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Rh the most unreflective and popular Realism embodies a truth, which it is our duty as idealists to comprehend, and to include within a larger truth. Moreover, as I hold, that truth upon which realistic doctrines lay a falsely one-sided stress is intimately related to the very truth which Professor Howison seeks to bring into such prominence; and Professor Howison himself, in declaring that the concept of “things in themselves” must ultimately receive an ethical interpretation, has explicitly pointed out a deep relation between the realistic and the ethical theories of Being. In short, Professor Howison’s thesis might be called an Ethical Realism quite as fairly as an Ethical Idealism. It becomes me, therefore, in the re-examination of the concept of Reality to give some of the fundamental conceptions of Realism the fairest scrutiny that space here permits. For of course no Idealism can in the end be acceptable which is not just both to those “external facts” upon which the realist usually lays such stress, and to those moral realities to which Professor Howison devotes his attention. And the thesis that the true basis of the so-called “external facts,” the real meaning of the “things in themselves,” lies in the moral world, is one that for me, as for Professor Howison, has great philosophical importance.

I shall therefore, in the present part of my paper, first scrutinise some realistic interpretations of the meaning of the concept of Reality; then, as I proceed, I shall restate and defend my idealistic interpretation of this concept; and thus I shall prepare the way for an effort, in the later parts of this paper,