Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/54

Rh tion to what we call true Being. And such reference not only seems at first very sharply different from the internal meaning, but must, for our purposes, at first be sundered by definition from that internal meaning even more sharply than common sense distinguishes the two. For abstract sundering is, in us mortals, the necessary preliminary to grasping the unity of truth. The internal meaning is a purpose present in the passing moment, but here imperfectly embodied. Common sense calls it, as such, an expression of transient living intent, an affair of Will. Psychology explains the presence and the partial present efficacy of this purpose by the laws of motor processes, of Habit, or of what is often called association Ethical doctrine finds in such winning of inner purposes the region where Conscience itself, and the pure moral Intention, are most concerned. On the other hand, the apparently external meaning of the idea is at first said to be an affair of the externally cognitive intellect, and of the hard facts of an independently real world. Not purpose, but the unchangeable laws of the Reality, not the inner life, but the Universe, thus at first seems from without to assign to the idea whatever external meaning it is to obtain. Subject and Object are here supposed to meet, — to meet in this fact that ideas have their external meaning, — but to meet as foreign powers.

Now we are first to recognize, even more clearly, I say, than common sense, the sharpness of this apparent antithesis between the conscious internal and the seemingly external meaning. Here, as I have said, is indeed the world-knot. We are to recognize the problem, but we are, nevertheless, to answer it in the end (when we