Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/134

Rh of the object as independent of the knowledge, that various causal connections, nevertheless, bind this or that object to this or that state of knowledge. On the other hand, the independence here in question seems to mean something much more nearly absolute than the independence which the Theory of Probabilities has in mind when it speaks of the two throws of the dice as independent events. For the “whether or no” of customary realistic phraseology means to sunder knowledge and object, taken in their deepest truth, more completely than any adjacent physical events, or even than any two merely physical facts can be sundered. For it is the very that of the object which is to be essentially and wholly sundered from the what of the object, in so far as the latter is expressed in any idea.

The only way to deal with a possibly ambiguous conception like this, is to view it first in its most extreme form, and to observe its consequences. Then later, if the conception is proposed in some modified form, the possibility of such modification may be considered. In this lecture, then, I shall henceforth take the realistic type of independence literally, and as a total independence. How alone a modified Realism can be stated, we shall see in connection with our Third Conception of Being. For the time, our realist shall be supposed to say, as many do, “Knowledge makes no difference to its real outer Object.” What follows?

In brief, then, this realistic definition seems to imply two assertions: First, that even if your knowledge and its object are facts which when examined, say by a psychologist, appear to him to be causally connected, or