Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/154

Rh have, as first defined, no connection with each other, but they can never get any possible linkage or relation. All their connections are nominal. As idea, the idea was said to have o for its object. But the idea is an entity. It can have nothing to do with the other entity o. These two are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor in the same natural order, nor in the same spiritual order. They have nothing in common, neither quality nor worth, neither form nor content, neither truth or meaning. No causality links them. If you say so, you again use mere names. No will genuinely can relate them. That they appear to have connections is simply a matter of false seeming. Our original definition called the one of them an idea relating to the object o. We now know that such an expression was a mere name. The idea has assumed as idea an obligation that as independent entity it cannot pay. It has no true relation with o, and o has no community with the idea. To speak of any being not o itself as if it were really an idea of o, is as if you spoke of the square root of an odor, or of the logarithm of an angel. For idea and object are two real beings. Their irrevocable sundering no new definition of their essence can now join again. For reality, in this doctrine, is independent of all definitions that could be made after the fact. Relations that could link the two entities would merely prove to be new independent beings other than either of them.

Nor is this all. The idea here in question is any idea or opinion. o is any object. Now a realist’s own theory is an idea or opinion. And the world was to be