Your intelligent ideas of things never consist of mere imagery of the thing, but always involve a consciousness of how you propose to act toward the thing of which you have ideas.... Complex scientific ideas viewed as to their conscious significance are, as Professor Stout has well said, plans of action, ways of constructing the object of your scientific consciousness.... By the word idea, then, as we shall use it, when, after having criticised opposing theory, we come to state in these lectures our own thesis, I shall mean in the end any state of consciousness, whether simple or complex, which when present is then and there viewed as at least a partial expression, or embodiment of a single conscious purpose.... In brief, an idea in my present definition may, and in fact always does, if you please, appear to be representative of a fact existent beyond itself. But the _primary_ character which makes it an idea is _not its representative character_, is not its vicarious assumption of the responsibility of standing for a being beyond itself, but is its inner character as _relatively fulfilling the purpose_, that is as presenting the partial fulfilment of the purpose which is in the consciousness of the moment wherein the idea takes place.[168]... Now this purpose, just in so far as it gets a present conscious embodiment in the contents, and in the form of the complex state called the idea, constitutes what I shall hereafter call the internal meaning of the idea.[169]... But ideas often seem to have a meaning; yes, as one must add, finite ideas always undertake or appear to have a meaning that is not exhausted by this conscious internal meaning presented and relatively fulfilled at the moment when the idea is there for our finite view. The melody sung, the artists' idea, the thought of your absent friend, a thought on which you love to dwell, all these not merely have their obvious internal meaning as meeting a conscious purpose by their very presence, but also they at least appear to have that other sort of meaning, that reference beyond themselves to objects, that cognitive relation to outer facts, that attempted correspondence with outer facts, which many accounts of our ideas regard as their primary inexplicable and ultimate character. I call this second, and for me still problematic, and derived aspect of the nature of ideas, their apparently external meaning.[170] From all this it is quite evident that Mr. Royce accepts and welcomes the results of the work of modern psychology on the nature of the idea. The difficulty will come in making the connection between these accepted results and the Platonic conception of ultimate reality as stated in the following: