Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/314

 300 JOHN DEWEY: meaning grows similarly in quality. But we cannot set up a rose, an object of fullest, complete and exhaustive content as that which is really meant by any and every odour of a rose, whether it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test of the cognitional rectitude of the odour lies in the specific object which it sets out to secure. This is the mean- ing of the statement that the import of each term is found in its relationship to other. It applies to object meant as well as to the meaning. Fulfilment, completion are always relative terms. Hence the criterion of the truth or falsity of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional thing lies within the relationships of the situation and not without. The thing that means another by means of an intervening operation either succeeds or fails in accomplishing the operation indicated, while this operation either gives or fails to give the object meant. Hence the truth or falsity of the original cogni- tional object. Let us return to the situation in which a smell is experi- enced to mean a certain fulfilment through an operation. Both the thing meaning and the thing meant are elements in the same situation. Both are present, but both are not present in the same way. In fact, one is present as-wo^-present-in- the-same-way-in-which-the-other-is. It is present as some- thing to be rendered present in the same way through the intervention of an operation. We must not balk at a purely verbal difficulty. It suggests a verbal inconsistency to speak of a thing present-as-absent. But all ideal contents, all aims (that is things aimed at) are present in just such fashion. Things can be presented as absent, just as they an be pre- sented as hard or soft, black or white, six inches or fifty rods away from the body. The assumption that an ideal content must be either totally absent, or else present in just the same fashion as it will be when it is realised, is not only dogmatic, but self-contradictory. The only way in which an ideal content can be experienced at all is to be presented as not- present-in-the-same-way in which something else is present, the latter kind of presence affording the standard or type of satisfactory presence. When present in the same way it ceases to be an ideal content. Not a contrast of bare exist- ence over against non-existence, or of present consciousness over against reality out of present consciousness, but of a satisfactory with an unsatisfactory mode of presence makes the difference between the ' really ' and the ' ideally ' present. In terms of our illustration, handling and enjoying the rose is presented, but it is not present in the same way that the smell is present. It is presented as going to be there in