„The question of the truth of the determinations of thought must seem strange to ordinary consciousness, for these seem to acquire truth only in their application to given objects, and accordingly it would make no sense to ask after their truth apart from this application. But this is precisely the question that matters. For that, of course, one must know what is to be understood by truth. Ordinarily we call truth the agreement of an object with our representation. We have here as a presupposition an object with which our representation of it is supposed to accord. – In the philosophical sense, by contrast, truth means, expressed quite abstractly, the agreement of a content with itself. This is thus a quite different meaning of truth from the one mentioned before. Moreover, the deeper (philosophical) meaning of truth is in part already to be found in ordinary usage. Thus one speaks, for example, of a true friend, and understands by that one whose way of acting accords with the concept of friendship; likewise one speaks of a true work of art. Untrue then means as much as bad, inadequate in itself. In this sense a bad state is an untrue state, and the bad and untrue in general consists in the contradiction that obtains between the determination or the concept and the existence of an object. Of such a bad object we can form a correct representation, but the content of this representation is something in itself untrue. Of such correctnesses, which are at the same time untruths, we may have many in our heads. – God alone is the genuine agreement of concept and reality; all finite things, however, have an untruth about them: they have a concept and an existence, but one inadequate to their concept. For that reason they must perish, whereby the inadequacy of their concept and their existence is made manifest. The animal as a singular has its concept in its genus, and the genus frees itself from singularity through death.
The consideration of truth in the sense here explained, of agreement with itself, constitutes the proper interest of the logical. In ordinary consciousness the question of the truth of the determinations of thought does not arise at all. The business of logic may also be expressed by saying that in it the determinations of thought are considered in respect of how far they are capable of grasping the true. The question thus concerns which are the forms of the infinite and which the forms of the finite. In ordinary consciousness one suspects no harm in the finite determinations of thought and lets them pass without more ado. But all deception comes from thinking and acting according to finite determinations.“ (Encyclopaedia § 19, Addition 3)