Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/276

 262 CRITICAL NOTICES : (p. 274). It follows from this that universal judgments can never fully attain the end with which they set out. Taken by them- selves, they can only tell us " what external Reality is not ". Now what we want to know is what external Eeality is. But our negative judgments could only give us this if they exhausted all possible alternatives. And this is a task which is " not only endless, but hopeless " (p. 279). In particular judgments, indeed, we get positive assertions about Eeality. But then no particular judgments will ever enable us to determine an individual as individual. We can never, by means of them, know an object so that we can know it to be absolutely unique in the universe. That is, we cannot determine it completely. But " the Other that we seek is that which, if found, would determine our ideas to their final truth. Now only what is finally determinate can, in its turn, determine. . . . Who- ever should try, as, in fact, our Third Conception of Being seems to try, to define the world of Being in terms exclusive of individu- ality, seems forced to say, ' The final fact is that there is no individual fact, or, in other words, that there is no unique Being at all, but only a type ; so that the Being with which our thoughts are to correspond does not determine the "mere ideas" to any single and unique correspondence with itself, but leaves them finally indeterminate '. But is the Veritas that is thus left us any Veritas at all '? Is not the very expression used self-contradictory ? Can the absence of finality be the only final fact?" (pp. 295, 296). The point raised in the questions with which this extract con- cludes would have repaid, I venture to suggest, further treatment. It has been held, by thinkers who cannot lightly be passed over, that universal and particular judgments, in all their relative in- definiteness, are, nevertheless, the ultimate truth. A refutation of this view seems necessary, if Dr. Eoyce's position is to be maintained and no one is better qualified than Dr. Eoyce to give one. We now pass to consider Truth as the Correspondence between any Idea and its Object. This correspondence, as the author points out with admirable clearness, depends on the purpose which we entertain in using the idea. " The idea is true if it possesses the sort of correspondence to its object that the idea itself wants to possess. Unless that kind of identity in inner structure between idea and object can be found which the specific purpose embodied in a given idea demands the idea is false (p. 306). Again "the idea intends to attain this correspondence to some particular object not to any object you please, not to whatever happens to correspond to the ideal construction in question, but to a determined object. The determination of what object is meant, is, therefore, certainly again due, in one aspect, to the internal meaning of the idea. No one else can determine for me what object I mean by my idea.