Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/537

521 precision of its outlines, is well suggested by Browning when he says: All that I know of a certain star Is, it can throw, like the angled spar, Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue, Till my friends have said they would fain see too, My star that dartles the red and the blue.

Then it stops like a bird, like a flower hangs furled— They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world! Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it."

The "Saturn," the star in the external world, exists, you see, for all beholders. It is a world, with its own definable characters. But the star of the inner world,—that has a right to its own incommunicably mysterious love-colors and sweet caprices. To what star the poet thus allegorically referred, one easily guesses. But in any case he spoke of a contrast between some object in the world of outer or verifiable fact, and an object as known in and through the world of the heart. Both objects are real; but one has, as an essential mark of its externality, the note of publicity, the other exists for one, and is therefore free to be capriciously and indescribably lovely.

Let me illustrate the same principles through another familiar example. Charles Renouvier, in his Logic, makes a good deal of the "principle of determinateness" as a principle a priori for whatever in the world is to be accepted as independently or externally real. Whatever is, must be determinate; this is the principle which Renouvier employs in his own criticism of naive realism. He applies it later in the definition of his views of the phenomenal world. He employs it as a foundation for his well-known onslaught upon the existence of really infinite magnitudes and aggregates. An infinite number would be an essentially indeterminate number—a number that is neither n nor n+1 nor n-1, nor n±r, where n and r are