Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/324

Rh least be confined to any particular sort or degree of general similarity to its object. The similarity may be as close or as remote, as sensuously interesting or as abstractly formal as you please. A scientific idea about colors need not be itself a color, nor yet an image involving colors. Or, to state the case in a very crude instance, a true idea of a dog need not itself bark in order to be true. On the contrary, photographs, and wax images, and toy dogs that bark, may correspond to the imitated objects in fashions that are of very little use in framing such ideas as are at once of scientific grade and of a given desired type of correspondence to their objects. The photographs, to be sure, help one to form scientifically valuable ideas far more frequently than does a wax image. But you cannot photograph the solar system, nor yet the constitution of a molecule. Yet you may have symbolically expressed ideas that correspond much more exactly to certain special truths about the solar system and the molecule than any ordinary photographs ever correspond to even the most important visible features of certain of their objects. The modern X-ray photographs very crudely reveal the internal structure of certain solid objects; but a trained student of anatomy of the brain has largely symbolic ideas of its structure which far exceed, in value of their correspondence to their object, all that can ever be hoped for from the X-ray photographs of a brain. In general, the photograph gives us at its best very one-sided ideas of visible objects. It is the aim of science to win ideas that intimately correspond, in however symbolic a fashion, to certain desired aspects of the structure of their objects; and without sys-