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TEST OF TRUTH AND ERROR 109 plementary aspects of a comprehensive theory. The first
requisite of such a theory is the independent existence of a
world of objects. If there were no such world, there would be
no ground for the distinction between truth and falsehood.
Some of our beliefs are true or false according as they are or
are not borne out by independent objects or facts. It is
because there are certain independent objects, to which our
beliefs may or may not conform, that we distinguish between
truth and error. Hence we say that truth consists in the corres-
pondence of our knowledge with independent objects or facts.
The difficulty on this view, it is generally remarked, is that if
the objects are independent of knowledge, we cannot know
whether our knowledge corresponds with them or not. How
can we know what is outside and beyond knowledge, and see
that true knowledge agrees with it? The reply to this is
that in the case of external objects, physical things and other
minds, we cannot straightway know the correspondence between
our knowledge and its objects. Still, we cannot deny the reality
of these external objects. But for the independent existence
of other things and minds we cannot explain the order and uni-
formity of our experiences and the similarity of the experiences
that different individuals may have under similar circumstances.
That some of our experiences represent the real qualities of
things may then be known from the fact that they are given in
the same way to different persons, or to the same persons
through different senses. As Professor Price has shown,
sense-data cohere together in families, and families are co-
incident with physical occupants."" On the other hand, some
of our experiences are not taken to represent the qualities of
things, because they do not cohere with other experiences of
the same individual or of different individuals. The first kind
of experiences is considered to be true and objective, while
the second is judged to be false and subjective. Similarly,
our knowledge of other minds is true when it correctly represents
"
1 Cf. Perception, p. 302.
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