Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/408

Rh ideas now partially embodied in this flying instant, is to remain in the end unexpressed, so that only an if-proposition, valid, but disembodied, contains the truth of the world when viewed with reference to ideas. Then still you do not escape from the facts. For the fact of this non-expression of our ideas, has, by this very hypothesis, its own real Being. But what form of Being shall this fact of the non-expression of the meaning of our ideas, this refusal of the universe concretely to fulfil our purposes, actually possess? Shall this brute fact that our ideas are not expressed possess the reality of an object independent of all ideas? But such a reality, as we now know, is a logical impossibility. Moreover, an object independent of all ideas, even if such an object were otherwise possible, could defeat, or could refuse real expression to no idea whatever. For what my idea seeks, and what therefore could conceivably be refused to it, by another, is simply its own expression in just that reality which it means and intends to possess as its own object. The reality, therefore, which shall positively refuse it expression, is ipso facto the reality to which the idea itself appeals, and is not independent of this appeal. For you are not put in the wrong by a reality to which you have made no reference; and error is possible only concerning objects that we actually mean as our own objects. The object that is to defeat my partial and fragmentary will is then ipso facto my whole will, my final purpose, my total meaning determinately and definitively expressed. Hypotheses never verified, if-propositions to which no concrete expression corresponds, have part in existence of course,