Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/344

Rh truth? The answer to these questions, — the solution to all our previous difficulties, is in one respect so simple, that I almost fear, after this so elaborate preparation, to state it, lest by its very simplicity it may disappoint. Yet I must first state it, abstractly, and perhaps unconvincingly, and then illustrate it as I close the present discussion, leaving to a later lecture its fuller development. The idea, I have said, ''seeks its own. It can be'' judged by nothing but what it intends. Whether I think of God or of yesterday’s events, of my own death, or of the destiny of mankind, of mathematical truth, or of physical facts, of affairs of business, or of Being itself, it is first of all what I mean, and not what somebody merely external to myself might desire me to mean, that both gives me an object, and determines for me the standard of correspondence to the object whereby I must be judged. Moreover, my idea is a cognitive process only in so far as it is, at the same time, a voluntary process, an act, the partial fulfilment, so far as the idea consciously extends, of a purpose. The object meant by the idea is the object because it is willed to be such, and the will in question is the will that the idea embodies. And that is why Realism proved to be impossible; that is why the Independent Beings were self-contradictory concepts; that, too, is why the resignation of all definite purpose which Mysticism required of our ideas was impossible without a failure to define Being as any but a mere Nothing. And every definition of truth or of Being must depend upon a prior recognition of precisely this aspect of the nature of ideas.

Whoever says, “I am passive; I merely accept the