Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/291

No. 3.] habit of speaking as if sunrise were the reality and the rotation of the earth the theory. But if we think the matter out, we see that the reality, by which we explain, to which we refer, our sensations, is an object of thought and not of sensation at all. And I have already shown that objectivity means coherence of my thinking with that of others.

IV. One sense of the term real need not detain us long — the sense in which we speak of "a real circle," meaning a perfect circle. In this sense "the real" is confessedly "the ideal." We call a figure of wood or stone or iron a circle only in so far as we can think it under the form of a perfect circle: we admit that the material figure existing in actual space is not the real circle.

V. Connected with this use of reality, is that in which real is used in a moral sense, the sense in which it is held that "The Real is the Rational." People have scoffed at this utterance of Hegel's; but it expresses a truth constantly recognized in practical life — a truth which people ignore at their hazard. The real is distinguished from the sham. We go behind the phenomenal existence of institutions to examine their ethical content, and we pronounce them real or unreal. Now this sense fits in with the main sense of reality, as the coherent and intelligible, except that we bring a moral standard of value, so that what is real in the sense of not being imaginary, may yet be unreal in the sense of being absurd or mischievous. The precise relationship between reality in this sense of rationality, and reality in the general sense of intelligibility, is the initial question of the science of ethics: What is the relation between being and well-being? Does well-being differ from being except in having respect to more permanence and to a more complex system of relations? These are questions I need not discuss at length now. Enough, if it is clear that the real in the sense in which it is said to be the rational, is at least a further carrying out the principle that the real is the intelligible.

The real as the rational differs from the merely existent (the objectively real — the second sense noted) just as definite species in plants or animals differ from "sports" and from "survivals."