Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/332

is supposed to be by nature apt to perceive objects when it is awakened through their presence, — all these very important ontological conceptions are assumed in order to define the special conditions under which a given object becomes the object of the ideas of a given person. Now, of course, we are not concerned here either to accept or to refute these presuppositions of so many theories of knowledge. We have only in passing to observe that these theories cannot help us in our present inquiry. We are now asking what is, by the Being of anything whatever, by the very Reality that one attributes to world or to soul, to causality or to sense organs. In pursuing this inquiry we have been led to a point where the reality of things means for us some condition or ground, whatever it be, — whether conscious or extra-conscious we know not yet, — some genuine basis or guarantee which gives to our ideas their truth. We have thus been led to ask directly, What is Truth? Into this question our question, What is Being? has transformed itself. The word “Truth,” however, appears, in traditional language, as a name for something called the correspondence of an idea with an object. And thus it is that we have been brought to face the problem, When has an idea an object? Our effort at present is to see whether we cannot define the Being of things by first defining their relation, as objects, to ideas. We cannot, then, hope to define, for our present purpose, the character of our objects, viewed as objects of ideas, by first presupposing their Being, and the Being of the whole physical world. No doubt there is this world, — but in what sense it is, that is precisely our problem.