Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/112

Rh real being, still relate to that being. If you suppose a realist to be addressing yourself, what he asserts may then be put into very much the following words: “The world of Fact,” he tells you, “is independent of your knowledge of that world. This independence, and the very reality itself of the world of Fact, are one. Were all knowledge of facts to cease, the only direct and logically necessary change thereby produced in the real world, would consist in the consequence that the particular real fact known as the existence of knowledge, would, by hypothesis, have vanished. Since we men are not only knowers, but voluntary agents as well, it is true that the vanishing of our own knowledge would indirectly alter the fact-world in a negative and perhaps in a very important way, since all the real results that our will, in view of our knowledge, might have brought to pass, would be prevented from taking place. But this is a secondary matter. Primarily, the vanishing of our knowledge would make no difference in the being of the independent facts that now we know.”

In brief, to sum up this whole view in a phrase, Realism asserts that the mere knowledge of any Being by any one who is not himself the Being known, “makes no difference whatever” to that known Being.

Otherwise stated, Realism involves, as its consequence, a characteristic mental attitude towards the truth, — an attitude celebrated in one of the best-known stanzas of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyám. Realism, at least in so far as it considers knowledge and does not add a special hypothesis to explain the active deeds of voluntary agents, submits. It accepts its realities as facts to which its own