Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/352

what sense it is there. It is, but what Being has it? We have long since seen that the whole world is real as the object that gives validity to ideas. We have inquired as to the sense in which anything can be called object. We have found the sense in which the idea chooses its object. We have found also that the object is nothing but the will of the idea itself in some determinate expression. But now one points out that in giving our ideas of empirical objects determinate expression, there is a sense in which, once having committed ourselves to given ideas, we have no more choice as to how the ideas shall turn out to be determined. Well, is not this an obvious enough result even of our own view? The idea in seeking for its object is seeking for the determination of its own just now consciously indeterminate will. This is, so to speak, the game that the idea undertakes to play. But consistently with itself the idea cannot choose to change capriciously its own choice, to alter the rules of its own game, even while it plays. If its will is to be determined only by experience that it awaits, then just this experience is the determiner of the will. In this sense the mathematician, too, has no choice. He, too, awaits the outcome of his own sort of experience as he computes, as he observes his diagrams and symbols. For his world also is in its own way an empirical world, and he experiments in that world, and wills to accept the result. In this same sense, too, the youth has no choice as to what he shall find his own will to be, since so long as he wills in his own way, his struggles for self-comprehension are in essence predetermined by his accepted, if not yet momentarily conscious selection, of a life plan. The idea having opened