Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/42

Rh tial expression or embodiment of a single conscious purpose. I shall indeed say nothing for the present as to what causes an idea. But I shall assert that an idea appears in consciousness as having the significance of an act of will. I shall also dwell upon the inner purpose, and not upon the external relations, as the primary and essential feature of an idea. For instance, you sing to yourself a melody, you are then and there conscious that the melody as you hear yourself singing it, partially fulfils and embodies a purpose. Well, in this sense, your melody, at the moment when you sing it, or even when you silently listen to its imagined presence, constitutes a musical idea, and is often so called. You may so regard the melody without yet explicitly dwelling upon the externally cognitive value of the musical idea, as the representative of a melody sung or composed by somebody else. You may even suppose the melody original with yourself, unique, and sung now for the first time. Even so, it would remain just as truly a musical idea, however partial or fragmentary; for it would then and there, when sung, or even when inwardly heard, partly embody your own conscious purpose. In the same sense, any conscious act, at the moment when you perform it, not merely expresses, but is, in my present sense, an idea. To count ten is thus also an idea, if the counting fulfils and embodies, in however incomplete and fragmentary a way, your conscious purpose, and that quite apart from the fact that counting ten also may enable you to cognize the numerical character of facts external to the conscious idea of ten itself. In brief, an idea, in my present definition may, and, as a fact always does, if you please, appear to be representative of a fact