Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/47

 to its vanishing point in body. The nature of the self-existent whole is then being by degrees extinguished in us. Suppose, per impossibile, that the universe could be anæsthetised; then, in the same way, the conditions of its concrete reality and self-existence would be gone.

But, it may be objected, its abstract reality, as a mass of insentient matter, would persist and exist none the less unaffected by the extinction of consciousness.

First, however, we have to consider whether we know that an abstract reality can persist by itself. Those who take the imperceptibles of science as the absolute type of what is real might here have something to say. But the physical realism which has been our guide, together with our own attitude to it, lead us to a different position. The reality of universals, as also that of secondary, and, in our view, of tertiary qualities, could not be separated from that of the most concrete self-existence, i.e., from the nature of mind or experience. An anæsthetised universe,