Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/117

98 made them realists, and not the particular sort of nature which they regarded as real. The changeless, although sensuous and materialistic Being of the Eleatics, is only one case of such sharp sundering of the real from the seeming. That true Being is, in some essential way, independent of false opinion, thus comes early to be regarded as a sort of obvious maxim. When Protagoras attacks this maxim, his extreme form of expression is a natural reaction from another extreme. Plato’s theory of the incorporeal Ideas, in its more extreme form, rests upon the presupposition, that unless knowledge is founded upon the absolutely independent reality, nothing is known. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, spends a long time in trying to define what makes any real object, or substance, just itself, — a being logically independent of other beings. That the definition of this essence or of any being also implies that a real substance is independent of the accident that it is known by another is, for Aristotle, rather a tacitly assumed and self-evident matter than a topic of frequent overt argument. But when, in