Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/67

48 a vocabulary, as to remind us at every turn how familiar in the concrete is the idea of Real Being even to the most unlearned mind. Let us forthwith exemplify. It is for common sense one thing to have, as they say, an idea “in your head,” and quite another thing to believe steadfastly that this idea corresponds to a “real outer fact.” It is one thing to read a “rumor” in a current newspaper. It is quite another thing to be sure that, in truth, as they say, the rumor is “so.” Now, in all these cases, the contrast between any plan and its actual fulfilment, between the so-called “mere idea” and the same conceived object when believed in as a “real outer fact,” between the newspaper “rumor” and the same story if viewed as that which is “so,” — this contrast, I say, is precisely the contrast between what is not and what is. The contrast in question, as I insist, is thus extremely familiar, and of the utmost practical importance. You may observe of course at once that this contrast is closely related to the one made at the last time between the internal meaning of ideas, plans, and the like, and their external meaning, or their relation to that which fulfils or realizes them. In the grasping of just this contrast, and upon fidelity to this distinction, the whole of the everyday virtue of truthfulness appears, in the world of common sense, to depend. The liar is a man who deliberately misplaces his ontological predicates. He says the thing that is not. His internal meaning is one affair; his external expression of his meaning is another, and contradicts the internal meaning. Upon a similarly clear sense of this same contrast, the life of all our external volition seems to depend. A plan involves an idea of what some possible object may