7. The Cultivation and Weeding Out of Ideas.
Unlike statements and judgments, terms and ideas are neither definitely true nor definitely false. Some ideas are products of artistic imagination, and may truthfully illustrate, though they do not really record, characters, events, and personal relations, as met with in actual human life. Other ideas are fictitious in the sense of referring to object-matters which are non-existent, and merely imagined, whether in the way of crude mythology, sophistical rhetoric, or immature science. If it be granted that an idea is neither fictional nor fictitious, but capable of forming the subject or predicate of true judgments, it may be said to be valid; but it is still, of course, uncertain whether any particular judgment in which it occurs is true. The general validity of a concrete idea consists in the many predicates which can be truthfully applied to the given subject, and that of an abstract idea in the many subjects to which the given predicate can be truthfully applied.
To discuss the criterion of truth would be altogether beyond the scope of the present article; but, granting that many judgments are true and others false, it is to be observed that an idea does not cease to be valid, even when we are misled into making it the subject or predicate of an erroneous judgment, provided our knowledge of the object-matter is such that the idea enters into many other judgments which are true. Thus valid ideas may persist, both in the individual mind and in the collective culture of a nation or of humanity, even though many opinions contingently connected with those ideas undergo change.
The discrimination of valid from essentially fictitious ideas involves the chief questions of theological and metaphysical controversy; yet what purports to be such discrimination is always taking place in psychological and sociological ways. In childhood or later life every personal idea must 'dawn on' the mind before it can become an habitual idea. Then, in the normal growth of knowledge, a valid idea will be strengthened and rendered more ideal, or significant, with every recurrence, especially if it be accompanied by perceptual experience with which it agrees or by a special effort to determine its true relation
