A Plea for the Half-Truth

“ THE average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed.” So Stephenson wrote in a little essay on “ Books which have Influenced Me,” one of the most illuminating and helpful of all his delightful writings. But why the average man, only? We are all creatures of a very limited content. Even the wisest cannot assimilate much truth at once, and by most of us truth needs to be taken only in homœopathic doses. As the baby requires small portions of food taken regularly to keep it in good condition, and too much food is far worse for it (and causes more sickness) than too little, so the mind and soul of man need little bits of truth to feed upon, to furnish necessary strength and stimulus for growth and useful work; and these little bits need to be half-truths, not whole ones. Half-truths, you say: why not little whole truths, small, but each one perfect?

Truth is like a circle-symbol of the infinite, and returns upon itself. To surround and grasp a whole truth, mentally, is to secure inspiration for work in many different and apparently contrary directions. What we need is the half-truth, perhaps the quartertruth; not the whole, but only so much of truth as furnishes us dynamic force for progress in a given direction. A great whole truth touched off within our minds all at once would be indeed a gunpowder charge, destroying, not invigorating, our powers. What both the individual and society need is the generation of just enough power to drive them around the circle— really an ascending spiral — gradually.

New half-truths, a few at a time, are necessary to supplement the old halftruths. When one round of life’s spiral is completed, we can look back upon the course traversed, and see the parttruths, that seemed once so mutually destructive that half of them must be false, harmonized and fitting perfectly into the completed, perfect truth. This is what upward progress means, and what human nature necessitates. “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” When all is finished we behold at last the many segments, the many shining facets of truth, and know our old opponents — teachers of most dangerous errors as we used to think — possessed of that knowledge of the other side of truth necessary to complete and harmonize our own. So the conservative and the radical fight mightily for their half-truths, because the half-truth possesses and inspires them fully. Possessed of both halves, progress would seem hopeless. The forces urging in one direction would be negatived by the forces urging in a contrary direction, and nothing would be accomplished. As men are constituted, upward progress to higher truth results from the over-emphasis of halftruths, — first radicals, then conservatives contributing their share, — until, the errors mixed in with each halftruth to make a complete working programme being burned out in the fires of conflict, the complete, symmetrical whole truth emerges, fused out of its seeming broken and opposing parts.

“ ’T is a half-time” always in this world, when studying the present and its needs, “but time shall make it whole,” when we look back from the higher level over the historic pathway trod.

Fortunately, men’s minds are so constructed that they cannot, if they would, take in whole truths all at once. This is our salvation. The half-truth is our present strength and dynamic inspiration; the whole truth is our complete reward, when the work is done.