A Case of Missing Integrity
Lord Peter Wimsey, that aristocratic and debonair sleuth, once remarked that “The first thing a principle does is to get someone killed.” He said so in the middle of Dorothy Sayer’s delightful book Gaudy Night, which, aside from being an entertaining mystery story is a book about intellectual integrity. What he meant was this: the moment you take up and hold an absolute truth, you have chosen one side of an irrevocable divide—you have stepped over a line in the sand. If they should kill you for it, it does not make the principle any less true. All things contradicting this truth are seen to be necessarily wrong, by that fundamental rule of reason that no one yet has ever successfully gotten around: “A thing cannot both be and not be, in the same respect and at the same time.” It’s called the Principle of Non-contradiction, if you want to be formal, but it is a thing so monumentally simple that children know it from the dawn of reason. Daddy has either got jelly-beans in his coat pocket or he has not, and it is of vital importance to know the truth of the matter, because there are no two ways about it.
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