Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/290

Rh tures, thereby enriching our internal meanings. But the act of judgment has always its other — its objective aspect. The ideas, when we judge, are also to possess external meanings. If we try to sunder the external meaning from the internal, as we have so far done, we find then that weaving the ideas into new structures is a mere incident of the process whereby we regard them as standing for the valid Reality, as characterizing what their object is. It is true, as Mr. Bradley has well said, that the intended subject of every judgment is Reality itself. The ideas that we combine when we judge about external meanings are to have value for us as truth only in so far as they not only possess internal meaning, but also imitate, by their structure, what is at once Other than themselves, and, in significance, something above themselves. That, at least, is the natural view of our consciousness, just in so far as, in judging, we conceive our thought as essentially other than its external object, and as destined merely to correspond thereto. Now we have by this time come to feel how hard it is to define the Reality to which our ideas are thus to conform, and about which our judgments are said to be made, so long as we thus sunder external and internal meanings.

Yet, for the instant, we must still continue to do so. We must, so to speak, “absent us from felicity awhile,” and in this world of merely internal and disappointed meanings, whose true objects are still far beyond, and whose only overt law is so far the law of correspondence to those objects — in this “harsh world,” I say, we must “draw our breath in pain,” until the real truth shall become manifest, and take the place of these forms which