Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/350

Rh a process; the object sought is simply the precise determination of this very will itself to unique and unambiguous expression. And in such a case the thesis and antithesis of our antinomy are reconciled. For the object is a true Other, and yet it is object only as the meaning of this idea.

But how is it when facts of experience are sought, — when the astronomer, having computed the planet’s place, looks to see whether the determination conforms to the apparently wholly “external empirical object,” when the chemist awaits the result of the experiment in the laboratory, when the speculator watches the waverings of the market, or when the vigilant friend by the bedside longs for the favorable turn of the beloved patient’s disease? I answer, in all these cases the apparently conflicting objects and ideas in question are indeed far more numerous and complex in their relations than the mathematician’s world. And we shall hereafter consider precisely such complications more in detail. But here we are concerned with the most universal aspects of our problem as to idea and object; and so here I can only respond, Whatever the object, it is still the object for a given idea solely because that idea wills it to be such. If it is experience, of a given type, and won under determinate conditions, that you seek, then in just that region of inquiry your inquiring interest, your imperfectly determined initial will, seeks its own more precise determination. But this self-determination is even here the only object that the idea seeks. No idea is confirmed or refuted by any experience except by that more determinate type, or instance, of experience which the less determinate and vaguer