sense, when we have acquaintance with the fact which corresponds to
the truth. When Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio, the
corresponding fact, if his belief were true, would be 'Desdemona's
love for Cassio'. This would be a fact with which no one could have
acquaintance except Desdemona; hence in the sense of self-evidence that
we are considering, the truth that Desdemona loves Cassio (if it were
a truth) could only be self-evident to Desdemona. All mental facts, and
all facts concerning sense-data, have this same privacy: there is only
one person to whom they can be self-evident in our present sense, since
there is only one person who can be acquainted with the mental things
or the sense-data concerned. Thus no fact about any particular existing
thing can be self-evident to more than one person. On the other hand,
facts about universals do not have this privacy. Many minds may be
acquainted with the same universals; hence a relation between universals
may be known by acquaintance to many different people. In all cases
where we know by acquaintance a complex fact consisting of certain terms
in a certain relation, we say that the truth that these terms are so
related has the first or absolute kind of self-evidence, and in these
cases the judgement that the terms are so related _must_ be true. Thus
this sort of self-evidence is an absolute guarantee of truth.

But although this sort of self-evidence is an absolute guarantee of
truth, it does not enable us to be _absolutely_ certain, in the case of
any given judgement, that the judgement in question is true. Suppose
we first perceive the sun shining, which is a complex fact, and thence
proceed to make the judgement 'the sun is shining'. In passing from
the perception to the judgement, it is necessary to analyse the given
complex fact: we have to separate out 'the sun' and 'shining' as
constituents of the fact. In this process it is possible to commit
an error; hence even where a _fact_ has the first or absolute kind of
self-evidence, a judgement believed to correspond to the fact is not
absolutely infallible, because it may not really correspond to the
fact. But if it does correspond (in the sense explained in the preceding
chapter), then it _must_ be true.

The second sort of self-evidence will be that which belongs to
judgements in the first instance, and is not derived from direct
perception of a fact as a single complex whole. This second kind of
self-evi