validity of idea[42] is its functional or instrumental use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. If Lotze's view were correct, "blue" valid once would be valid always--even when red or green were actually called for to fulfil specific conditions. This is to say validity really refers to rightfulness or adequacy of performance in an asserting of connection--not to a meaning as contemplated in detachment. If we refer again to the fact that the genuine antecedent of thought is a situation which is disorganized in its structural elements, we can easily understand how certain contents may be detached and _held_ apart as meanings or references, actual or possible. We can understand how such detached contents may be of use in effecting a review of the entire experience, and as affording standpoints and methods of a reconstruction which will maintain the integrity of behavior. We can understand how validity of meaning is measured by reference to something which is not mere meaning; by reference to something which lies beyond it as such--viz., the reconstitution of an experience into which it enters as method of control. That paradox of ordinary experience and of scientific inquiry by which objectivity is given alike to matter of perception and to conceived relations--to facts and to laws--affords no peculiar difficulty because the test of objectivity is everywhere the same: anything is objective in so far as, through the medium of conflict, it controls the movement of experience in its reconstructive transition. There is not first an object, whether of sense perception or of conception, which afterward somehow exercises this controlling influence; but the objective is _any_ existence exercising the function of control. It may only control the act of inquiry; it may only set on foot doubt, but this is direction of subsequent experience, and, in so far, is a token of objectivity. It has to be reckoned with. So much for the thought-content or meaning as having a validity of its own. It does not have it as isolated or given or static; it has it in its dynamic reference, its use in determining further movement of experience. In other words, the "meaning," having been selected and made up with reference to performing a certain office in the evolution of a unified experience, can be tested in no other way than by discovering whether it does what it was intended to do and what it purports to do.[43]