What is Truth? [pp. 506-535]

What is Truth?
earth can grasp its movements. To believe that this is all
effected by fortuitous impulse, does violence to common
sense, and proves the mind which clings to such a theory unfit
for rational speculation. For no person, not wilfully blind,
can fail to see that undirected force segregates rather than
aggregates, and destroys instead of creating. Thus the mind
instinctively recognizes that all harmony and beauty in the
visible world, all symmetry of atomic structure in organized
matter, all obedience to law and constancy of action, result
from the command of a Being possessed of infinite intelligence
and power. Again, Truth is shown to us by answering the
end for which a thing was made. Hence, accident or uncertainty in the result to be reached is inconsistent with its
conditions as fixed by a superintending governor. In any
scheme of intelligent providence, every part must have its
purpose and fulfill the mission assigned to it. For in this way
it conforms to that will which foresaw all the possibilities of
things before they were created and willed their arrangement
and issue. The members of this vast creation were written in
the Divine book of universal Providence when as yet there
was none of them.* And when in continuance they were
fashioned, they grew up into that wondrous Cosmos whose
parts are so fitted to each other that they have one common
end in view,t and work, both matter and mind, like soul and
body, together.
But while Truth is one and indivisible, save in thought, we
may speak of physical and metaphysical, or moral and political Truth; but these are only different names for parts of one
and the same thing-that is, conformity of the agent to the
creating and governing purpose of the Supreme will. There
can, therefore, be no conflict between these co6rdinate parts
of one idea which rests for its authority upon the determination of God. Yet we hear so much said about the conflict
between Religion and Science that many are prone to think
they are irreconcilable, and therefore the utterances of
one or the other must be false. And as those facts which
appeal immediately to the senses offer a readier and simpler
criterion of proof, it is taken for granted that they are true;
while the utterances of Revelation which do not, from the
*Ps. cxxxix: I6 (Hebrew). tCleanthes' Hymn to Zeus, I2-13.
I 877.]
5 I 3