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TRUTHS BUT
NO TRUTH: The fundamental reason why we can never arrive at 'the truth' about
the world is that there is no single truth, i.e. human truth, but an infinity of truths which, in their various
manifestations, correspond to the different life-forms contemplating them.
Thus we can divide earth truths, as it
were, into human, animal, reptile, bird, fish, insect, microbe, and vegetable,
and then again into the 'truths' appertaining to each individual species within
the overall pattern; though the 'truths' of the seven kinds of life beneath man
will be correspondingly smaller and more restricted, as befits organisms with a
much narrower range of knowledge. Then,
of course, one must bear in mind the possibility of diverse kinds of life
existing on other planets, if not in this solar system then at least in solar
systems that we presume to exist both elsewhere in the Galaxy, of which our sun
is only a minor star, and in the thousand million or so other galaxies
currently known to man via the world's most powerful telescopes.
Hence the universe of natural truths is
potentially so great, diverse, and exclusive ... as to completely defy any
attempt man might make to establish a categorical criterion of 'the truth'
based solely on the limited and necessarily partial perspective of human
cognition. For truth, as we here
understand it, is eternally relative, not absolute, and thereby confined to
being a record of the human mind.