Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/327

308 to sing in tune? Then your musical ideas are false if they lead you to strike what are, then, called false notes. But do you want to study acoustics? Then your ideas of sound are false unless they involve correct inner constructions of the physical relations of sound waves, and that, too, however fine your musical skill, and however vivid and accurate your musical imagination may be. In that case mere accurate images of tones would be false acoustical ideas.

In vain, then, does one stand apart from the internal meaning, from the conscious inner purpose embodied in a given idea, and still attempt to estimate whether or no that idea corresponds with its object. There is no purely external criterion of truth. You cannot merely look from without upon an ideal construction and say whether or no it corresponds to its object. Every finite idea has to be judged by its own specific purpose. Ideas are like tools. They are there for an end. They are true, as the tools are good, precisely by reason of their adjustment to this end. To ask me which of two ideas is the more nearly true, is like asking me which of two tools is the better tool. The question is a sensible one if the purpose in mind is specific, but not otherwise. One razor can be superior to another. But let a man ask, Is a razor a better or worse tool than a hammer? Is a steam-engine a better mechanism than a loom? Such questions are obviously vain, just because they suggest that there is some one purely abstract test of the value of any and all tools, or some one ideal tool that, if you had it, would be good apart from any specific use. Yet there are philosophers who ask, and even suppose themselves to