Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/320

Rh ject, and still so correspond therewith as to be a true idea? Are not the items in a ledger very unlike the commercial transactions that they ideally depict? And yet may not the items in the ledger be true? The nature, then, and the degree of that correspondence between idea and object which is meant when one talks of the truth of an idea, is a doubtful matter, and we shall have to consider it more closely. As to the other one of these two problems about idea and object, it seems plain, and in fact seems to be implied in the very definition of truth, that an idea can have an object without rightly corresponding to its object. For how otherwise should falsity and error be possible? To have an object and to correspond to it are therefore different relations. What, then, is the nature of the relation that makes a given idea such as to have a given object, whether or no the idea truly represents the object? These two problems are, then, the two aspects of the general question, What is Truth? regarded now from the side of the correspondence between internal and external.

Let us next attack the first of these two questions. If an idea is to be correspondent to an object, our first impression is that the idea must always possess some one predestined sort or degree of likeness or similarity to its object. Is this necessary? Is it once for all predetermined that its object, as a finished fact, required the idea to be like it? The relation of correspondence, in general, apart from the special problem about ideas and objects, has been most elaborately studied in mathematics, where correspondence is, in the most various forms, a constant topic of exact inquiry. If you have before you