As soon as you define such a relation from without, and declare that the idea has an object by virtue of that relation to this object, I shall merely ask: Did the idea itself intend and select that relation as the relation in which its purposed object was to stand to the idea? If you answer “No,” then I take my stand beside the idea, and shall persist in demanding by what right you thus impose the relation in question upon the idea as the relation rightly characterizing its object. For the idea, in seeking for truth, does not seek for your aims, so far as you are a merely external observer. The idea is selective. It seeks its own. It attends as itself has chosen. It desires in its own way. If you, having somehow first finished and established your own definition of Being, choose to regard the idea and its object as entities in your own supposed world, then, indeed, you can talk, from your own point of view, of the various real relations of these entities, precisely as a psychologist does when he discusses the origin or the results of ideas. But just now we are not first presupposing that we know what the Being of the object is apart from the idea, and what the Being of the idea is apart from the object. We are trying, in advance of a finished conception of the Being of the object, to define the essential relation that makes an object the object of that particular idea. And as the idea, precisely so far as it intends truth at all, is through and through a selection, a choosing of an object, I ask what reason you can have to say that the object is the object of the idea, unless you observe somehow that the idea chooses for itself this object.
But now if you reply, “Yes, the relation of object to
