Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/473

ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY. 459 in that which falls outside each, seems, in the presence of the actual fact, to be unmeaning or at least untenable. Thus, as applied to the Universe, we found that the doctrine, which we examine, proved invalid, while now in the case of my real and my imaginary self it seems even vicious. But the doctrine without doubt possesses truth, truth not unlimited but partial. So far as you can abstract from the diversity of your different worlds, whether real or imaginary, you can take their contents as merely the same. And to a certain extent and in many cases it is legitimate and useful so to abstract. But, while the doctrine taken in this sense is true, in any other sense it seems not true. It is first not true that the content so abstracted is in the strict sense im- aginary. This content on the contrary is so far neither real nor imaginary. And again it is not true that all the diversity from which you abstract must consist in something other than content. You cannot take this diversity as everywhere something external, which leaves objects unaffected in their character. For in the end the whole distinction of imaginary from real fundamentally rests, we shall find, on a difference in quality. If, to repeat, you abstract from the difference between the imaginary and the real, you obviously so far have no difference of any kind between them. But, if on the other hand the difference between them is to be main- tained, it must rest in the end on a difference in felt content. What is the imaginary ? This is a question which up to a certain point we have answered already. The imaginary, we saw, is not something indifferent to which reality could simply be added. The imaginary is qualified by exclusion from real existence, and apart from that exclusion it loses its character. And real existence, I have now to urge, de- pends on a positive quality. My ' real world,' we saw, is a construction from my felt self. It is an inconsistent construction, and it also in the last resort depends on my present feeling. You may protest that its basis is really my normal waking self, but in the end you have no way of distinguishing such a self from the self which is abnormal. In the end my foundation is and must be my present self, whatever that happens at the moment to be. In madness or drunkenness we have the distinction of imaginary from real, and the distinction seems here to be as good as elsewhere. Nay even in dream I may construct another world which is the environment of my dream-body, and may oppose to this reality a mere imaginary world. The basis of the opposition everywhere is, in a word, present feeling, and one present feeling, if you take reality so, stands