Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/306

Rh meaning for us are determined solely by what ideas of our own are in question. Or, again, empirical judgments, as such, are always particular. Hence, they never by themselves absolutely confirm, or refute, all that our ideas mean. And what they confirm, or refute, depends upon what questions have been asked from the side of our internal meanings.

The empirical facts can, indeed, refute, and they very often do refute, abstractly stated universal judgments, by showing particular cases that contradict these judgments. But they can never show, by themselves, that the ideas in question have no application, anywhere, in yonder externally valid world, but only that in some case just these ideas fail. Hence, unless I have ideally chosen to stake my all upon a single throw of the dice of “external experience,” I am not logically “crushed” by the particular experience that this time disappoints me. If my internal meaning takes, for instance, the form of a plan of external action, I can, if this time defeated, “try again”; and the human will has in all ages shown its power not to be crushed by any particular experience, unless its ideas determine that it ought to accept the defeat. Ideas can be quite as stubborn as any particular facts, can outlast them, and often, in the end, abolish them. Even if the internal meaning is a merely imitative conception, that, like a scientific hypothesis, was solely intended to portray the nature of the external fact, then the empirical failure of the hypothesis, in a given instance, shows, indeed, that it is not universally valid as regards yonder external world of finally valid fact, but does not show that it is universally invalid.