Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/351

332 will of the inquiring idea has first sought as its ideal goal, as its chosen authority, as its accepted standard, and so as its own object. If I will to watch for stars, or to measure places of heavenly bodies, or to be guided in the determination of my will by the appearance of certain chemical precipitates in test-tubes, or to stake my fortune in the stock-market, or to be determined in my acts by the empirical outcome of this patient’s disease, — well, in all such cases, it is an experience that I first am to accept as the determination of my purpose. By that choice my development of my ideas is guided. But for that very reason the awaited experience is, in advance, my object precisely, because it is, just by virtue of my own purpose, the desired determiner of my purpose. The same rule holds here also as in the former cases. The idea is a will seeking its own determination. It is nothing else. And herein lies the explanation of the process which we studied, earlier in this lecture, in our account of the relations between judgment and experience. Judgments, taken as universal, already involve a negative determination of the world of internal meanings through an exclusion of bare possibilities. The judgments of experience, the particular judgments, express a positive, but still imperfect, determination of internal meaning through external experience. The limit or goal of this process would be an individual judgment, wherein the will expressed its own final determination.

But if one here retorts, “Ay, but in the empirical world I have no choice, since facts are facts, and the world is once for all there;” then I reply: I do not now question that the world is there. I am asking in