Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/143

124 one of them is essentially indifferent to the presence, or absence, or alteration of any of the others. So far as the primary definition of any one of them goes, no change in that one need correspond to any change in the others. This is my realist’s present hypothesis. I ask at once, what further consequences follow from this hypothesis? And in particular I want to know whether, when once the realist has defined his many beings as logically independent and as all in his sense real, he can ever afterwards define any way in which they can come to be linked, say by causation or space or time? In brief, I want to see him mend the broken crystal of the world of the Many, and make one world of it. In answer, I suppose that the realist may here at once counsel me to consult experience. What is more familiar than the existence of really independent beings? Yonder in the ocean there are drops of water. Here on the land is my desk. Both are real. Does any change in one of these beings just now need to correspond to any change in the other. If either were supposed to vanish, would the other thereby be changed? The unseen meteors in interplanetary spaces, are they not beings that are real, and that yet just now make no difference to your being or to mine? If we change or die, do they not move on unheeding? If their swarms disintegrate, do we therefore suffer? What then is more familiar than the empirical fact that the real world contains many mutually independent beings? In fact there are men in China or in Lapland who are beings utterly independent of me. They know me not, nor I them; and our lives make “no difference” to one another. Is this not the verdict of experience?