perhaps a free construction of an ideal object in mathematics, — but in any case an idea, is valid, has truth, defines an experience that, at least as a mathematical ideal, and perhaps as an empirical event, is determinately possible. The truth, validity, or determinate possibility of the experience in question, may be, so far as yet appears, either transient or eternal, either relative or absolute, either something valid for a limited group of people, or something valid for all possible rational beings. But in any case, this third definition of Being attempts to identify the validity of the idea with the true Being of the fact defined by the idea.
I
Our Third Conception of Being has been thus stated and illustrated. It remains here next to follow in the briefest outline its history as an ontological conception, before trying to estimate its final value.
As now repeatedly recognized in these lectures, our Third Conception of Being is, in European thought, partly an indirect result of Plato’s doctrine.[1] But it is also probably the historical fact, as we saw in our discussion of Realism, that Plato himself did not, on the whole, conceive his own Ideas in this way. The original Platonic argument about the Ideas amounts in general to saying, on the one hand, that only what
- ↑ That what I here call the Third Conception of Being was in essence Plato’s concept, was the thesis, as is well known, of Lotze — a thesis which has often been discussed. Teichmüller and Zeller agree in rejecting Lotze’s interpretation of Plato; and, in the main, I here follow their authority.
