Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/151

132 or community of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor in the same natural or spiritual order.

The doctrine of the Many, upon a basis of the arbitrarily assumed definition of many, thus becomes, in seeming, paradoxical enough. Historically, Realism has more than once assumed, however, almost this uncanny form; and the mere seeming of paradox is in itself no refutation of a philosophical doctrine. Yet before we press this very paradox to its final extreme, we must first see whether the realist is in any way forced to persist in defining his real Beings as in this sense many at all. Have we not ourselves admitted the possibility that, in one real Being, unity and multiplicity, for all that yet we see, can be reconciled? The Many, if once irrevocably defined as real, and as essentially independent, can never again be linked by external ties. They indeed thenceforth remain strangers. “But surely,” one may say, “the realist is not forced to remain in so scattered a world. He can still pass over to the other hypothesis. He can say: ‘My world is One Being, a single, real, but perhaps an internally complex, yes an infinitely wealthy Being, whose various aspects and functions are not logically independent, but are linked in a system, so that fully to define one part or region would be to define something of the essence of all, and so that no portion can indefinitely alter or wholly vanish without some implied change, however minute, in all the other parts. Diversity there is in my world, but no sundering of entities.’ Why may