Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/132

Rh tution of any realistic world. And here we shall restate the precise sense of the realistic definition, and next shall develope, in a series of formal propositions, its inevitable consequences, until we see to what end they lead, both the realist himself, and all whose faith, whether in the world of science or in the realm of religion, depends upon realistic philosophical formulas.

As to the meaning of the realistic definition, we must take our realist seriously. He declares that whenever you know any being not yourself, your object is primarily and logically quite independent of your knowledge, so that whether your knowledge comes or goes, is true or is false, your object so far may remain whatever it was. He asserts, also, that in knowing the rest of the universe, you do, on the whole, know a being that is not your knowledge, and that is consequently independent of your knowledge. He asserts that this independence is the very means of defining the Being of any real object, when viewed in relation to any knowledge of this real object that is not itself a part of the object known. Now this definition turns upon the conception of independence. In just what sense is the reality to be independent of the knowing process?

In the Mathematical Theory of Probabilities, the conception of events that are said to be mutually independent is familiar. Two chance throws of dice, two drawings of a lottery, are such independent events. But the definition of such independence in the theory in question is always relative, and is limited to special aspects of the objects in question. One sometimes means, in such cases, that while both events, say both throws of the dice, are