Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/353

334 the game of its life, cannot withdraw its own moves without failing of its own determination.

Well, precisely so it is with all the facts of experience in their relation to specific ideas. All finite ideas, even the vaguest, are already in one aspect contents of experience, imperfectly fulfilling purpose. In all cases every idea, whether mathematical, practical, or scientific, seeks its own further determination. In every case it is true that such further determination is also to be given only in terms of experience. Sometimes it is a definite group of sense-experiences that we mean in advance; then we are said to be observant of the physical world; and then in physical nature only do we find the desired determination of our will. Sometimes, as in the mathematician’s world, we deal with objects that appear more directly under our control than do physical objects. But there are no ideas that have not an aspect in which they are masses of experience, and masses of experience are never objective facts except in so far as they present the answers to specific questions about fact. And the answer to a question is merely the more precise determination of the will that asks the question.

Of course, my private will, when viewed as a mere force in nature, does not create the rest of nature. But my conscious will as expressed in my ideas does logically determine what objects are my objects.

But one may say: “How if the facts of experience altogether refuse to fulfil given ideas in any sense whatever? Have not such ideas an object that they seek and never find at all? Is not the object of a defeated purpose, or of an error, still an object, but a purely ideal one? Yet