Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/277

JOS I AH KOYCK, The World and the Individual. 263 " But hereupon wo seem to face, indeed, a fatal dilliculty. And this is that, if the idea predetermines what object it selects as the one that it means, just as it predetermines what sort of correspondence it intends to have to this object, the idea, never- theless, does not predetermine whether its object is such that the idea, if finite, shall succeed in attaining entire agreement with the object. Otherwise truth would be mere tautology, error would be excluded in advance, and it would be useless even to talk of an object external in any sense as the idea" (pp. 319, 320). What is the solution ? Dr. Boyce gives the following, which is in harmony with the result attained from the first definition. " The idea so selects the object, that, if the idea has a perfectly definite meaning and truth at all, this object is to be a precisely determinate object, suck that no other object could take Us place as the object of this idea. And in spite of the fact that the object is such solely by the will of the idea, the idea undertakes sub- missively to be either true or false when compared with that object " (p. 327). But with this we have reached the fourth and final Conception of Being, " that What is, or what is real, is as such the complete embodiment, in individual form and in final fulfilment, of the internal meaning of finite ideas " (p. 339). This Fourth Conception is then developed, and defended against various misconceptions. After this, in the ninth lecture, we pass to the discussion of Universality and Unity. This begins, if I understand it rightly, with an attempt to identify the ulti- mately true and the ultimately desirable, which does not seem to follow logically from what has preceded it. In every case in which our ideas are not expressed, we are told, " the reality, which shall positively refuse it expression, is ipso facto the reality to which the idea itself appeals, and is not independent of this appeal. For you are not put in the wrong by a reality to which you have made no reference ; and error is possible only concerning objects that we actually mean as our own objects. The object that is to defeat my partial and fragmentary will is then ipso facto my whole will, my final purpose, my total meaning determinately and definitely expressed " (p. 389). And again, " My will, as it is now transiently embodied, can fail in any partial way of realisation, but only because I now fail to be wholly aware ci my own will. . . . However far I wander in the wildernesses of my temporal experience, the eternal fulfilment of my own life encompasses me. I escape not from the meshes of the net of my own will " (p. 390). This seems too short a road to a final harmony. No doubt every act of knowledge is a fulfilment of the will, for we cannot know, as Dr. Eoyce points out, without willing to know. And every volition is an experience of reality, for, when we will, our volition is part of the real. Thus nothing real could be abso- lutely alien to our will, and no ideal could be absolutely void of reality. But, after all, the will to know is only an element in the whole system of volition. And it is conceivable that this element