Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/386

Rh what our Fourth Conception says. So far we agree with any empiricist. But if you reject our Fourth Conception, you then add, “This experience which is, is, even when taken in its totality, a fragmentary experience, — a mere collection of whatever happens to be; and this world of experience possesses no finality.” But do you mean hereby that of two contradictory propositions made about the existence of a supposed individual fact in this whole realm of the real experience, both or neither may now be true? Do you mean that if I say: “There is life after death,” or, “There was the siege of Troy,” or, “There is the observable planet Neptune,” or, “There is happiness in yonder child’s heart as he sings,” I can thus assert a proposition that is neither true nor false, or that is both true and false at once, and in the same sense? If this were what you asserted, the assertion would indeed mean nothing. But otherwise, if the world of experience, as a real world, has even now, while we speak, an actual constitution, then any definite proposition about the world is either true or false when it is made. But if so, any proposition with a definite internal meaning involves ideas that, when the proposition is made, consciously mean to refer to the existent facts of that world of real experience. But such reference to objects does not consist, as we have now sufficiently seen, in mere correspondence between idea and object. The only reference that can constitute the meaning of an idea is one which involves the complete expression of the will of the idea. But if every issue which ideas can join, with regard to the constitution of the empirical world, if every contradictory opposition which the ideas can ex-