Validity. I do not simply mean by this term that, for

working purposes, our judgments are admissible and will

pass. I mean that less or more they actually possess the

character and type of absolute truth and reality. They

can take the place of the Real to various extents,

because containing in themselves less or more of its

nature. They are its representatives, worse or

better, in proportion as they present us with truth

affected by greater or less derangement. Our judgments

hold good, in short, just so far as they agree with, and

do not diverge from, the real standard. We may put it

otherwise by saying that truths are true, according as

it would take less or more to convert them into reality.

We have perceived, so far, that truth is relative and

always imperfect. We have next to see that, though

failing of perfection, all thought is to some degree

true. On the one hand it falls short of, and, on the

other hand at the same time, it realizes the standard.

But we must begin by enquiring what this standard is.

Perfection of truth and of reality has in the end the

same character. It consists in positive, self-subsisting

individuality; and I have endeavoured to show, in

Chapter xx., what individuality means. Assuming that the

reader has recalled the main points of that discussion,

I will point out the two ways in which individuality

appears. Truth must exhibit the mark of internal

harmony, or, again, the mark of expansion and all-

inclusiveness. And these two characteristics are diverse

aspects of a single principle. That which contradicts

itself, in the first place, jars, because the whole,

immanent within it, drives its parts into collision. And

the way to find harmony, as we have seen, is to re-

distribute these discrepancies in a wider arrangement.

But, in the second place, harmony is incompatible with

restriction and finitude. For that which is not all-

inclusive must by virtue of its essence internally

disagree; and, if we reflect, the reason of this becomes

plain. That which exists in a whole has external

relations. Whatever it fails to include within its own

nature, must be related to it by the whole, and related

externally. Now these extrinsic relations, on the one

hand, fall outside of itself, but, upon the other hand,

cannot do so. For a relation must at both ends

affect, and pass into, the being of its terms. And hence

the inner essence of what is finite itself both is, and

is not, the relations which limit it. Its nature is

hence incurably relative, passing, that is, beyond

itself, and importing, again, into its own core a mass

of foreign connections. Thus to be defined from without

is, in principle, to be distracted within. And, the

smaller the element, the more wide is this dissipation

of its essence--a dissipation too thorough to be deep,

or to support the title of an intestine division. But, on the contrary,

the expansion of the element should increase harmony,

for it should bring these external relations within the

inner substance. By growth the element becomes, more and

more, a consistent individual, containing in itself its

own nature; and it forms, more and more, a whole

inclusive of discrepancies and reducing them to system.

The two aspects, of extension and harmony, are thus in

principle one, though (as we shall see later) for our

practice they in some degree fall apart. And we must be

content, for the present, to use them independently.

Hence to be more or less true, and to be more or less

real, is to be separated by an interval, smaller or

greater, from all-inclusiveness or self-consistency. Of

two given appearances the one more wide, or more

harmonious, is more real. It approaches nearer to a

single, all-containing, individuality. To remedy its