Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/343

324 self-contradiction. Or again, were no error possible, there would be no truth, since then the assertion that there is no truth would itself be no error, or would itself be true. This, again, would be a contradiction. Or finally, if error were impossible, any and every account of Being or truth, of ideas and of objects, of the world or of nothing at all, would be equally true, or in other words, no truth would ever be defined. For truth we define by its contrast with the error that it excludes. So some ideas certainly can and do err in as far as they undertake to be ideas of objects. Ideas can then fail of their desired correspondence with their intended objects, just because these objects are indeed other than themselves. But the error of an idea is always a failure to win the intended aim of the idea, precisely in so far as the idea sought truth. Hence, as no purpose can simply and directly consist in willing or intending its own defeat, it is plain that an idea, precisely in so far as it can turn out to be an erroneous idea, can intend what its object forbids it to carry out, and can mean what its object excludes; while in so far as the object thus refutes the idea, the object contains what the idea did not purpose, and was unable to predetermine. In brief, the very Possibility of Error, the absolutely certain truth that some ideas give false accounts of their own objects, shows that some objects contain what is opposed to the intent of the very ideas that refer to these objects. And so the antithesis is proved.

In view of this apparent antinomy, how is the idea related to its object? How is error possible? What is