Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/152

Rh not a realist take refuge in this modified monism, — not in the Eleatic Being, or even in the Substance of Spinoza, but in the assurance that the All, however manifold and full of contrast, is still an interrelated whole?”

Why not, indeed? Ah, — but just as we are about to enter, with the realist, to explore this harbor of refuge, we suddenly observe that the realist has long since carefully closed the channel of entrance with a wholly impassable blockade. For let us remember that, as we observed before, there are already at least Two genuinely and absolutely independent real Beings in the realistic world.

For now comes a single proposition to which I have already made reference. Consider that “idea of o,” of which any object o was to be independent. Let that idea be the realist’s own idea, when he talks of any independent object. I ask the realist: “Is not your own idea itself a real being, or at least a part of one? Come let us reason together. If you, the realist, are a being independent of my idea of you, then are not your own ideas a part of your own independent being? Are not your ideas then real? If, therefore, your object o yonder is independent of your ideas, are not your ideas, in so far as they also are parts of an entity and so have being, independent of o itself? If o vanished, could not your idea consistently be conceived as remaining, as a psychical fact, just what it now is? Yes, ideas, even the most false ones, are facts in the mental world. The realist must call them real in his sense, or abandon his system. And by the very first hypothesis of the system, since independence is a mutual relation, the idea and its object o are mutually