Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/56

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You may observe already, even in this wholly preliminary sketch of the particular form of Idealism to be developed in these lectures, two principal features. First, Our account of the nature of Being, and of the relation between Idea and Being, is to be founded explicitly upon a theory of the way in which ideas possess their own meaning. Secondly, Our theory of the nature of Meaning is to be founded upon a definition in terms of Will and Purpose. We do not indeed say, Our will causes our ideas. But we do say, Our ideas now imperfectly embody our will. And the real world is just our whole will embodied.

I may add, at once, two further remarks concerning the more technical aspects of the argument by which we shall develope our thesis. The first remark is, that the process by which we shall pass from a study of the first or fragmentary internal meaning of finite ideas to that conception of their completed internal meaning in terms of which our theory of Being is to be defined, is a process analogous to that by which modern mathematical speculation has undertaken to deal with its own concepts of the type called by the Germans Grenzbegriffe, or Limiting Concepts, or better, Concepts of Limits. As a fact, one of the first things to be noted about our conception of Being is that, as a matter of Logic, it is the concept of a limit, namely of that limit to which the internal meaning or purpose of an idea tends as it grows consciously determinate. Our Being resembles the concept of the so-called irrational numbers. Somewhat