Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/300

Rh realm of the ideas viewed as internal meanings, you see, indeed, that they are constantly becoming enriched, in their inner life, by all this process. Take your thinking merely as that which is to correspond to an external Other, and then, indeed, your universal judgments tell you only what this Other is not, and leave, as what it is, merely some of the possibilities still undestroyed. But view the internal meaning of thought as a life for itself, and revel in the beautiful complexities of a mathematical, or other rationally constructed realm of inner expressions of your thoughtful purposes; and then, indeed, you seem to have found a positive constitution of an universe that, alas! is, after all, as contrasted with those “external facts,” to be regarded only as a shadowland. “Is it really so yonder?” you say. Is namely the positive aspect of all this construction present in that world? Your universal judgments cannot tell. To take, again, the simplest case: To know, by inner demonstration, that 2 + 2 = 4, and that this is necessarily so, is not yet to know that the so-called “external world,” taken merely as the Beyond, contains any true or finally valid variety of objects at all, any two or four objects that can be counted. That you must learn otherwise, namely, of course, by what is usually called “external experience” of that outer world. On the other hand, so far as your internal meaning goes, to have seen for yourself, to have experienced within, that which makes you call this judgment necessary, is, indeed, to have observed a character about your own ideas which rightly seems to you very positive. So, then, universal judgments and reasonings appear to be of positive interest in the realm