Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/407

388 my object is, my idea at this instant not only imperfectly defines, but fragmentarily presents in its own transient way. That my object is, is true in so far as the whole what of my object is empirically expressed in an individual life, which is my real world.

Thus, although Realism assured us that the what could never predetermine the that, the essence never prove the existence, and although this has become a mere commonplace of popular metaphysic, we now have found how the that, the very existence of the world, predetermines the what, or the essence of things, and the fact of Being has become for us the richest of concrete facts.

For despite the relative failures and errors of our finitude, the real world cannot fail to express the whole genuine intent of our ideas, their completely understood internal meaning. Ideas, in other words, in so far as they are consistent with their own completed ideal purpose, cannot remain unexpressed in a concrete life of individual experience. For if they remained unexpressed, their final meaning could only take the form of hypotheses whose verbal statement would begin with an if. The final truth would be that if certain empirical expressions took place, certain ideal results would follow. But as we have seen, what is merely valid, is not even valid. For the Third Conception of Being failed to express how even itself could be true, just because it left us with a mere general what, and never reached the that.

Suppose, in fact, that what we have with equal propriety called the meaning and the will of our finite