Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/293

274 sible from any assertion about Being, and as completely as possible a judgment about “mere ideas.” “If wishes were horses, beggars might ride.” “If the bowl had been stronger, my tale had been longer.” “If a body were left undisturbed by any external cause, it would continue its state of rest, or of uniform motion, in a straight line unchanged.” Are not all these judgments about purely ideal objects, and not about Being, or about any real world? Where are wishes horses? When do beggars ride on their own steeds? When were the wise men of Gotham in the bowl? What real body moves undisturbed?

And yet, I answer, these are all of them judgments that, if they are true, do not indeed directly tell us what the world of valid Being actually and concretely contains, but do tell us what that real world does not contain. Indirectly, by limiting the range of valid possibilities, they thus throw light upon what the world does contain. Thus the First Law of Motion, as stated, tells us that there are no bodies which, although undisturbed by external causes, still move in lines not straight, and with velocities that vary. Hence, since the physical bodies observed by us turn out to be in motion, in various curves, and with varying velocities, we are directed to look for the causes hereof in the disturbances to which these bodies are subjected. So it is, also, in the other cases mentioned, in so far as these statements are true at all. In general, the judgment, “If A is B, C is D,” can be interpreted as meaning that there are, in the world of valid objects, no real cases where, at once, A is B, while at the same time C is nevertheless not D.