The contrast thus drawn is, however, wrongly made. If we have regard to the mental processes themselves, both perceiving and thinking are temporal occurrences, dependent upon temporal conditions, and temporal determinations may be represented by means of thought no less than by means of perception. On the other hand, if we have regard to the content apprehended in each case, no such contrast can be constituted. A content per ceived is, no less than a content thought, qua content, outside the region of temporal flux and change. Nothing can alter it, for the simple reason that it is not an existent entity that can be operated on, acted on, or affected in any manner whatsoever.
Broad (The Mind and its Place in Nature, p. 18) distinguishes between what he calls "abstracta" and "existents." In the first place, an existent can be referred to in a proposition only as a logical subject, although some abstracta share this property with existents. In the second place, however, all existents are either directly and literally in time, or at least appear to human minds to be so, while abstracta, on the other hand, neither are nor appear to be directly and literally in time. And under the head of "ab stracta" he includes qualities, relations, numbers, and also proposi tions and classes, if there be such entities.
Reality, then, is a much wider and more fundamental category than existence ; all existents must be real but not all that is real exists. And it is convenient to employ the term subsistence in speaking of those entities which are real but which do not exist. Moreover, the term "subsistents" is more appropriate than Broad's term "abstracta," because there are, as we have seen, some enti ties, such as sensible appearances, which are not existents, but which may yet not be suitably designated "abstracta." It is obvi ous that some subsistents are very closely connected with existents and thereby become indirectly connected with time. A universal may, for example, change in its relation to conscious minds. It will be thought of at one time and not at another, and may thus be in relation to many minds or to few at the same time. It can, again, change in respect to the particular existents it is said to qualify or relate. The characteristic of being crimson may apply to a particular rose at one time and not at another. But the nature of a universal does not change, nor can its relation to another universal, except as involving one of the relations mentioned to a particular.
Passing now to what we ordinarily describe as truth in employ ing such a phrase as that mathematics is a body of truths or that philosophy is an effort to grasp the truth of things, it is clear that, however we may define the term "truth," we do not mean by it anything to which the term existence is applicable. In refer ence to existent entities, we have seen reason for concluding that they are not dependent either for their existence or their charac teristic qualities upon the circumstance of being perceived or known. But are we also entitled to say that the being and nature of truth is likewise independent of its being known? That is a difficult question, about which great difference of opinion prevails. One thing, however, can be definitely asserted. Truth does not depend upon its being known by individual human minds. Truth has a nature of its own to which our individual thinking must conform or fail to grasp it. By our thinking we can neither make nor alter truth; we may come to recognise it, but we cannot in vent it; and its nature is unaffected by the circumstance that at a particular time and under certain conditions it is acknowledged by us. The truth that 2 + 2 = 4 would subsist even though there were no human minds to know it.
What, then, is the relation of truth to concrete existing fact? The question concerns not all truth, for obviously there may be truth that has no reference to anything which either has existed or does exist or will exist. But it does concern a very large por tion of what we may describe as the whole of truth. The answer
of those thinkers who have recognised the distinction between truth and existence has usually been that there is a correspon dence between these two realms of being, that a proposition is true when it corresponds to the "facts," or that a scientific theory is true when it corresponds to the nature of the things in reference to which it is asserted to hold. And that a correspondence of some sort does obtain between the truth about existent facts and the existent facts themselves may be accepted as indispu table. To determine the exact character of the correspondence may well be, however, a task beyond our power of accomplishing. Certainly, truth is no mere likeness of reality, there is no "one one" correspondence between them. The order and connection of truths is not the same as the order and connection of things. In the realm of concrete existence there are no connections of which the purely logical connections of general and particular, of ground and consequent are precise parallels. The subordination of notion to notion, for example, in a logical scheme of classi fication has no strict counterpart in the actual structure and de velopment of things. To use Lotze's illustration, "this horse was not to begin with animal in general, then vertebrate in general, later on mammal, and only at the last stage of all, horse; nor can we at any moment of its life separate off as an independent set of qualities the more fully defined group of properties which make it a horse from the more general and less determinate which would make it a vertebrate, or from those most indeterminate of all which would merely constitute it an animal as such." Yet to set aside a crude conception of that sort is in no way to undermine what is known as the "correspondence theory." In order to justify the theory, it is not necessary that we should be in a posi tion to formulate the precise kind of correspondence here involved. It may be questioned whether there is any real incompatibility between the correspondence theory of truth and the view of truth as systematic coherence. The latter is the conception of truth as a significant whole, and, in the long run, it is not between tits of truth and isolated facts of reality. but between the whole of truth and the whole of reality that correspondence would need to evince itself. From the point of view of human intelligence, the conception of a whole of truth is an ideal; and, although nothing in our partial knowledge answers precisely to the demands of such an ideal, yet it would seem to be essentially involved. By taking typical instances of true judgment, and asking what their truth virtually implies, it may be shown that any such judg ment expands into a system of wider scope, a process which evi dently can reach no terminus save that of a system at once self contained and all-embracing. Every item of truth tends, so to speak, to open out and to be absorbed into a completer truth, and that tendency is the expression of the ideal struggling in it for self-fulfilment. When, for example, a fragmentary truth is ab sorbed into such a body of truth as we call a science, it does not retain the identical character which it possessed per se; it loses in large measure its fragmentariness, and gains in richness of mean ing through its relation with the rest of the whole of which it has become a part. And whenever what purports to be a truth refuses to fit into such a coherent system it at once awakens suspicion as to its claim. But the truth can only form a coherent system in so far as the constituents of that system are truths. If truths and existent entities be indiscriminately mingled, and these be supposed to be related to one another in a way similar to that in which either of them are related among themselves, no coherence will disclose itself. And that is an error which has not seldom been committed in expositions of the theory in question. For metaphysics doubtless a vast problem is thus created, that, namely, of so conceiving the whole of reality as to render intelli gible the presence in it of these two subordinate and correlative systems; but nothing but confusion can result from attempting to amalgamate them by introducing into the one conditions which determine the coherence of the other.