Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/153

134 and typically a pair of independent beings. Now the thesis that, if reality means independence, the ideas too, of anybody you please, are themselves existent entities, or are parts of an entity existent and independent, constitutes what I may call the Forgotten Thesis of most realistic systems. The whole present argument depends upon simply declining to countenance that forgetfulness. An idea has Real Being if anything has Being. And whatever existence means, that an idea also possesses.

A knowing process and its independent object, constitute then the irreducible minimum of the realistic world. But herewith I propose a perfectly simple and final procedure. I propose to treat this pair of entities precisely as we have just treated any two independently real beings in general. For this pair are not only the so-called idea and object; they are also a pair of mutually independent entities. We must not forget this aspect. The two theses just proved are now merely to be applied to them. The crisis of the realist’s destiny is reached. The doom of his world is at hand.

Object and idea, viewed as entities, are twain. Realism began by saying so. So much is nominated in the bond. The realist shall have his pound of flesh, although we can grant him indeed not one drop of blood for all his world. By the original hypothesis either any individual idea, or o, the object of that idea, could without contradiction be conceived as changing, or as vanishing, without any logically necessary change in the other member of the pair. Therefore, according to what we have now shown to be the case with any two independent realities, the idea of o and o, as real beings, not only