Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/123

104 another, as our failure to read the ideas of our neighbors proves, can still know the same outer object. The sameness of the physical fact for all souls, is only explicable, in view of the mutual isolation of the souls, by the supposition of an equal isolation of the physical fact from the inner life of all who know it. Finally, if the material objects are independently real, the souls that know are also independently real. All is now independence and isolation. This is a world of chasms. The independence meant is intended to be a mutual relation.

So much for our Sânkhya authors. They bring again to mind what I earlier mentioned about the social motives of realism. Our acceptance of our physical objects as topics of common knowledge for all men, stands side by side with an equally social assurance on our part that any man’s knowledge is primarily a secret from all his neighbors. The mutual independence of the knowers requires their common separation from all their common objects. The independence of the objects makes possible their community for all the independent knowers. These social presuppositions have a great deal to do with the development of the whole realistic world, — a world where an abstract reduction of the reality to a mysterious unity, such as the Eleatic One, has alternated with a tendency to create numerous gaps and separations. In this world, thought, as you see, first declares certain barriers absolute; and then proceeds, by immediate assurance, or by elaborate devices of reasoning, to transcend in knowledge these barriers, and to join in insight what Being is first said to have put forever asunder. The result is a struggle in which the unity sometimes