Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/139

120 And now suppose that o stands for any real object that you please, whether an angel, or a worm, or a Spencerian Unknowable; and that o is, precisely thus, independent of any idea that you please, so long as this idea is not itself a part of o. Suppose, too, that the object o is consequently also independent even of the very ideas by which we just now declared it to be independent. Suppose just so that the ideas are, as mere ideas, definable independently of their objects. Then, finally, we have before us the unmodified realistic definition of the sense in which the object o is real. For Realism asserts simply that the real being of o is adequately defined by the supposed law that no change in either o or the mere idea of o primarily or essentially corresponds to any change or variation or vanishing of the other member of this pair, so long as that idea is not itself a part of o, and that any causal connection, or truthful agreement, or other such mutual dependence of o and the idea, if it ever came to exist, would be a third fact, external both to the primary nature of o and to that of the idea.

This abstract development of the sense of that “whether or no” which common sense so lightly utters when it speaks of an object as real “whether or no” you are aware of the fact, — this development, I say, already serves to bring more clearly before us the extreme subtlety of the considerations upon which the realistic view depends. But the definition is now complete. Let us at once set it to work. It has defined a world. Let us enter that world, and see what is there.