiving themselves into the acceptance of a “truth” merely because it be pleasant to their taste. It would enable them to avoid acceptance of their own or someone else’s imagination about truth as being truth itself. It would give a final certitude of outlook unpossessed by those who do not know whether what they believe is truth or not and who are therefore always liable to change their mind.
A further glimpse of the philosophical value of vigorous verbal analysis may now be given. How many men are wholly drugged or half awed by the mere sound of an impressive word like God and thus deflected from calm verification and impartial analysis of all its implication? This word gives great comfort and magical solace to millions of people, but the truth-seeker, alas! can derive no comfort from it in advance before he has considered the thought itself rather than the word. Because society has used this word continuously throughout several centuries superficial minds come to assume that the word must therefore represent a “something” which exists within human experience, which is. The student, however, must first analyse psychologically what they have done. For he must start with a basis of inquiry, which shall be dogma-free and yet fruitful for the growth of understanding, otherwise it is mere verbiage. Specific and accurate definition must be this starting point in study. He has not the good fortune of those glib clergymen and wise theologians who speak of God with such familiarity and such certitude as to give the impression that they were doubtless present when He created the world, or at least as if, in the words of Matthew Arnold, “he were a person in the next street.”
The first thing which he then discovers is that this brief three-letter word can be understood in many different senses. As he rummages through the cluster of pious associations which it possesses he soon perceives that ten men may utter the word “God” but important differences of view may lie concealed beneath each utterance, although it is heard as one and the same sound. The word may mean a personal or an impersonal being, it may mean the abstract totality of the laws of nature or a particular individual existence, a piece of carven wood or a moulded metal image. In the mind of a primitive man it is a purely animistic term, whereas in the mind of the late Lord Haldane it was an abstract and absolute one. The student should not limit his inquiry to the conception held in his immediate locality or in his country or among his race; he is a seeker after the truth of all life and therefore he must collect and compare conceptions from every quarter of the globe. He will then discover that there are racial gods like Jehovah, tribal gods galore, personal rulers of the universe like Vishnu, and impersonal and universal spirits without any form at all, and that the human mind, in its primitivity, worships a deity totally unlike that which it worships in its maturity.
His attempt to get under the skin of this term and fix its full significance thus carries him into a weary task which is as interminable as it is inconsequential. For do what he may he is wholly unable to discover what exactly is meant by this disarmingly short word. It is susceptible of a diversity of strange interpretations. It may furnish fifteen meanings to as many persons. It has probably given rise to more nebulous vapourizing than any other word in the dictionary. All that he can discover is what a multitude of persons, ranging from simple Fiji Islanders to finished university graduates, imagine, believe, hope, suppose, trust, or visualize the meaning may be, but none—not a single person—really knows what it is. The bewildering consequence is that all their definitions contradict each other. The diversity of definitions given to “God,” not merely by uncouth barbarians but by educated people, is really scandalous. Few mental Gods are alike. Because they are forced to use words as prime elements of their thinking, because meaning must first flow into word-shapes before it can be properly appropriated by the mind, this motley multitude of talkers about God do not really know what they are talking about when they do not know the precise meaning of the word. And not only do they not know themselves what they are talking about but those who listen to them do not really understand them either. For the notions that are received and formed in their minds are likely to be quite other than those formed by the minds of the talkers. All, in fact, have objectified their personal assumptions into the word and through the latter into the world that environs them.
The student of philosophy should not submit unresistingly to such an extraordinary situation. He must put himself on guard and take antiseptic precautions against these serious dangers to mental health. He has to apply the test of disinterested thinking to the confident talk about God which constantly pours into his ears or passes in print before his eyes. He cannot do this merely by consulting a printed dictionary for an answer to the question, “What is the significance of God?” He should know that all dictionaries are merely attempts to stabilize meanings and that they have never fully succeeded in their aim because different dictionaries offer different meanings, and that after all they are but indicators of interpretational opinion existing at the time of compilation: their authority is not absolute. He can do it only by reframing his question thus: “What is felt in my mind when I use this word? What is there in experience of the world or life which corresponds to the term God?”
Thus when we deeply consider “the meaning of meaning” we find that it is, after all, only an idea in the mind, a thought which we hold, or even an imagination which we construct. And because it possesses a purely mental existence it is never possible to compare the idea held in one man’s mind with that held in another’s. Two external objects such as pencils can easily be placed side by side and compared, but not two internal ideas. Consequently each hearer or reader of a word may and will imagine only what he prefers as the meaning. Accurate communication and perfect reception are thereby defeated. Such a defeat can only be averted by entering more carefully into cautious examination and prior definition. When the student has not only understood how to assess the worth of words, but also how to assess the meaning of meaning, then the time has come when he may hope to discover what God truly is, in contrast to what some people merely imagine Him to be, but before then—never! His discovery will not come at once, it will not be made indeed until the end of his philosophic quest, but if he perseveres it will come, and thereafter he will no more be deceived by the graven images of false Gods.
A word which has also played much part in entrapping men in false conceptions or bewildering them with vague ones is spiritual. It has been used by totalitarian dictators to label their outlook on life, but it has also been used by their opponents! There is something ironic in the way in which dictators and democrats have mutually accused each other of being materialistic and unspiritual. There is obviously much confusion here in the notions possessed by politicians about this attractive word. But when we enter into the spheres of religion and mysticism the confusion increases greatly. We hear of “spiritual” experiences which, on analytical examination, turn out to be magnificent emotional titillations, or extremely imaginative flights, or beautiful moods of intense peace, or crudely sentimental conversions, or visions of immaterial beings, and so on. The possible interpretations are therefore many. Finally, if we say that a certain man is very “spiritual,” one hearer thinks it means that he is noble in character, another believes that it indicates he is possessed of a tranquil temperament, a third imagines that he lives a life of ascetic simplicity and solitude, a fourth pictures him as being ultrareligious, while a fifth regards him as living in a mysterious state of consciousness unknown to ordinary mortals and so forth. Thus each definition differs from all the others.
Let us now analyse more deeply the implication of the word spiritual. Whatever be the nature of anyone’s spiritual experience or consciousness, trace it to an analytical terminus and it will be discovered that it is his mind that tells him of it and it is his mind that enables him to know it as existent in his life. Now the mind can only make us aware of anything—whether it be a tiny fly or a great God—by entertaining the thought of it. Therefore whatever is known in any way is known ultimately as a thought. Spiritual experiences and spiritual consciousness are no exception to this universal rule. They too are really nothing more than thoughts, however unusual in character they might otherwise be. Hence there is no difference between the word spiritual and the word mental. All conscious life is thought-life. The most “spiritual” man lives in thoughts as much as the most materialistic man. He cannot do otherwise and remain awake.
It is now possible to understand not only why people form no clear and consistent notion of the meaning of spiritual, but also why they never can form one. All that they can do is unconsciously to construct imaginatively a meaning which pleases their personal taste or temperament. The philosopher must refuse to be captivated by the charm of this word and by deeper thinking discipline his own use of the term so that he achieves clarification of what he is talking about.
A fourth linguistic enemy, against whose superficial acceptance the philosopher must war lest it deceive and entrap him in illusion, is fact. For the philosophy of truth prides itself in being based on facts rather than on beliefs. But what is a fact? Here is a word whose meaning in everyday usage is commonly taken for granted, but even a slight analytical inquiry will show that it treacherously shades off into quite a number of other nuances. If anyone arbitrarily accepts the first or third of all these interpretations because the effort of further inquiry is too troublesome, how can he assure himself that his knowledge is really based on facts?
Suppose a boy is walking home in the dim twilight and notices that a coiled snake is lying beside the road. He hurries on and later meets another traveller, who, however, is proceeding in the opposite direction. The former deems it his duty to inform him of the fact that a snake is resting further along the road and to warn him against accidentally treading on it and being bitten in consequence. The next day the boy meets the same man, who informs him that he shot at the snake and then approached it. To his astonishment he found it to be no reptile at all but merely a coil of thick rope. The dimness of the light had deceived them both! The reptile was but a creature of their unverified imagination, an unconscious self-deception.
Was it a fact that the boy saw a snake? The answer must be yes. Was it a fact that the object seen was really a rope? The answer must again be in the affirmative. But suppose he had never met the other man again. Would he not have stoutly asserted it was a fact that he had seen a snake just as the man would now stoutly assert the “fact” that the boy had not seen any snake at all?
It will be clear to the thoughtful mind that we must be more wary when using this term. If a fact is something reported by the five senses, then it is possible for the senses to deceive us and to provide us with a misrepresentation of it. In that case the student must add the word fact to the list whose uncritical use he ought to regard with suspicion. If, instead of thinking, “I have seen a snake,” he had thought, “I have seen something which appears to have the characteristics of a snake,” he would not have misled himself and others so easily.
This, however, is the simplest of his difficulties in accepting the term. Words which belong to the prescientific age and to conceptions far off in time and space still permeate our language and may actually mislead him now that their referent is something about which contemporary knowledge shows an enormous extension. The results which have been achieved in our generation could not have been achieved in any earlier age, for they have largely been made possible by the marvellous new instruments and delicate apparatus which have been devised and invented to help the five senses function where they could not function so finely before. Thus the microscope, the telescope, and the spectroscope, the sensitive photographic surface, and the photoelectric cell have made visual reports possible which the unaided human eye could not have got otherwise.
The microscope, for instance, reveals a new world to our eyes, a wonderful world which shows that the corpse we thought statically dead is in truth dynamically alive with active parasites, that the water we thought uninhabited simply teems with minute living creatures, that the razor-edge we thought perfectly straight is sawlike and crooked, and that what is perceptible to the gross senses is only a pitifully slight abstraction of what is still imperceptible. A few centuries ago everybody glibly said that the unaided first impressions referred to facts, whereas modern science now declares that the later ones alone refer to facts. Both groups of observations seem to contradict each other, or appear to falsify each other. Yet millions of people have been thinking and many still think of the simpler observations as being facts.
We still go on applying the old primitive terms to such phenomena, although every student of science now knows them to be technically inaccurate and misleading. Our minds still use concepts of the world as it is signalled by the naked senses. Our talk still embraces verbal expressions based on those delusive concepts. Language trails like a laggard far in rear of our knowledge. How can those who unguardedly use such a deceptive medium of thought, understanding, and communication ever hope to bring the ultimate truth of life within their reach?
For what in the last analysis is the significance of these statements? It is that men may easily read their own beliefs into the word fact. When we consider matter scientifically we learn that every material object is constituted of whirling electrons. Your typewriter may report itself to the senses as continuously existent and constant, but it reports itself to modern laboratory inquiry as an energy whose waves undulate away in a moment. Still more, science, having failed to find an ultimate substance, has dropped the word “object” for the word “event,” so that your machine is a complex of events in space-time which can never identically recur twice. The typewriter, as a space-time fact, can never be identical at successive moments of time. So long as your concern with the machine is merely a practical one, these considerations may not interest you, for they have no value when you want to write on a sheet. But when your concern is a scientific one, because you seek to learn more truth about the typewriter as a material object among many others, these considerations become vitally important. It would then be erroneous and misleading if you thought of the word typewriter, i.e., defined it, in the same way that you would think of it from the practical standpoint. Should you stick stubbornly and slavishly to the old prescientific definition it is quite obvious that you would never get at the scientific truth, but be tricked by the five senses and corrupted by the word itself. If you insist on regarding the term “fact” as holding only the superficial content which the ordinary man usually assigns it, i.e., referring to matter in its crudest sense, to whatever is tangible to the unaided five senses, you remain in an atmosphere of thought which prevents the acquisition of truth.
Nor is this all. If you could wait for thousands of years and watch the process of gradual rust and eventual decay through which the typewriter would pass, it would eventually crumble away into dust and vanish from sight altogether. It would thus be transformed into some other “stuff.” In an altogether new form it would somehow continue existence. Inquiry into the nature of that ultimate existence is a work that rises beyond science into philosophy, which then reveals a previously unsuspected version of the meaning of “fact” to which the student will come in due course, and which is at present beyond the horizon of the specialized scientist.
Philosophy is thus not satisfied with knowing the fact of a moment: it wants also to know the permanent fact, if there be one. Hence it is of little use to the philosopher to be told that something is a fact when the statement is made by someone who has never sought to know the characteristics and tests of a fact. If he wants to get effectively at ultimate truth he has indeed to retranslate some part of the terminology of everyday life. He cannot use even such a prescientific term as “fact” indiscriminately without mutilating modern knowledge, for it is but one of a number of major words borrowed from the realm of everyday experience which carelessly used may hinder him from attaining right thinking because their meanings are too blurred by popular misusage. How much more will this be the case when he ascends beyond the scientific level into the still more rarefied atmosphere of their philosophic interpretation! Such correction of his vocabulary will lead to the correction of his thinking, because both are inseparable. Unconsidered words of this character carry a heavy burden of ancient half-understandings, primitive miscomprehensions, and erroneous modes of early thought from which they ought to be purified whenever they are utilized for anything higher than rudimentary practical purposes. Release from these defects should be sought. Language is linked with knowledge and should logically evolve with it, not drag painfully behind it.
Our examination of these four terms, truth, God, spiritual, fact, has revealed the contradictory definitions which each one may yield to different users. They are glibly uttered by everybody, by men in the street who have never given a day’s thought to them, by many who are even incapable of giving them such thought, and—let it be said!—by every mystic who presumes his ecstatic experiences entitle him to speak the last word concerning them. How can any of these people rightly possess certitude when he has not taken the trouble previously to ascertain what it is that corresponds to his words? But the haziness of his thoughts provides him with convenient shelter under which to take cover against troublesome questions or sudden doubts. The student cannot afford to tolerate such weakness.
This examination has also shown the vital importance of obtaining a definite understanding of word-thoughts which can act as a working compass to lead him out of all this confusion and give him right direction in the quest. This effort to reach semantic understanding is what the student must seek to achieve from now onward, and he must also bring within its scope certain other important terms of a similar nature as they arise. He must guard against using words which bring emotional satisfaction but lack intellectual enlightenment; he must beware of terms that cater to ancient prejudice and ingrained habit but define nothing factual. He must recognize that to release himself from the tyranny of superficially used language is to release his mind from the burden of ignorance and misunderstanding. He must protect himself against false theories which rest not on verified fact but on fictions of purely verbal construction.
It is not the purpose of the present chapter to take up all the chief ideas expressed in religious, mystic, philosophic, or everyday terms and analyse them. Words like intellect, reason, reality, exist, mind, and so on will appear and be defined in the course of this book, and a reeducation of thinking may be effected when their meaning is properly attended to. The precise purpose here is to prepare the reader’s mind by broadly showing the way to deal accurately with the verbal problems that arise, by explaining the general principle which must be followed from now on. The first difficulty of the problems of philosophy is that their real nature is usually hidden from those that seek to solve them because the language terms in which these problems are stated stand at the end of a long series of known and unknown processes. Analysis helps to unearth what is implicit in them.
The seeker will therefore have to apply the method of verbal discipline not only now but at every further step of his study. Hence he must here learn to pick up a special intellectual characteristic. He was told in the previous chapter to pick up certain other characteristics essential to philosophical inquiry. These two chapters are therefore quite complementary. A consequence of this effort will be that he will gradually escape from the delusion which often haunts so many religious, mystical, and metaphysical people among others, that they have learnt something veridically new whereas they have actually learnt nothing but sounding words. He will discover that people explore words for ideas which they do not contain, never have contained, and never can contain, words that are often mere hollow sounds. He will come specially to beware of those indefinite meanings, those emotional words which sound so full of sense but are actually full of nonsense. Politicians, orators, and demagogues particularly are fond of using grandiloquent words, slogans, and phrases which either reek with gross overstatement or mean absolutely nothing relevant at all, or which are intended to arouse strong blind feelings, or which seek to cover uncomfortable facts—and do!
They possess a glamorous spell, a mesmeric effect which gives a semblance of significance to them but which hides their emptiness. When he resolutely analyses such sentences he can destroy their false pretensions to knowledge.
The use of meaningless words may lead even a reputedly intelligent man to believe that he is investigating given data and objective facts, when in reality he is merely investigating his own hallucinations in which he may be thoroughly entangled like a fly caught in a spider’s web. Most people are under the delusion that every word must necessarily represent a nonverbal thing. But there may actually be nothing at all behind its surface. The falsity of this belief that every word must needs possess a meaning is demonstrated by the possibility of using such phrases as “the son of a sterile woman” and “flowers in the sky,” which are clearly ridiculous even to a schoolboy, but are no more ridiculous to a philosopher than numerous expressions which are thoughtlessly used by people in the highest to the lowest circles.
The basis of this criticism is that one ought to be silent about the truth of those things whose existence one has never verified and can never verify. To speak in such a case is to imagine, and therefore to depart from the straight road of strict fact. We ought not to permit a word to deceive us into believing that we are dealing with objects, experiences, and existences when in actuality we are doing nothing of the sort.
“Does this word designate something real or something fictitious?” should become a constant query when faced with assertions made by many advocates and most propagandists. When a word does duty for the inconceivable it may soon blind the judgment of a man and lead him to accept the nonexistent. This is pseudo-interpretation, this shooting one meaningless term after another and moving in a circle which returns to the original word without having provided any real explanation of meaning during its journey. Magnificent verbal worlds are thus constructed in which their creators live happily ever after! Men everywhere entertain false opinions through their incorrigible habit of inferring that something named is something that exists, through their traditional tendency to mistake empty words for substantial realities. Hence the need to examine statements to ascertain whether they are really thinkable or whether they are merely pseudo-meanings—sets of symbols with nothing substantial in human experience that actually corresponds to them. In short, it is the need to get at what is truly known, to unveil hidden assumptions, and to elucidate what is being done when a thing is said to be true.
The student of philosophy has no option but to begin by distrusting every word which does not represent a particular thing within definite and universal personal experience. He must doubt the verbal idols which former men or present tradition have set up for his worship. He must put aside the simple faith that the existence of a word necessarily signifies the existence of a thing or of an idea denominated by that word. He may then discover, to his astonishment, that its supposed existence is no existence at all! Of course, although such a word does not represent any existent object, as is supposed, it may represent a feeling of the one who utters it and in its turn it may stimulate another feeling of the same class in the hearer.
Thus he has to seek for the solid substance behind the show of language, to get at the “meaning of meanings.” Before he can rightly start with a sentence like, “What is the nature of the world around me?” he should ask, “What is the character of this expression ‘nature of the world’?” He has to learn how to frame questions rightly if he is to secure correct answers. Eighteenth-century chemists lost themselves in the falsity of the phlogiston theory because they asked, “What special substance is involved in the process of burning?” instead of asking, “What kind of process is burning?”
Language must be adjusted to fit the pursuit of philosophy, and not vice versa. Words which carry no meaning must be ruthlessly abandoned. Words which carry false meaning must be rigorously corrected. Words which carry ambiguous meaning must be sharply clarified. Words which pretend to represent fact but really represent imagination must be revealed for what they are. All such words hold the budding philosopher in fetters and limit the field of his inquiry until he sunders the conceptual reality of their meanings from the actual reality, the fictitious significance from the real significance. The elucidation of their ultimate meanings is a necessary stage in the elucidation of ultimate truth, because it involves the wholesale reconstruction of thought.
The reorientation involved in this revision of verbal evaluations to bring them into conformity with the philosophical outlook is admittedly painful at first. It may be troublesome to become meticulously linguistically self-conscious, but the arduous effort passes into easy habit with time. Nevertheless the half-educated frankly find it a bore, while the feminine sex usually find it a bother! Hence we observe few women take to philosophy and few men care for it also, unless either their mental background or yearning for truth is of the right quality.
It is true to add that the general effect of this verbal self-training will certainly appear within the field of everyday living. As the mind becomes more exacting in its demands on thoughts and words during philosophical inquiry, so will it slowly and automatically extend the habit to include ordinary practical affairs. The universally careless condition which characterizes most thinking, permeates much writing, and distorts daily conversation will give way gradually to significant, purposeful, and realistic certitude. These consequences are likely to be far reaching indeed. Not merely the labels but the very stuff of thought will be altered and improved. When we pay attention to meaning we are paying attention to something whose range extends far beyond the sphere of communication or learning; it is carried over by its own impetus of habit into other environments and other fields of activity where we reap the consequent benefits. It is not too much to say that it leads to a mental reeducation. We thus unfold a capacity for independent thinking. “Words plainly force and overrule the understanding,” confessed that master of words, Francis Bacon. He was shrewd enough to point out that of all the obstacles to right reasoning those imposed by words were “the most troublesome of all,” and his warning to all would-be philosophers is to be ever remembered: “Words, like a Tartar’s bow do shoot back upon the understanding and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.” If the structure of language is after all but a system of implication, the possibilities of error and uncertainty are very real. Statements which imperfectly represent a thing may always lead to incorrect thought upon it.
As before in this book it is necessary to utter another warning. There should be no misunderstanding of the function of linguistic analysis. It is not meant that speech should exist only for the purpose of conveying facts. It is not meant that all metaphorical language, all the beauties of poetry, all the pleasures of fiction, all the relaxations of humour and all imaginative work should be neither expressed nor appreciated. The light and often grossly exaggerated touches which humour gives to conversation, the colourful patches which the reading of novels gives to leisure, are not to be rejected in disdain. There is nothing said here against such reasonable enjoyments of life. “Be a philosopher,” counselled Scotch Hume, “but amidst all your philosophy be still a man.”
What is really meant is that, whether talking or appreciating humorous nonsense, one ought not to be oblivious of the fact that it is nonsense; that when writing or reading fanciful unrealities one ought to know just what one is doing and not fall into the belief that there is any substance to these fancies; and that amid all the petty talk inseparable from social life one is not carried away into unconsciousness of its pettiness or into confusion of the practical with the philosophical necessities. What we require for everyday life is not necessarily to be judged by the standards of what we require for philosophical research. We may indulge in as much nonsense as we please in connection with the former within the limits of personal taste, but we may not indulge in the slightest nonsense in connection with the latter. We may utter a million meaningless words during the gossip of a lifetime without doing much or any harm to ourselves, but we may not utter or think a single meaningless word during the philosophical quest without losing our right direction. We may load our sentences with as much artistic imaginativeness or emotional colour as we wish, so long as we do not deceive ourselves thereby and can acknowledge what has been done. We may peruse page after page of fiction so long as we understand the unphilosophical nature of the language we are dealing with. We may even harangue a political audience with misleading metaphors and figurative innuendoes if that be our lot, but we ought not to fall into the errors which we prepare for others.
Language need not be drained of colouring and fancy, provided we retain the consciousness that it is colouring and fancy. Art is as admissible into the philosopher’s life as into the empiricist’s. We may enjoy all these to the full, only let us not set them up as the standards whereby truth also is to be judged and let us keep them in consciousness outside the purlieus of our keen quest for what is ultimately real. We must renounce them to ascend the altitudes like a cold ascetic renouncing the world, but we may pick them up again calmly the moment the mind turns from this study. Thus a twofold viewpoint will gradually develop, the practical and the philosophic. Such a duality will last as long as man is a seeker, but to the sage who has attained the hidden goal all life becomes a sublime unity and there is nothing for him to guard against.
What is it that the mind does when it searches for a meaning? This question provides a philosophic task of the first magnitude and its answer is itself a mental triumph.
This chapter may be summed up by the statement that when a man speaks or writes he reveals not only what he does know but also and unconsciously what he does not know. His ignorance, no less than his knowledge, lies naked in his sentences to the philosophic insight. They constitute a document of self-revelation, a manifestation of his subconscious no less than of his conscious mind. Only the sage can ever achieve an exact formulation of his knowledge, where others reveal the poverty of their thinking by their use of ambiguous, biased, inexact, or empty linguistic constructions, for he alone has burrowed to the roots of his own ideas. Thus too only the sage can detect from the style of man’s speech, the character of his linguistic structures, the precise stage on the road to truth to which his intelligence and his knowledge have advanced.
Philosophical analysis in linguistic matters along the lines indicated here will help the student to see whether any statement which he or others may make conveys genuine information or mere misinformation. For the philosophy of truth is taught in a particular and peculiar way. It begins to lead men to truth by pointing out their error, by showing where they think or talk nonsense, by causing them to unlearn illusory knowledge and then by reminding them that penetration to a deeper level of inquiry is possible and desirable. It is established in the mind of its students not so much by the affirmation of what is as by the elimination of what is not. It displays the leading principles of all other known views of existence and then proceeds to show their falsity and mistakes. When these false views are once thrown out of the mind they carry away with them numerous problems, pseudoproblems, and tormenting questions which have troubled the thoughts of all ages but which have never been brought to an issue because they never can, for they need never have arisen. And it says finally: “God exists, but He could not be revealed to you as He really is before you had rid your mind of the erroneous ideas concerning Him which filled it. Now only is the way prepared for you to find Him, to find Truth and to find Reality, the holy trinity which are really One.” Hence the high importance of this method of critical analysis.
Thus the subtleties of language may be shaped into a master key which unlocks many gates of the mysteries of thought and being.