Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/114

Rh world “outside” is here literally to mean. Space, too, in its wholeness, may be viewed by a realist as “extra-mental.” But space as a whole is obviously not in any literal and spatial sense “outside” of anything whatever; so that to call space “extra-mental” is to use a phrase that ipso facto needs further interpretation. Accordingly, “extra-mental” is often interpreted as meaning merely “other than” the knowing mind. From this point of view Realism would mean only that an object known is other than the idea, or thought, or person, that knows the object. But in this very general sense, any and every effort to get at truth involves the admission that what one seeks is in some way more or less other than one’s ideas while one is seeking; and herewith no difference would be established between Realism and any opposing metaphysical view. Idealism, and even the extremest philosophical Scepticism, both recognize in some form, that our goal in knowledge is other than our effort to reach the the goal. Still, then, the realistic meaning of the phrase “outside of the knowing mind” would need an explanation.

But if this phrase is next taken to mean “different from or apart from the contents of any or of all minds,” the phrase is inadequate to express what Realism has historically meant by the reality of the world. It is indeed true that in any realistic system there must be at least some real facts that find no place amongst the contents of any mind whatever. This is true, for any realistic view, at least, with regard to those supposed facts called the real relations between knowing beings and the “outside” objects which they know. For those real relations,