The Origin and Development of Religious Belief

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE BASIS OF TRUTH Wahrheit, O Gott, tst dein .1? Wieland. Truth is relative ? The antipodes of truth ? antagonistic ideas ? the antinomy in man ? Egoism and sympathy ? Contradictories radically exclude one another an exploded axiom ? The centre of gravity of Truths ? The Ideal conciliates all ? Conciliation of reason and sentiment ? No absolute falsehood ? Error the opposition of one relative truth against another to the exclusion of the latter ? All truths positive ? Negations are nothing ? Private judgment the negation of other judgments ? Private judgment the negation of absolute Truth ? The proper function of private judgment ? It is the resolution of what is true to the individual self ? Universal truth the combination of all appreciations of truth., such as it appears to us, can only be relative, - because we ourselves, being relative creatures, have only a relative perception and judgment. We appreciate that which is true to ourselves, not that which is universally true. And truth may well assume an aspect to one different from that it assumes to another. When two men stand face to face, the right of one is the left of the other, and vice versa. The rising sun in one hemisphere is the setting sun in the other; the zenith of one is the nadir of the other; when one hemisphere is enjoying day the other is steeped in darkness. The winterof the arctic regions is the summer of the antarctic pole. The descent of one scale is the ascent of the other. In a word, everything in the world is inverse. 1 Truth, O God, is Thy body. When we talk to English children of the antipodes, they think that the men there walk with their heads downwards; and to New Zealanders we ourselves are reversed. This is at once true and false for each. True, if each c...