Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/409

396 J. DEWEY : KNOWLEDGE AS IDEALISATION. intelligence, and thereby to the meaning of possible future experiences. The process of the growth of experience is accordingly a reciprocal one. Any experience has meaning as the self projects this meaning into it from its own ideal store ; this projection appropriates the given experience, as to its meaning, into the ideal store of the self, thereby farther developing it. Knowledge might be indifferently described, therefore, as a process of idealisation of experience, or of realisation of intelligence. It is each through the other. Ultimately the growth of experience must consist in the development out of itself by intelligence of its own implicit ideal content upon occasion of the solicitation of sensation. But this is again a thought to be elaborated at another time. We may sum up our results as follows : meaning consti- tutes the worth of every psychical experience ; meaning is not bare existence, but is an inferential mediate factor ; it is relation and is ideal ; as ideal it is supplied by intelligence out of its own content ; this content constitutes, indeed, the reality of intelligence. I think we may have reason now to congratulate ourselves that we did not, at the beginning, make any inquiry into the connexion between this ideal quality or the meaning of experience and objective reality. For, it seems to me, that would have been to begin at the wrong end, and imply that there was somehow, somewhere present to consciousness, a conception of what reality is by which we could measure the significance of our experience. And I have become convinced by the inquiry set forth in the preceding pages that if reality is itself an element in conscious experience, it must as such come under the scope of the sig- nificance, the meaning of experience, and hence cannot be used as an external standard to measure this meaning. The v reality of experience is, in short, an element of its interpre- tation, of its ideal quality or relation to intelligence. We do not have externally given to us some fixed conception of reality which we can compare with our ideas, and thereby see how much agreement with reality the latter have. Keality, like everything else that has meaning, is a function of our ideas. To find out what it is we must look within these ideas. It is the great merit of English Psychology that in attempt, at least, it has recognised this. It is its defect that it has tried to find this reality in the ideas, as existences, where naught can be found. We have now to see whether better fortune may meet an attempt to discover the nature of reality, where all is ultimately contained and must be found in the ideas as significances, as meanings. I hope, accordingly, at some future time, to ask after this relation of idea to reality.