The vulgar notion of correspondence here is that the thoughts must copy the reality—­cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti et cognoscentis; and philosophy, without having ever fairly sat down to the question, seems to have instinctively accepted this idea:  propositions are held true if they copy the eternal thought; terms are held true if they copy extra-mental realities.  Implicitly, I think that the copy-theory has animated most of the criticisms that have been made on humanism.

A priori, however, it is not self-evident that the sole business of our mind with realities should be to copy them.  Let my reader suppose himself to constitute for a time all the reality there is in the universe, and then to receive the announcement that another being is to be created who shall know him truly.  How will he represent the knowing in advance?  What will he hope it to be?  I doubt extremely whether it could ever occur to him to fancy it as a mere copying.  Of what use to him would an imperfect second edition of himself in the new comer’s interior be?  It would seem pure waste of a propitious opportunity.  The demand would more probably be for something absolutely new.  The reader would conceive the knowing humanistically, ‘the new comer,’ he would say, ’must take account of my presence by reacting on it in such A way that good would accrue to us both.  If copying be requisite to that end, let there be copying; otherwise not.’  The essence in any case would not be the copying, but the enrichment of the previous world.

I read the other day, in a book of Professor Eucken’s, a phrase, ‘Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins,’ which seems to be pertinent here.  Why may not thought’s mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence?  No one who has read Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which brands them as ‘illusory’ because they copy nothing in the thing.  The notion of a world complete in itself, to which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is irrational.  Rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious supplement.

‘Knowing,’ in short, may, for aught we can see beforehand to the contrary, be only one way of getting into fruitful relations with reality whether copying be one of the relations or not.