Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/131

112 which lies at the basis of his whole doctrine, to the development of a positive conception of a world that shall contain either One Being or Many Realities. Either all Unity, or else no linkages: such has been his historical alternative. Now is this fate of Realism a mere accident, due to the defects of individual realistic thinkers? Or is it somehow founded in the very nature of the realistic definition of what it is to be?

This question deserves to be considered more carefully, and upon its own merits. We have perhaps exhausted the aid that a merely historical survey can just at present give us. We must turn back to our realistic definition itself, and must directly consider, first, how best to state its exact logical force, and then how to test it by applying it to that famous problem as to whether the universe contains One real Being or Many real Beings. For, as I must insist, it is precisely the problem of the One and the Many which will prove to be the great test problem of realistic metaphysics.

And so we turn from the perplexing and varied history of the fortunes of realistic doctrine, to the even more forbidding task of reflecting upon the first principles of Realism. We lay aside for the time all thought of whether God, or the souls, or permanent matter, or the flashes of moonlight upon water, or the coquettish glances of our Sânkhya commentator’s world of Oriental courts and splendors, are to be regarded as real beings. We ask only as to the most general theory of the consti-