Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/330

Rh moment, expressed in rich, sensuous imagery, it is certain that they are ideas not because they are masses or series of images, but because they embody present conscious purposes. Every idea is as much a volitional process as it is an intellectual process. It may well or ill represent or correspond to something not itself, but it must, in any case, make more or less clearly articulate its own present purpose. The constructive character of all mathematical ideas, the sense of current control which accompanies all definite thinking processes, the momentary purposes more or less imperfectly fulfilled whenever we conceive anything, — these are evidences of what is essential to processes of ideation. Volition is as manifest in counting objects as in singing tunes, in conceiving physical laws as in directing the destinies of nations, in laboratory experiments as in artistic productions, in contemplating as in fighting. The embodied purpose, the internal meaning, of the instant’s act, is thus a conditio sine qua non for all external meaning and for all truth. What we are now inquiring is simply how an internal meaning can be linked to an external meaning, how a volition can also possess truth, how the purpose of the instant can express the nature of an object other than the instant’s purpose.

So much, then, for the relation of correspondence between idea and object. But, now, when has an idea an object at all? This question, as I before observed, has been decidedly more neglected in fundamental discussions about truth than has the question as to the