Truth is not halfway between anything

 "All vistas close in the unseen – no one doubts it – but Helen closed them rather too quickly for her taste. At every turn of speech one was confronted with reality and the absolute. Perhaps Margaret grew too old for metaphysics, perhaps Henry was weaning her from them, but she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily shreds the visible. The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see, dear; it’s about halfway between,” Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility."

– E. M. Forster , Howard’s End (1910), Chapter 23

HT: Myrtias (I am grateful for bloggers who stop blogging, but retain content online)

Comments

[Jeremy Pierce]

Isn't it sometimes true, though?

If I say 1+1 is 3, and you say it's 1, then the truth is halfway between what we each said.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

[JohnFH]

Hi Jeremy,

There is also a sense in which the "golden mean" is a reasonable goal in some areas of life and thought. Adherence to it nonetheless is often an index of mediocrity.