And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any
intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in order that they may
turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill and
eject God from their own consciousness or from the consciousness of
others.
What is truth? There are two kinds of truth--the logical or objective,
the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the
opposite of which is falsehood. And in a previous essay I have
endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46]
Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is
moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a
school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to
submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they
are--that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would
have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data
of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the
outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws--it is not
we ourselves who thus formulate them. It is the numbers themselves which
in our mind create mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of
resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly
most insignificant of facts. And it is the gateway of religion; but
within the temple itself its function ceases.
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