Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/128

Rh startling in their strangeness. And in what sense this last observation is true, a very moderate knowledge of the history of Realism will show. For the paradox of this history is that while the realistic metaphysic begins as the very voice of common sense, the more developed and thoroughgoing realistic systems show a character which has made realism, from the Sânkhya to Herbart, or to Herbert Spencer, the breeding place of a wholly marvellous race of metaphysical paradoxes. The Atoms and the Monads, the Ideas of Plato, the isolated Souls of the Sânkhya, the unknowable Things in Themselves of Kant, the transcendent Reals of Herbart, the Eleatic One, the Substance of Spinoza, and the Unknowable of Spencer, are beings far more remote from our ordinary experience and from common sense than are many views such as Realism vigorously opposes. Yet all these types of hypothetical realistic beings were invented in the very effort to make a realistic definition of what it is to be, consistent with itself, and adequate to the demands of life and of experience.

A definition whose union with common sense is at first so close, but whose consequences are subject to such remarkable and rapid transformations, is not indeed thereby discredited, but is at all events properly subject to a close scrutiny, to see whether we may not find out the reason of this tendency towards unexpected interpretations of Being. But if we indeed look yet more narrowly at the history of Realism, we find obvious motives running through the whole which make it seem in still other ways paradoxical. For upon such closer scrutiny we find that Realism has, as it were, vibrated between two histori-