Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/116

Rh as the one mark of the realistic type of Being, the indifference of any real being to what you may, as knower, think about it, so long as you yourself are not the being that is known. The being, known by you, may be in itself a mere state of consciousness in the mental life of your neighbor. But it is a realistic being so long as it is supposed to be quite independent of your knowledge, and so undetermined by your knowledge. If you think the truth, so much the better for your knowledge. But if you or any other knower chance to think error, or chance even to vanish from the universe, the realistic realm is thereby modified only in respect of so much of its reality as you intelligent beings carry away with you when you blunder or vanish. To say just that, is to be realistic. This then is a general statement of the Realism which I mean in the present lecture to examine. This definition still needs, however, some further historical exemplification, to make sure that we have stated it not unfairly.

Historically speaking, this general realistic conception of what it is to be has been held with various degrees of consciousness and definiteness of conception. The early Greek thinkers soon learn to make a sharp distinction between what existed, as they said, “by nature,” and what was merely believed from the point of view of human and of false “opinion.” These two realms, the real and the false, they erelong not only distinguished, but sundered. It was this sundering that