Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/144

Rh But as to the consequences of such independence, why is not experience also again our guide? Beings, thus primarily independent, may later come to be linked by actual ties. These ties are then new facts in the world. But they are possible. The drop of water in the ocean, evaporated, may enter into the atmospheric circulation, may be carried, as moisture, to my desk, and may there help to warp the wood. The meteors, reaching the earth’s neighborhood, may be seen and perhaps heard as they explode. The men in China or in Lapland may become my business correspondents, my enemies, or my neighbors. So then independence, first real, may later change to mutual dependence, and what were strangers may become linked. Is not all this obvious?

But if one thus urges upon me such considerations, I reply at once that all this is simply not obvious as any case of true independence or of its possible consequences. I have just abstractly defined an absolute type of mutual independence supposed to exist amongst many real beings. This independence, I suppose a realist hypothetically to assert as the truth about this world. I ask for the consequences of this hypothesis. But now I distinctly decline to admit that, in our concrete human experience, you can ever show me any two physically real objects which are so independent of each other that no change in one of them need correspond to any change of the other. On the contrary, the very cases mentioned are cases of objects such that certain changes of one do very really correspond to very precise changes in the other, and the very beings of each can only be defined by admitting the possibility of just such a change. The water, once