Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 87

— Chap.

ACCEPTED USE OF THE WORD

I]

63

banish from our consciousness whatever represents existing things as other than they are. In a pregnant sense, as will be shown more at length in another place, truth stands over against falsehood. Even when truth is sought in order to

avoid or to combat an unintentional mistake, or an illusion

good faith or an inaccuracy which is the result of an insufficient investigation, there always is an antithesis which belongs to the nature of this conception. If there arisen in

were no falsehood conceivable, or mistake, illusion or inaccuracy, there would be no thirst after truth. The facts that science seeks after truth, and that truth is of supremest importance to it, do not state its fundamental thought, which is and always will be, the knowledge of what is, that it is, and how it is. And this effort assumes the form of "seeking after truth" only as far as, for the sake of discovering what

is, it has to dismiss all sorts of false repreIn such a state of things as is pictured by Revelation in the realm of glory, the desire to see and to know is

sentations.

through immediate percepwhile the antithesis between falsehood, mistake, illusion,

equally active tion

;

;

there, of course,

inaccuracy and truth shall

fall entirely

Subject and

§ 38.

away.

Object

In the conception of science the root-idea of be sharply maintained.

And

to kjioiv

the question arises

:

must

Who

is

and what is the object ? Each knows innumerable things which lie entirely outside

the subject of this knowledge, of us

of the realm of science. You know where you live and who your neighbors are. You know the names of your children and the persons in your employ. You know how much money you spend in a week. All this, however, as such, is no part of what science knows or teaches. Science is not

the sum-total of of

what A,

be this

what

A

knows, neither is it the aggregate The, subject of science cannot but must be man^mc? at large, or, if

B and C know.

man

or that,

you please, the human consciousness. And the content of knowledge already known by this human consciousness is so immeasurably great, that the most learned and the most

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