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Concept
De Veritate
Summary
De Veritate, prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso is the major work of Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury. He published it in 1624 on the advice of Grotius.
De Veritate combines a theory of knowledge with a partial psychology, a methodology for the investigation of truth, and a scheme of natural religion. The author's method is prolix and often far from clear; the book is no compact system, but it contains the skeleton and much of the soul of a complete philosophy. Giving up all past theories as useless, Herbert professedly endeavours to constitute a new and true system. Truth, which he defines as a just conformation of the faculties with one another and with their objects, he distributed into four classes or stages:
truth in the thing or the truth of the object;
truth of the appearance;
truth of the apprehension (conceptus);
truth of the intellect.
The faculties of the mind are as numerous as the differences of their objects, and are accordingly innumerable; but they may be arranged in four groups. The first and fundamental and most certain group is the Natural Instinct, to which belong the notitiae communes, which are innate, of divine origin and indisputable. The second group, the next in certainty, is the sensus internus (under which head Herbert discusses amongst others love, hate, fear, conscience with its communis notitia, and free will); the third is the sensus externus; and the fourth is discursus, reasoning, to which, as being the least certain, we have recourse when the other faculties fail. The ratiocinative faculties proceed by division and analysis, by questioning, and are slow and gradual in their movement; they take aid from the other faculties, those of the instinctus naturalis being always the final test. Herbert's categories or questions to be used in investigation are ten in number whether (a thing is), what, of what sort, how much, in what relation, how, when, where, whence, wherefore. No faculty, rightly used, can err "even in dreams"; badly exercised, reasoning becomes the source of almost all our errors.
Official source
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