Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/308

Rh and appeal to what, for their current ideas, constitutes a relatively external realm of experience. When, believing that their own science, too, has become exact, the students of nature, in their turn, use universal judgments; they just as truly appeal, for their sole warrant, to internal meanings, as do the mathematicians when the latter think about universal truth.

As to these two types of judgment, the universal and the particular, they both, as we have seen, make use of experience. The one type, the universal judgments, arise in the realm where experience and idea have already fused into one whole; and this is precisely the realm of internal meanings. Here one constructs, and observes the consequences of one’s construction. But the construction is at once an experience of fact, and an idea; at once an expression of a purpose, and an observation of what happens. Upon the basis of such ideal constructions, one makes universal judgments. These, in a fashion still to us, at this stage, mysterious, undertake to be valid of that other world, — the world of external meanings, the realm that is said to be the Reality of which these ideas are the shadow and imitation. But every assertion of this sort implies that in verity the external and the internal meanings are not sundered, but have some deeper unity, which, in this realm of mere validity, you can never make manifest. Meanwhile, this control of idea over fact is, indeed, here viewed as limited. The ideal necessities only determine what the facts are not, and not what the facts are.

On the other hand, since this realm of internal meanings is, in us men, limited and fragmentary, one indeed