A single thought has no limit to its value; a thought, properly speaking, - that is a truth held not from any man’s saying so, or any accidental benefit or recommendation it has in our trade or circumstance, but because we have perceived it is a fact in the nature of things, and in all times and places will and must be the same thing, - is of inestimable value.
Are not all thoughts like this? Are not all thoughts true in and of themselves, not because any person says that they are? It is this quality of thought that gives it its value. All thoughts are true. It is only if we insist on a strict representational role for language that we run into problems. If we insist that Lloyd George[1] must be alive, in London, and asleep at this moment for the phrase “Lloyd George is sleeping in London” to be true, then we will have difficulty with the idea that all thoughts are true. Emerson’s claim goes to a deeper level. It does not depend on any specific reference, but on the ability of thought, and thus language, to act in a referential way. It is not important that at this moment Lloyd George is not alive and is not sleeping in London, but that there was, or at least could be, a time when Lloyd George was asleep in London. This thought bears the type of truth of which Emerson speaks because it has the capability to refer to a condition of the world in which Lloyd George is asleep in London. When you reflect on it, this is a truly amazing property of thought. We take it for granted, but there is no reason that our thought should be like this. Our thoughts could have no relationship to our world of experience. In fact, there are people whose thought is like this, having no, or at best a distorted relationship to the world that most of us experience. Schizophrenics are perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon.
From these considerations, we see that we can divide the property of thoughts into two classes. There are those properties that emerge when a specific thought or chain of thoughts has a direct connection with our experience of an event in the world. This is not the property that Emerson is referring to when he speaks of the truth of a thought. The other property of thoughts is their ability to reference events in the world, whether those events are true in the first sense or not. This is the deeper meaning of the truth of thought. It is the intensive, inner meaning of thought. Without this quality, there would be no possibility of thought being true in the first sense.
[1] David Lloyd George (1863 – 1945) was the first and only British Prime Minister of Welsh ancestry, and the last Liberal to hold the office.
This page is the commentary on Page 35