Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/319

300 fathomed. To complete our definition of Reality, we must undertake to do so. And here, at last, the sundering of external from internal meaning receives its final test. Must not that to which our thought has to conform, whether it will or no, remain wholly external to thought itself? We shall see. And when we see this, our goal will at last be attained.

A time-honored definition of Truth declares it to mean the Correspondence between any Idea and its Object. The mystery that everybody feels to lie hidden behind this definition depends upon the fact that two relations, both of a very intangible sort, are implied by this definition, and that the combination of these two relations is required to constitute truth. If an idea is true, it must, in the first place, have an object. But what constitutes the relation called having an object? When is an object the object of a given idea? And, secondly, the idea must correspond with its object. But what is the relation called correspondence? Until recently, the whole theory of the nature of correspondence remained an extremely undeveloped, although an obviously fundamental conception of Logic. And still more neglected has been the conception of the relation that constitutes any supposed object the genuine object of an idea, whether the idea be true or false. As to the problem about correspondence, how much must an idea resemble its object in order to be true? A photograph resembles the man whom it pictures. Must a true idea be even so a sort of photograph of its object? Or, perhaps, may an idea be very unlike an ob-