Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/126

Rh

I have thus defined the realistic view (and have tried by historical examples both to elucidate and to justify the definition given at the outset) and above all I have tried to separate the one essential feature that lies at the basis of every realistic system from the countless accidental features, and from the more or less controversial consequences that, in this realistic system, or in that, distract our attention from the most fundamental issue. This issue is simply the problem whether any realistic definition whatever can be self-consistent, or can be adequate to what we seek when we look for true Being. Our problem, you see, is not here whether the real world contains one or another special type of beings, whether only states of consciousness and their real relations really exist, or whether only atoms have being, — whether colors are real, or whether space has genuine being, or whether souls or angels are to be found in the outer universe. Our only present problem relates to the sense in which anything whatever can be called real at all. We wish to know whether this abstract sundering of the what and the that can be consistently carried out.

But when the issue is thus simplified, the realistic definition stands before you as something that is on the one hand very plausible and familiar, and on the other hand very baffling and mysterious. As for its plausibility and familiarity, we hardly need here further dwell upon them. Is it not perfectly obvious that the very life of ordinary, socially colored common sense depends