He had the idea that honesty was an objective value and so the direction in which it lay could always be made out. Honesty is the way that the soul in conversing with itself, or with another, collects its scattered powers and becomes more centred in itself. It is less about discovering unknown truths than about relinquishing fruitful errors, but what had always kept him drawn to it was an aesthetic quality, a kind of music that he perhaps would have given anything for, in spite of any falsehood. Objectivity was something else again, since if its distinction from subjectivity was intrinsic to experience this distinction was also reflective. This meant that there was always the beginning of a procedure for setting them apart. But one could have a prejudice in favour of the objective without this meaning that one had any instinct for truth, and much less honesty. As against his notion that growing honest was a matter of surrendering to a certain field of attraction - discovered perhaps in moving closer to death, where its distinctive music would begin to be heard - there was his experience that honesty was a fleeting phenomenon, like artistic beauty, and required the same peculiar combination of application and chance to come about. The very principle of errancy and scattering was intimate in a way that truth could never be.