Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/337

318 judged. Now this selection involves what we have called the inner meaning of the idea. Just as truly as the sort of correspondence by which an idea is to be judged is predetermined by the internal meaning of the idea, just so truly is the internal meaning of the idea also to be consulted regarding the intended selection of the object. If I have meant to make an assertion about Cæsar, you must not call me to account because my statement does not correspond, in the intended way, with the object called Napoleon. If I have meant to say that space has three dimensions, you cannot refute me by pointing out that time has only one. And nowhere, without a due examination of the internal meaning of my ideas, can you learn whether it was the object Cæsar or the object Napoleon, whether it was space or time, that I meant.

Our preference, however, for the objects of sense, for the pen, and the sun, as typical instances of objects of ideas, arises from the fact that in case of just these objects, it is especially easy, by observing, from without, the acts of the person who has these ideas, to form confident and, for common-sense purposes, relatively exact notions of the selection to which the internal meaning of the ideas has bound the maker of any given judgment about objects. Moreover, it is easy for us ourselves to follow our sense-ideas and their objects with continuous scrutiny and to observe their relations. For sense-objects are vivid, and combine relative permanence with the sort of plasticity that enables us to get what we call nearer or, in general, novel views of them; so that in passing back and forth from idea to object, we seem assured of some definite relation between them. And our acts in dealing