We might try to think that the world, _as known to each of us_, is constructed and sustained by his individual consciousness; and that every other individual also frames for himself, and sustains by the action of his intelligence, the world in which he in particular lives and moves. Of course such a construction is to be taken as a reconstruction, a construction by way of knowledge only; but for our present purpose this is indifferent. Thus we might think of the ideas and objects of our private world rather as corresponding to than as from the beginning identical with those which our fellow-men are occupied in constructing each within his own sphere of consciousness. And the same would be true even of the objects and contents within our own world, in as far as an act or effort would be required to maintain them, of the same kind with that which was originally required to construct them.... Thus the paradox of reference would become clearer. We should understand that we refer to a correspondence by means of a content. We should soften down the contradiction of saying that a name to meet which we have and can get nothing but an idea, nevertheless does not stand for that idea but for something else. We should be able to say that the name stands for those elements in the idea which correspond in all our separate worlds, and in our own world of yesterday and of today, considered as so corresponding. (Pp. 45, 46.) According to this view, the idea obtains the universality which constitutes it an idea by a sort of process of elimination. It is like a composite photograph. It selects only the common elements in a large number of particular existences, and thus succeeds in representing, or referring to, all the particular existences which have gone to make it up. But when we come to consider the bearing which this view of universality, or generalized significance, has on our estimate of the knowledge-process, we feel that it has not solved the problem for us. In the first place, the idea _in its existence_ is just as particular when regarded as made up of the common elements of many ideas as is any of the ideas whose elements are taken. A composite photograph is just as much a single photograph as any one of the photographs which are taken to compose it. The chasm between the particularity of the psychical image and the universality of its meaning is not bridged by regarding the content of the image as made up by eliminating unlike elements in a number of images. The stuff with which thought has to work is still nothing more than a particular psychical image, and the problem of what gives it its logical value as a general significance is still unsolved. Nor does it seem possible to find anything in the _existence_ of the image which could account for its reference to something outside of itself. The _fact_ of reference itself becomes an ultimate mystery.[48]