Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/465

 ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY. 451 imaginary, we could hardly assert the existence of any and every truth as an actual fact. On the other hand, whatever we might protest, we feel and know that truth somewhere must be real. Nay, even in the practical relation of desire and will, ideas are felt somehow to be real. Their reality in collision with their non-existence indeed makes the con- flict in which we suffer. We suffer there most where most we feel that the idea has reality superior to the existence which excludes it. Our will is moved by, and it unawares insists on, the reality in another world of that idea which it brings here into fact. The star that I desire does not wander outcast and naked in the void. My heart is drawn to it because it inhabits that heaven which is felt at once to be its own and mine. In the end and taken absolutely (to repeat this) there can be no mere idea. Eeality is always before us, and every idea in some sense qualifies the real. So far as excluded it is excluded only from some limited region, and beyond that region has its world. To float in the absolute sense is im- possible. Flotation means attachment to another world, a world other than that sphere which for any purpose we take here as solid ground and as fact. Now the region which we oppose to fact may be a distinct world, or may be a residue more or less unspecified. It may be this or that province of the ideal, or it may be no more than the undefined space which falls beyond what we distinguish as fact. But the province, or the mere residual space or vague background, is still reality felt as positive, and to this reality the idea is bound. 1 We may deal rapidly with the position of the idea in im- peratives and questions. The nature of an imperative has been already discussed in a previous number of MIND (N.S., No. 49, pp. 4 and 5), and we need not enter on that general topic. But with regard to reality it is with the idea here as in the practical relation generally. The idea, ordered to exist in our world, qualifies already the world of ideas and has reality there. The same thing holds again in interroga- tives. In a question we have some known aspect of reality before us which we regard, at least here, as actual fact. We have next the suggestion of an idea, more or less specified or again undefined, which we assume to be somehow con- nected with our known fact. We have finally a demand for further knowledge in this direction. The demand is addressed 1 The idea again may be excluded from the subject taken simply and in itself, or again from the subject taken merely as so far known. The negation in the latter sense may, if we please, be called privative.