iking
illustration of an equivocation we mentioned in the beginning;[7]
namely, that the import of an experience is regarded as a
manifestation of its cause -- the product of a faculty substituted for
the description of its function. Eternal types are the instrument of
aesthetic life, not its foundation. Take the aesthetic attitude, and
you have for the moment an eternal idea; an idea, I mean, that you
treat as an absolute standard, just as when you take the perceptive
attitude you have an external object which you treat as an absolute
existence. But the aesthetic, like the perceptive faculty, can be
made an object of study in turn, and its theory can be sought; and
then the eternal idea, like the external object, is seen to be a
product of human nature, a symbol of experience, and an
instrument of thought.

The question whether there are not, in external nature or in the
mind of God, objects and eternal types, is indeed not settled, it is
not even touched by this inquiry; but it is indirectly shown to be
futile, because such transcendent realities, if they exist, can have
nothing to do with our ideas of them. The Platonic idea of a tree
may exist; how should I deny it? How should I deny that I might
some day find myself outside the sky gazing at it, and feeling that I,
with my mental vision, am beholding the plenitude of arboreal
beauty, perceived in this world only as a vague essence haunting
the multiplicity of finite trees? But what can that have to do with
my actual sense of what a tree should be? Shall we take the
Platonic myth literally, and say the idea is a memory of the tree I
have already seen in heaven? How else establish any relation
between that eternal object and the type in my mind? But why, in
that case, this infinite variability of ideal trees? Was the Tree
Beautiful an oak, or a cedar, an English or an American elm? My
actual types are finite and mutually exclusive; that heavenly type
must be one and infinite. The problem is hopeless.

Very simple, on the other hand, is the explanation of the existence
of that type as a residuum of experience. Our idea of an individual
thing is a compound and residuum of our several experiences of it;
and in the same manner our idea of a class is a compound and
residuum of our ideas of the particulars that compose it. Particular
impressions have, by virtue of their intrinsic similarity or of the
identity of their relations, a tendency to be merged and identified,