THE NEW EEALISM AND THE OLD IDEALISM. 317" sufficiently before him in the course of his metaphysical speculations. Nor do I think it easy to do so ; for the distinction is really one of considerable difficulty ; and I believe it may be worth while to give a little more time to- its elucidation. Let us consider, for instance, what it would mean if applied to the case of colour, of which we were previously speaking. In the case of pleasure, broadly speak- ing, we mean nothing more than what we experience. In the case of a geometrical axiom, what we mean is almost completely separable from what we experience. In the case- of colour, the two distinguishable aspects would seem to be more evenly balanced. We may simply experience yellow,, and in that case it is nothing more than what we experience ; and each one of us may be said, in that sense, to have a yellow of his own. But if we go on to name the colour and discriminate it from other colours, we are beginning, with a more or less clear consciousness, to give it a place within a relational scale ; and that scale has an objective signifi- cance, just as a geometrical axiom has. It is not simply something that we experience, but something that we mean- Now this is what I wish to emphasise. There is such a thing as meaning, and meaning always carries us beyond what is immediately before our consciousness. This is, I think, a point that is, in general, not sufficiently recognised even by most of those philosophers who at times acknow- ledge its truth. Most of us no doubt recognise it readily enough in some of those instances that Dr. Stout has made familiar to almost all philosophical students. In the case of an animal instinct, for example, most of us are readily pre- pared to admit that the animal means a great deal more than it consciously realises to itself ; and most of us have learned to repeat Emerson's line about the cathedral builders- -' They builded better than they knew ' and to acknow- ledge a certain truth in it. But, with all this, I fancy it remains true that most of us are apt to suppose that, in the developed human consciousness at any rate, everything that we mean is, in the phrase of Descartes, a ' clear and distinct idea,' standing in our minds like a picture in its frame. This is the view, as I think, that we must learn to reject, Descartes, as we all know, even speaks familiarly of the idea of the infinite, as if it were actually to be found in our minds in a sort of bodily form. Most of us would probably recognise that this at least is untrue, that the idea of the infinite, at least as understood by Descartes, is of the nature of an ideal, something that we may mean but that we can- not formally realise to ourselves. It does not require very
