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If, on the other hand, it demands to be taken as generally valid, the possibility of a general truth is acknowledged from the start. If this one exception is granted, the whole illusory universe of relativism is overthrown. To deny any thought which is more than relative is to deprive even scepticism itself of the presuppositions on which it rests. The logical sceptic has no ego to doubt with.
Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason. Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.
We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration in order to go from that duration to moments, instead of starting from moments in order to bind them again and to construct duration. Yet it was to a non-temporal intuition that the immediate successors of Kant turned, in order to escape from the Kantian relativism.
Be that as it may, it is the confusion of two kinds of order that lies behind the relativism of the moderns, as it lay behind the dogmatism of the ancients. We have said enough to mark the origin of this confusion.
The former view is relativism, the latter is absolutism, in the matter of truth. Now, there can be no doubt that absolutism is more congenial to our natural prejudices. Accordingly it is the method tried first; but it soon conducts dogmatism to an awkward series of dilemmas. If there is absolute truth, who has it? and who can use the absolute criterion of opinions it is supposed to form?
In that case he would see the trees first as tall things and then as short things; he would see the clouds first as high and then as low. And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has written a very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees; and that here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague relativism. "The Food of the Gods" is, like Mr.
Such a system of thought reigns today virtually unchallenged across the planet, under the nominal designation “Western civilization”. Philosophically and politically, it presents itself as a kind of liberal relativism; economically and socially, as capitalism—two value systems that have now so adjusted to each other and become so mutually reinforcing as to constitute virtually a single, comprehensive world-view.
To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected into an absolute the factitious unity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or a relativism that universalizes and extends to all the results of science the artificial character of some among them.
Consequently, every real Knowledge has something sub specie aeternitatis as its essence, and this differentiates it from all mere relativism. The movement of History culminates alternately in Concentration on the one hand, and in Expansion on the other: Positive and Critical epochs alternate. Both aspects are necessary for the growth of life.
But to come to terms with relativism is to renounce the dogmatic attitude entirely, and to approach the problems of philosophy in a totally different spirit. It has been shown in the last chapter how urgent has become the problem of discriminating between the true and false among relative 'truths. For absolute truth has become a chimera, self-evidence an illusion, and intuition untrustworthy.
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