Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/111

92 But the task of critically analyzing Realism, to get at the essential meaning, is austere and intricate. Realism easily assumes its vast metaphysical responsibilities; yet an examination of the true state of its accounts with the truth proves to be a very baffling enterprise. The preparation of a balance sheet of these accounts, the definite presentation of the assets and the liabilities of Realism, has been repeatedly attempted by philosophers ever since Plato, and even before his time. Of the difficulty of the work let the proverbial obscurity of metaphysical treatises bear witness; for very much of that obscurity is due to just this problem. As a fact, all here depends upon finally simplifying the issue, upon leaving out countless non-essential problems, which have been discussed by this or that realistic system of doctrine, and upon reducing the central question of every realistic view of the universe to its lowest terms. Once thus separated from its historical setting, the mere intricacy of this problem indeed vanishes; and you find yourself at last in presence of a very precise issue. But then your difficulty only changes its shape; for hereupon the issue brought to light by Realism proves to be highly abstract; and the austerity of which I just spoke comes to be felt all the more as the crisis of the enterprise approaches. Nowhere in these lectures shall we have to undertake, in fact, a more abstract investigation than the one here immediately before us. May the magnitude of the interests at stake justify the inevitable hardships of just this day of our voyage!

Realism asserts, as I have said, that to be real means to be independent of ideas which, while other than a given