Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/329

310 edge. When you count, it is symbols that you want, not pictures. Hence, the numbers are for your purpose superior to photographs; and the entries in the ledger give a better record of their own aspect of the commercial transactions than a legion of phonographs and kinetoscopes, set up in a shop to record transactions, could, by any perfection of literal reproductions, retain. Symbols, then, are not in the least less definitely and, on occasion, less obviously, consciously, empirically true, or correspondent to their objects, than are, for their own purpose, the most vivid of mental pictures. An idea, again, is true, as a chess player is skilful, or as an artist is powerful, or as a practical man is effective. The question always is, Can the player win his chosen game, the artist succeed in his own selected art, the practical man accomplish his own task, and not the task of some other man? And precisely so the question is, Does the idea win in its own deliberately chosen game of correspondence to its object?

And so we conclude that the object does not, as a finished fact, predetermine the sort of likeness that the idea must possess in order to be true. It is the idea that so far decides its own meaning. And I may once more point out that in all this you may see afresh why, from the opening lecture of this course, I have laid such stress upon the essentially teleological inner structure of conscious ideas, and why I defined ideas as I did in our opening lecture, namely, as cases where conscious states more or less completely present the embodiment, the relative fulfilment of a present purpose. Whatever else our ideas are, and however much or little they may be, at any