Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/339

320 termine whether its object is such that the idea, if finite, shall succeed in attaining entire agreement with the object. Otherwise truth would be mere tautology, error would be excluded in advance, and it would be useless even to talk of an object external in any sense to the idea.

Here, then, is the central dilemma as to the nature of truth. I may state it once more, but now in the form of an antinomy; that is, in the familiar shape of the Kantian Antinomies, with thesis and antithesis. To be sure, the antinomy will be imperfect. On one side will stand a stubborn, but no doubt somehow incompletely stated, apparent truth. On the other side will stand an obvious and demonstrable certainty. We shall have to reconcile an opposition that can be but apparent.

The thesis of our antinomy is as follows: There seems to be, in the object of an idea, just in so far as it is the object of that specific idea, no essential character which is not predetermined by the purpose, the internal meaning, the conscious intent, of that idea itself.

For consider: An object, as we have seen, has two relations to an idea. The one is the relation that constitutes it the object meant by that idea. The other is the sort of correspondence that is to obtain between object and idea. As to the first of these two: An object is not the object of a given idea merely because the object causes the idea, or impresses itself upon the idea as the seal impresses the wax. For there are objects of ideas that are not causes of the ideas