4. Standard Cultural Ideas.
Now it is clear that all actual ideas, considered in extension, are notions, or presented ideas. There are no ideas outside consciousness and there is no actual consciousness save that which appears in some moment (or presented span) of consciousness. In such a moment, however, there may be deliberate reflection on consciousness which was actual in the past, and there is normally the recalling of ideas which are familiar through a long series of past presentations. It is instinctively felt that only a minute fraction of memorized experience can come to the surface in any moment of consciousness. Hence any habitual idea must be considered as subsuming, and as being essentially more important than, any one of its passing presentations. If it be the idea of some concrete object-matter, it will reappear in various instances as the same idea, but in many different contexts, according to what qualities or relations of the object- matter are specially in question. The assumed reality of a concrete object-matter consists largely in the fact that it has an indefinite number of qualities and relations which cannot be simultaneously predicated of it as subject, while only a few of them can be simultaneously imagined. Many, however, can be predicated in succession, whether in the process of writing a treatise on the given subject or in the course of contemplating it at different moments of a life-time. When we have once clearly learnt to predicate anything of a subject, that something belongs to our habitual idea of it, though not necessarily to every subsequent presented idea in which bare reference to the subject may be made.
As the habitual personal idea is thus nearer to reality than the presented personal idea, so must the cultural idea be considered nearer to reality than the personal idea. It may be the idea of some object-matter which is better known to one person in one of its aspects and to another person in another of its aspects. Different minds in human society are constantly acting upon one another through speech and writing, and thus supplementing each other's experience through transmitted information; yet the best-informed individual's knowledge falls short of the
