Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/148

Rh of the two. This analysis holds of every possible link that is secondarily to bind together any two of the many beings that were declared to be primarily independent. Thus the many cannot be linked as even the most widely sundered empirical objects are always found to be linked, even at the very moment when you first observe their relations. The realist’s many beings, as defined, are defined as wholly disconnected; and they must remain so. You cannot first say of them, for instance, that they are logically independent, and then truly add that nevertheless they are really and causally linked. No two of them are in the same space; for space would be a link. And just so, no two are in the same time; no two are in any physical connection; no two are parts of any really same whole. The mutual independence, if once real, and real as defined, cannot later be changed to any form of mutual dependence.

And now for the second thesis. In our ordinary experience we often, as a fact, observe that two objects have some character, as we say, “in common.” We call this the “same” character, quality or feature, present in both of them. Thus in experience, what is called the same redness can appear in two cherries. The old controversy about universals has made familiar the question whether that which is truly the same can ever really form part of two different beings. How this question is to be answered when it concerns the structure of that organic whole, that realm of mutual interdependence called our concrete experience, we shall later see. For the moment we have only to consider such a question as applying solely to the independent beings which the realist has defined.