Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/358

Rh out some loss of determination, or some vagueness. You seek another so long as your present purpose is unfulfilled. The fulfilment of the internal meaning of the present idea would leave no other object defined by this idea as an object yet to be sought. And where no other was to be sought, the individual life of the whole idea, as a process at once of experience and of purpose, would be present fact.

Now this final embodiment is the ultimate object, and the only genuine object, that any present idea seeks as its Other. But if this be so, when is the idea true? It is true — this instant’s idea — if, in its own measure, and on its own plan, it corresponds, even in its vagueness, to its own final and completely individual expression. Its expression would be the very life of fulfilment of purpose which this present idea already fragmentarily begins, as it were, to express. It is with a finite idea as it is with any form of will. Any of its transient expressions may be at any instant more or less abortive. But no finite idea is wholly out of correspondence to its object, as no will is wholly false to itself.

We have thus defined the object and the truth of an idea. But observe that thus we stand upon the threshold of a new definition of Being. Being, as our Third Conception declared, is what gives true ideas their truth; or in other words, to be real is to be the object of a true idea. We are ready, now that we have defined both object and truth, to assert, as our Fourth and final Conception of Being, this, that What is, or what is real, is as such the complete embodiment, in individual form and in final fulfilment, of the internal meaning of finite ideas.