Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/348

sciousness in another, that is a more explicit and precise, form, and if possible, in what would finally prove to be an absolutely determinate form, — this case, I insist, is typical of every case where an idea seeks its object. In seeking its object, any idea whatever seeks absolutely nothing but its own explicit, and, in the end, complete, determination as this conscious purpose, embodied in this one way. The complete content of the idea’s own purpose is the only object of which the idea can ever take note. This alone is the Other that is sought. That such a search as this is a genuine search for an object, that while sought appears as another and as a beyond, the experience of the mathematical sciences will at once illustrate. As we saw, in a previous discussion, the mathematician deals with a world which his own present ideas, as far as they go, explicitly attempt to predetermine; yet what these ideas do not at present completely and consciously predetermine for the mathematician’s private judgment, in advance of proof, is precisely that further determination of their own meaning which they imply and seek. This further determination the mathematician wins through his process of inquiry. His result is, then, actually willed from the start, in so far as his definitions, which are themselves acts of will, determine in advance the outcome of the proofs and computations of which they are already the initial step. But at the instant when the definitions and considerations of his problem alone are present to the mathematician’s passing consciousness, the outcome, the fully developed meaning, is an Other, an Object, which the mathematician seeks. At any moment, in his further research, he may attempt to define this Other by a con-