JESUS declared that the truth shall make us free; but there are unnumbered thousands of men and women throughout Christendom despairingly repeating the cry of Pilate of old, "What is truth?" It is evident, therefore, that somehow the world at large has not found the right way to truth. The world is filled with the complaint of the agnostic, who declares that he can affirm nothing and can deny nothing in respect to basic or ultimate truth; but in this initial statement agnosticism refutes itself, because the declaration that we can affirm nothing and can deny nothing is really an affirmation and a denial. It is an affirmation that truth is unknowable, and a denial that truth can be comprehended by mankind. This is a fatal contradiction at the very threshold of the so-called agnostic philosophy of negation. The philosophy of truth is a philosophy of affirmation, not one of negation.
What is the right way to find the truth becomes a question of transcendent importance when we discover that the world at large is struggling with these religious problems. In order to find out the right way to the truth it is very useful to find out why it is that so large a portion of mankind seems to be traveling along the wrong road to the truth, and why thereby the widespread infidelity, agnosticism, materialism, religious doubt and despair, altogether too much in evidence on all sides.
We find in an analysis of human reasoning that it is, in the last analysis, to be classified into two processes, one the inductive, the other the deductive. When we inspect the mode of reasoning which is most often employed we find that it is the inductive process, which does not and cannot lead us to ultimate or basic truth,—I mean thereby the truth which relates to man's true place in the universe, which relates to the being of God, to the relations between God and man, and to that dire problem in human belief which men have agreed to call the problem of evil.
