Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/245

226 sense his free creation. In another sense it is a world where that comes to light which he, in his private capacity, had neither intended nor anticipated. In that world he can long go astray, can hold false views as to his own creations, and, just as if he were working in a laboratory, can have these views set right by the outcome of further carefully planned experience, whose instruction he submissively awaits as if he were in no sense the creator of any object present. Like any other student of Real Being, he observes and experiments. The nature with which he deals is at once ideal and eternal, at once rigid and free. The most surprising analogies are often discovered linking together its most widely sundered and seemingly independent regions. The mathematician too has his news of the day, his unexpected events, his fortune, so to speak, even in the realm of a Being that explicitly is only in so far as it is conceived.

Plainly, then, the realm of Validity has a good many persuasively ontological characters. When we enter it, we need not come as sceptics or as mere victims of fantasy. What we there learn is that constructive imagination has its own rigid and objective constitution, precisely in so far as its processes unite freedom with clear consciousness.

And so, as we saw, it is possible, at least by way of trial, to undertake to define Being wholly in terms of validity, to conceive that whoever says, of any object, It is, means only that a certain idea, — perhaps an idea suggested by passing experience, perhaps the thought of an empirically discovered law in a natural science,