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real experience. Sometimes we get a long way from such experience

in abstract thinking. We keep building one set of relations upon

another, trying with all our powers, meanwhile, to keep these rela-

tions true among themselves, much as one might work out the orbit of

a comet, but at last the test is whether things in experience stand back

of the true relations whether the comet can be really found in this

orbit.

When Hoffding says: "The evidence of reality is given, then

* * * in the firm connection of percepts. We can never be so strongly

convinced of the reality of single things and occurrences, as of con-

nected series of things and occurrences," he has confused reality and

truth. Compared with the earlier statement quoted above, the incon-

gruity appears grotesquely. He said that, 'in spite of all effort' we

'can't help' recognizing reality, and that there can be no question of

any other than this subjective criterion, and now he proposes to add

to this once-for-all reality greater reality by multiplying relations.

But this is just the difference between truth and reality. Reality,

once realized, can by no possibility be improved upon or made more

real, while, on the contrary, truth grows more certain the more nearly

all known relations are found to cohere with the given relation.

It is not meant by this, of course, that the truth increases with the

number of instances, as in the common logical fallacy, but truth be-

comes more convincing the greater the scope of interaction discovered.

The truth that all Felida? are carnivorous is not greatly increased by

observing one cat repeatedly to eat meat nor by seeing that one kind

of cat always eats meat, but the finding that a different species of

animal combines feline dentition with a carnivorous habit adds greatly

to the evidence by proving that certain combinations are non-essential

and throwing into prominence the organic or genetic relations.

Bosanquet seems to state the law of reality in the definition:

'Logic treats of the mental construction of reality,' ' the world which

surround him is there only as an idea, i. e., only in relation to some-

thing else, the consciousness which is himself.' But immediately and,

indeed as in duty bound (his subject being logic) he proceeds to dis-

cuss the true. For him the objective world is 'what we are con-

strained to think in order to make our consciousness consistent with

itself.' In other words, reality consists in consistence of relations,

which is precisely truth. Logic might be defined as the science of

truth.

Perhaps the discrimination of reality from truth may even help in

the much discussed problem of the subjective and objective. For ex-

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