Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/494

 478 J. H. MUIRHEAD : II. Without stopping to dwell upon this, 1 we may go on to notice in the second place the mode in which the ideal under these two aspects of all-embraciveness and complete con- sistency operates in actual experience. The question deserves more careful consideration than I can here afford to give it, but I must not pass it wholly over. The answer in general is that it operates like any other ideal. The dynamical efficiency of an idea, that which transforms it from a mere idea in the mind into an end or an ideal, is the felt discord between it and the actually existing fact. In his little book on the Psychology of the Moral Self Mr. Bosanquet has some observations on the question how our ideas can in- clude not only facts but purposes, which may assist us here. He points out that they can become purposes by being recog- nised as only conditionally true. A purpose is always relative to actual facts ; an ideal is always based upon some reality. It stands to that reality as an appercipient group (e.g., the group corresponding to a penknife) does to the actual presen- tation (e.g., the penknife in my desk). The ideal is only realised when the actual thing comes up to the idea of it. My penknife is rather a broken-down affair ; until I have it cleaned up and sharpened my idea is only conditionally true. Facing the penknife as it is, there is the idea of w T hat the penknife ought to be ready when the contrast becomes too painful to rise into an actual purpose to take it to the cutler or replace it with a new one. Before turning to the question before us we may notice that while the above mode of expression is undoubtedly the right one from the point of view of psychology, from the point of view of teleology we may prefer to reverse it. Here we have to recognise that the ideal is the truth of the actual. The source of dissatis- faction, and therefore of action, is that the actual is not true. It fails of truth and reality because it falls short of the features that the persistent idea or appercipient system contains. The reality of the knife is its suitability to its purpose ; so far as it is unsuitable it fails to be a knife. In taking it to the cutler's I restore this reality to it. Applying this to the ideal of knowledge, the actual fact here, of course, is a concept or group of concepts ; the per- sistent idea is the idea of these concepts rendered internally harmonious in the manner we have described. This ideal 1 For fuller details see the excellent sections in Hobhouse's Theory of Knowledge, pt. iii., c. 6, init.