Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/331

312 nature of the desired correspondence to the object. That which makes an object the object of a given idea has too frequently been considered from the side of an accepted and uncriticised ontological, or, possibly, psychological theory as to the causation and origin of ideas. The object of any idea is, for many of the older theories of knowledge, that which arouses, awakens, brings to pass, the idea in question. The old Aristotelian metaphor of the seal impressing its form upon the wax is here the familiar means of exemplifying how an object becomes such by impressing its nature upon the ideas that it arouses. The sun shines, a light enters a man’s eyes, and the man, looking up, sees the sun. Thereupon the sun becomes the object of his ideas. One touches and handles objects; they impress upon him their solidity and their tangible form. Thereupon they furnish the basis for further ideas. Or, again, a distant object is dimly seen. It comes nearer and nearer, and is found to be some particular object. When it was distant it was already the object of ideas, because, affecting one’s sense of sight, it roused curiosity. As it approaches, these ideas are confirmed or refuted by further observation, and, according to the sort of correspondence with their object that they undertook to have, they then turn out to be true or false.

In all such accounts of the relation of idea and object, the existence of the object is presupposed as something well understood. And not only is this presupposition made, but the whole existence of the so-called external world, the existence, too, of the relation called the relation of causality between the object and the perceiving subject, yes, the very Being of the subject itself, as an entity that