e matter, since it would contain no beliefs or
statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.

(3) But, as against what we have just said, it is to be observed that
the truth or falsehood of a belief always depends upon something which
lies outside the belief itself. If I believe that Charles I died on the
scaffold, I believe truly, not because of any intrinsic quality of my
belief, which could be discovered by merely examining the belief, but
because of an historical event which happened two and a half centuries
ago. If I believe that Charles I died in his bed, I believe falsely: no
degree of vividness in my belief, or of care in arriving at it, prevents
it from being false, again because of what happened long ago, and not
because of any intrinsic property of my belief. Hence, although truth
and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent
upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal
quality of the beliefs.

The third of the above requisites leads us to adopt the view--which has
on the whole been commonest among philosophers--that truth consists in
some form of correspondence between belief and fact. It is, however, by
no means an easy matter to discover a form of correspondence to which
there are no irrefutable objections. By this partly--and partly by the
feeling that, if truth consists in a correspondence of thought with
something outside thought, thought can never know when truth has been
attained--many philosophers have been led to try to find some definition
of truth which shall not consist in relation to something wholly outside
belief. The most important attempt at a definition of this sort is the
theory that truth consists in _coherence_. It is said that the mark of
falsehood is failure to cohere in the body of our beliefs, and that it
is the essence of a truth to form part of the completely rounded system
which is The Truth.

There is, however, a great difficulty in this view, or rather two great
difficulties. The first is that there is no reason to suppose that
only _one_ coherent body of beliefs is possible. It may be that, with
sufficient imagination, a novelist might invent a past for the world
that would perfectly fit on to what we know, and yet be quite different
from the real past. In more scientific matters, it is certain that there
are often two or more hypotheses which account for all the known facts
on some subject, and although, in such ca