But to take another example: there is such a thing as a phenomenon called the “color” red. Imagine how it might be defined. A reactionary would call it a “Bolshevik” (_A_1); a Bolshevik would say “My color” (_A_2); a color-blind person would say “such a thing does not exist” (_A_3); a Daltonist would say “that is green” (_A_4); a metaphysician would say “that is the soul of whiskey” (_A_5); an historian would say “that is the color of the ink with which human history has been written” (_A_6); an uneducated person would say “that is the color of blood” (_A_7); the modern scientist would say “it is the light of such and such wave length” (_A_8). If this last definition be “valid in infinity” or not we do not know, but it is, nevertheless, a “scientific truth” in the present condition of our knowledge.
This final but unknown “truth valid in infinity” is somehow perceived or felt by us as an ideal, for in countless years of observation we have formed a series of less and less false, more and more nearly true “ideas” about the phenomenon. The “ideas” are _reflexes_ of the phenomenon, reflected in our midst as in a mirror; the reflexes may be distorted, as in a convex or concave mirror, but they suggest an ideal reflex valid in infinity. It is of the utmost importance to realize that the words which are used to express the ideas and the ideals are THE MATERIALIZATION of the ideas and ideal; it is only by words that we are enabled to give to other human beings an exact or nearly exact impression which we have had of the phenomenon.
It may be helpful to illustrate this process by an example. Let us suppose that a man makes an experiment of doing his own portrait from a mirror, which may be plane, concave or convex. If he looks into a plane mirror, he will see his true likeness; even so, if he be a poor designer, he will draw the likeness badly. Let us suppose that the man has beautiful features but because the drawing is very poor, it will not convey the impression that the features of the original were beautiful. If this poor designer were to look into and work from a concave or convex mirror, the drawing of his likeness would have practically no resemblance to his original features.