Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/338

Rh with the objects of sense are correspondingly definite, so that observers easily judge what object we mean.

Yet precisely what this relation of object and idea is, we are still called upon to explain, even in case of the most obvious object of sense, and still more in case of objects of a more subtle character, such as past events, valid laws, and mathematical constructions.

Plain, so far, are two considerations: First, the object of an idea is in somewise predetermined, is selected from all other objects, through the sort of attentive interest in just that object which the internal meaning of the idea involves. Unless the idea is thus selective, it can never come to be either true or false. For if it means to be true, it intends a sort of correspondence with an object. What correspondence it intends is determined, as we saw, solely by the purpose which the idea embodies, i.e. by the internal meaning of the idea. Furthermore, the idea intends to attain this correspondence to some particular object, — not to any object you please, not to whatever happens to correspond to the ideal construction in question, but to a determined object. The determination of what object is meant, is, therefore, certainly again due, in one aspect, to the internal meaning of the idea. Nobody else can determine for me what object I mean by my idea.

But hereupon we seem to face, indeed, a fatal difficulty, For the second of the two considerations just mentioned remains. And this is that, if the idea predetermines what object it selects as the one that it means, just as it predetermines what sort of correspondence it intends to have to this object, the idea, nevertheless, does not prede-