As to the process of accomplishing this, the original difficulty is that one does not know what one's purpose is, at least in terms of the objects with which he must deal. It is characteristic of the purpose that it is forever in search of its own completed meaning. Its life is a movement from self-ignorance to self- knowledge. This knowledge comes in dealing with the world of objects, for they are the completions of the meaning of the purposes, their 'external meanings,' more organically parts of the purposes themselves than are the objects of Holt's wishes parts of the wish.[1] It is through contact with objects that I learn to recognize in them (or as Plato would say, to recollect) my own meaning.
Royce does not describe the process through which a purpose finds its meaning as a dialectic process; and there are sufficient reasons for resorting to new terms. Since Hegel's time this word has borne a connotation which was foreign to Plato, that of determining in advance the course which experience must follow; and in the rejection of this prescriptive tyranny, the descriptive value of the concept, together with its experiential character, have been largely overlooked. The notion of an a priori deduction of the course of experience is as foreign to Royce as to Plato; the quest is experimental, and it is essentially the same quest. So far as it has a typical history, Royce describes it about as follows: Our life at any moment shows two regions or strata: there is a region in which, having found out what we want and have to do, we have adopted habits toward various objects,—these are our known and recurrent wishes; and there is a region of groping, of working by trial and error, in pursuit of the residual meaning yet ungrasped, "interpolating new terms in a series of stages that lie between the original condition of the organism and a certain ideal goal, which the individual organism never reaches."[2]
The findings of this experimental quest, Royce first refers to as
- ↑ The fact that, according to the type of idealism which Royce holds, the world of objects only exists for me as a world of the external meanings of my ideas does not, of course, imply that the objects with which any given wish has to reckon exist only as external meanings of that particular wish.
- ↑ The World and the Individual, Vol. II, p. 317.
