The expounders as well as the critics of analytic logic have agreed that it reaches its most critical junction when it faces the problem of truth and error. There is no doubt that the logic of objective idealism, in other respects so similar to analytic logic, has at this point an advantage; for it retains just enough of the finite operation of knowing--an "infinitesimal" part will answer--to furnish the culture germs of error. But analytic logic having completely sterilized itself against this source of infection is in serious difficulty.
Here again it is Professor Holt who has the courage to follow--or shall we say "behold"?--his theory as it "generates" the doctrine that error is a given objective opposition of forces entirely independent of any such thing as a process of inquiry and all that such a process presupposes. "All collisions between bodies, all inference between energies, all process of warming and cooling, of starting and stopping, of combining and separating, all counterbalancings, as in cantilevers and gothic vaultings, are contradictory forces which can be stated only in propositions that manifestly contradict each other."[31] But the argument proves too much. For in the world of forces to which we have here appealed there is no force which is not opposed by others and no particle which is not the center of opposing forces. Hence error is ubiquitous. In making error objective we have made all objectivity erroneous. We find ourselves obliged to say that the choir of Westminster Abbey, the Brooklyn bridge, the heads on our shoulders are all supported by logical errors!
Following these illustrations of ontological contradictions there is indeed this interesting statement: "Nature is so full of these mutually negative processes that we are moved to admiration when a few forces coöperate long enough to form what we call an organism."[32] The implication is, apparently, that as an "opposition" of forces is error, "coöperation" of forces is truth. But what is to distinguish "opposition" from "coöperation"? In the illustration it is clear that opposing forces--error--do not interfere with coöperative forces--truth. Where should we find more counterbalancing, more starting and stopping, warming and cooling, combining and separating than in an organism? And if these processes can be stated only in propositions that are "manifestly contradictory," are we to understand that truth has errors for its constituent elements? Such paradoxes have always delighted the soul of absolute idealism. But, as we have seen, only the veil of an infinitesimal finitude intervenes between the logic of the objective universal of absolute idealism and the objective logic of analytic realism.