Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/115

96 in any realistic system, are directly present to no consciousness whatever, and are thus absolutely different from the contents of any mind. But, on the other hand, it is not true that Realism need regard only such unconscious facts or beings as real in its sense of the word real. You, for instance, as a conscious mind, might be viewed by a realist as a being that he would call real in his sense. That assertion, if made by a typical realist, would simply mean that the contents of your mind, although present within your own consciousness, are real without regard to whether anybody else knows of your existence or not. It is true that some realists, namely, the extreme materialists, have in their systems declared only matter to be real. It is also true that such a realist as Herbart, who was no materialist, still defined the real beings as in themselves absolutely simple, and therefore not conscious beings. But, on the other hand, many realistic systems have regarded conscious beings as in the realistic sense real; and it is historically possible for a realist to maintain that his world consists wholly of conscious beings, or even of mere states of mind, when taken together with the unconsciously real relationships existent amongst these beings. Whether such a theory can be consistently worked out, with a purely realistic sense of what it is to be real, is indeed another question. But one could be a realist in his definition of Being, and still insist that all Being is in its nature entirely psychological.

All these various interpretations of the phrase “outside of the mind,” prove, then, inadequate to express the meaning of the realist. There remains as the one essential idea conveyed by the phrase “outside of the mind” and