ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY. 45T doctrine is often stated as axiomatic or as at any rate in- contestable, and certainly I do not doubt that it possesses truth. On the other hand the truth possessed by it seems partial and limited. And in the end and in principle the- doctrine must even be called false. About its plausibility there is no question. "What is the- difference, we are asked, between a real and an imaginary shilling, and, if they differ as shillings, how do they differ?" Suppose that they differ, then take this point of difference,, whatever it is, and in imagination remove it. There will now no longer be any diversity in content between the two- shillings, which still remain two. This contention obviously is plausible, and, though there are difficulties to my mind insoluble which result from its acceptance, the prevalence- it has acquired is not surprising. On the other hand, when we reflect, the counter-doctrine seems no less plausible. The real shilling, it has been re- marked, does things, where the imaginary shilling has no- power. The former is an active and in some sense a per- manent constituent of the real world. And this difference appears to be essential and to affect the internal content of the shilling. You may perhaps deny this, and may attempt to argue that any such difference falls outside the two shill- ings. They are to differ, that is, barely in and through their external relations and not at all in themselves. And of" course continuance will be a mere matter of external context^ But this is to assume that a thing's relations, which make all the difference to other things, or, at least all the differ- ence beyond itself, make no difference at all to itself. And this assumption, if it is tenable, seems Tat least not free from. difficulty. For in the end the doubt is suggested whether in the end, when you have removed the relations, there is- any shilling at all left. You may answer perhaps that this abstract difficulty leaves you unmoved. At any rate when the " real " external" relations are cut off, what in fact is left is no more or less than the imaginary shilling. But this answer, I will go on to show, apart from any objection based on general principle,, is in practice unavailing. For we have not to deal merely with two shillings, the one real and the other fancied. There is not on one side a single ' real ' world of fact and on the other side a single world that I call 'imaginary'. On the contrary a man has, as we saw, an indefinite plurality of worlds. 1 1 In a work of fiction, for instance, we have the imaginary worlds of the characters over against their real world, and so on indefinitely.
