Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/146

Rh man from far lands, shows us how important even the remotest and heretofore least obvious empirical relation may at any moment become.

Our human experience, then, never shows us how beings would behave if they were mutually independent, in the ideal sense of our exact definition. Unhampered, therefore, by empirical guidance, we turn back to the chill realm of the hypothetical many beings of our realist’s hypothesis. These many beings are so far the creatures of an exact definition, whose consequences, purely hypothetical so far, we want to predetermine. We must do so solely upon the basis of our realist’s supposed present assumption. And hereupon, assuming the real world now before us to contain many mutually independent beings, I will prove at once two theses: (1) The many different real beings once thus defined can never come to acquire or later to be conceived as possessing any possible real linkages or connections, binding these different beings together; and so these beings will remain forever wholly sundered, as if in different worlds. (2) The many real beings thus defined can have no common characters; they are wholly different from one another. Only nominally can any common characters be asserted of them.

As to the first thesis: If I am defining mere ideas, apart from reality, I can of course first define two objects as independent, and can later add a definition of something that then comes to link them together. But if first I define two objects as so far quite independent of one another in essence, and if I next define each of them severally as real, apart from and inde-