Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/462

448 the common visible facts. And there are the regions of hope, desire and dream, madness and drunkenness and error, all 'unreal,' if you please, but all counting as elements in the total of reality. The various worlds of politics, commerce and invention and trade and manufacture, all again have their places. Above the sensible sphere rises the intellectual province of truth and science, and, more or less apart from this, the whole realm of the higher imagination. Both in poetry and in general fiction, and throughout the entire region of the arts and of artistic perception, we encounter reality. Things are here in various ways for us incontestable and valid, while in another sense of the word truth these things could not be called true. But this multiplicity of our worlds may perhaps be taken as a fact which is now recognised. The diversity and even the division of our various worlds is indefinite and in a sense is endless. And, without entering further into detail, I will state at once how this diversity bears on our problem. Because there are many worlds, the idea which floats suspended above one world is attached to another world. There are in short floating ideas, but not ideas which float absolutely. Every idea on the contrary is an adjective which qualifies a real world, and it is loose only when you take it in relation to another sphere of reality.

On the one side the whole Universe or the Absolute Reality is the subject to which in the end every idea is attached. On the other side (and this is the side on which we have to dwell here) the reality qualified by an idea depends always on a distinction. The subject in a judgment is never Reality in the fullest sense. It is reality taken, or meant to be taken, under certain conditions and limits. It is reality in short understood in a special sense. And hence when an idea, floats above, and is even repelled by, one region of the world, there is available always another region in which it inheres and to which as an adjective it is attached. And everywhere, where we seem to find ideas which float absolutely, we can discover the ground to which really they are fixed.

I will go on to point this out in a variety of instances, but, before proceeding, I must lay stress on an important distinction. If 'judgment' is used in its ordinary sense of explicit judgment, where we have a distinct predicate and subject taken one as applied to the other, then it certainly is true