it is certain, possesses a sensible side or aspect. Beside being a content, it, in other words, must be also an event. Now to describe the various existences of ideas, as psychical events, is for the most part a task falling outside metaphysics.[1] But the question possesses a certain bearing here. The existence of an idea can be, to a greater or to a less degree, incongruous with its content; and to predicate the second of the first would involve various amounts of inconsistency. The thought of a past idea, for example, is a present state of mind; the idea of a virtue may be moral vice; and the horse, as judged to exist, cannot live in the same field with the actual horse-image.[2] On the other hand, at least in most cases, to think of anger is, to however slight an extent, to be angry; and, usually, ideas of pleasures and pains are, as events, themselves pleasures and pains in fact. Wherever the idea can be merely one aspect of a single presentation, there we can say that the ideal content exists, and is an actual event. And it is possible, in such cases, to apply a semblance of the ontological proof. Because, that is, the existence of the fact is necessary, as a basis and as a condition, for the idea, we can go from the presence of the idea to the presence of the fact. The most striking instance would be supplied by the idea of “this” or “mine.” Immediate contact with Reality can obviously, as a fact, never fail us; and so, when we use the idea of this contact, we take it always from the fact as, in some form, that appears. It is therefore impossible that, given the idea, its existence should be lacking.
But, when we consider such a case more closely,
- ↑ The question is one for psychology, and I may perhaps be permitted to remark that, with regard to abstract ideas, it seems still in a very unsatisfactory condition. To fall back on Language, after all, will not tell us precisely how much passes through the mind, when abstract ideas are made use of.
- ↑ Compare Mind, xxxiv., pp. 286-90, and xliii., pp. 313-14.
