Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/129

110 cal extremes, extremes suggested by the well-known question whether the real world contains One independently real Being, or Many such beings, all equally independent of any knowledge that, not belonging to their own nature, refers to them from without. It is just the problem of the One and the Many which, when it arises in a world defined in the realistic way, is the deeper source of those marvellous metaphysical hypotheses of which we just spoke. And it is when we consider this aspect of the history of Realism that we become at length fully awake to the gravity of the problems in hand.

Realistic systems have frequently, like the Sânkhya, taught that many different beings are real. The historical fate of such pluralistic forms of Realism is well known, and has already been mentioned. Again and again, with an uniformity that seems characteristic, such types of Realism, in order to assure the true multiplicity of their real beings, have defined these beings as in ultimate nature quite independent of one another, as essentially out of all mutual relations, as isolated. The result one sees in the Monads of Leibniz, or in the Reals of Herbart, or in the souls of the Sânkhya itself. Then, necessarily, there has arisen the question why, despite the isolation of the real Beings, this, our own world of experience, seems so full of interrelationships, of mutual connections, of laws that bind soul to soul, and sun to planet, and all things to space, to time, or to God. To meet such demands, Realism has in just such pluralistic systems resorted to various paradoxical secondary explanations. Preëstablished harmonies, illusory forms of unreal linkage, or assumptions of intermediating principles,