Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/125

106 lations. And just so, too, Power, Efficacy, Activity, seem to be evidences of independence. Plato associates them in the Sophist, with Reality. Yet, I insist, none of these predicates are essential to Realism.

Realism especially tends to sunder the what from the that, the essence from its existence. But permanence properly belongs to the what and not to the that of any being in a realistic world. And the same is true of activity, potency, effectiveness. One can define a mythical being, say Achilles, conceiving him as yellow-haired. To be yellow-haired belongs to the what of Achilles; to his essence, not to his existence. One can so conceive him while not asserting that he is, but while defining him as a myth. But just as easily one can conceive him as active, as pursuing Hector; and still one need not conceive him as anything but a myth. Activity and realistic existence are then certainly different ideas, just as much as yellow-haired and existence. Just so it is with permanence. Not all realists have asserted that permanence holds true of the Real. A world of events could be independently real for any Heraclitean thinker. The flashes of moonlight upon water may as well stand for independent realities as any other facts of experience. With the arguments used in special realistic systems, for the permanence of the reals, we have here nothing to do. Our concern is with the definition.

So there remains one more as the one essential historical mark of the realistic type of Being, its ontological independence of knowledge that refers to it from without.