olute first
cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a
primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential
discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity. There is
this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that
the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
objective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
doctrine a respectful ear.

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and
still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great
difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength
of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the _terminus a quo_
of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
_terminus ad quem_. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
by its being true.

VII.

One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.
There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of
opinion,--ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference
the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little
concern. _We must know the truth_; and _we must avoid error_,--these
are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are
not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two
separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the
truth _A_, we escape {18} as an incidental consequence from believing
the falsehood _B_, it hardly ever happens that by merely d