Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/273

 JOSIAH ROYCE, The World and the Individual. 259 be the question: What is reality?" (p. 6). "Philosophy," he remarks, not only in Hegel's spirit, but very much in his manner, " necessarily involves a good deal of courage ; but so does life in general " (p. 7). " As for the tine-drawn distinctions and airy abstractions, no distinction is ever too subtle for you, at the mo- ment when it occurs to you to make that distinction for yourself, and not merely to hear that somebody else has made it. And no abstraction seems to you too airy in the hour when you rise upon your own wings to the region where just that abstraction happens to be an element in the concrete fulness of your intellectual life " (p. 8). With these words we get the key-note of the book. " I am one of those," the author proceeds " who hold that when you ask the question : What is an Idea ? and : How can Ideas stand in any true relation to Beality '? you attack the world-knot in the way that promises most for the untying of its meshes " (p. 16). Now ideas have two aspects. " An idea is any state of mind or complex of states, that, when present, is consciously viewed as the relatively completed embodiment, and therefore already as the partial fulfilment of a purpose " (p. 24). This purpose Dr. Eoyce calls the Internal Meaning of the Idea. But ideas " at least appear to have that other sort of meaning, that reference beyond themselves to objects, that cognitive relation to outer facts, that attempted correspondence with outer facts, which many accounts of our ideas regard as their primary, inexplicable, and ultimate character. I call this second, and, for me, still pro- blematic and derived aspect of the nature of ideas, their apparently External Meaning " (p. 26). The problem of the nature of Being will then take this form, " How is the internal meaning of ideas consistent with their ap- parently external meaning? " The solution of this may be found, we are told, " in the consideration that unless ideas first volun- tarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false,. . . that despite the seem- ingly hopeless contrast between internal and external meaning, ideas really possess truth or falsity only by virtue of their own selection of their own task as ideas " (p. 32). In the second lecture, we are told that there are four fundamental conceptions of Reality. The first is the Eealist conception. For it, " that is real which is simply Independent of the mere ideas that relate or that may relate to it ". " For the second " or Mysti- cal "conception, that is real which is absolutely and finally Im- mediate, so that when it is found, i.e., felt, it altogether ends any effort at ideal definition, and in this sense satisfies ideas as well as constitutes the fact." The third is the typical view of modern Critical Rationalism, for which " that is real which is purely and simply Valid or True." " But for the fourth conception, that is real which finally presents in a completed experience the whole