Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/155

136 his object. Our perfectly general result, true of all ideas, applies of course to the group of ideas called the realistic theory. As an entity, the realist is an independent being. His ideas, as part of his being, can have nothing to do with any object that exists independently of himself or themselves. The realistic theory, then, as we now know, by its own explicit consequences, and just because its real objects are totally independent of its ideas, has nothing to do with any independently real object, and has no relation to the independent external world that its own account defines. Nor can it ever come to get such a relation. No realist, as he himself now must consistently maintain, either knows any independent being, or has ever, in idea, found himself related to one, or has ever made any reference to such a being, or has ever formed or expressed an opinion regarding one, or, in his own sense of the word “real,” really believes that there is one.

And thus, suddenly at one stroke, the entire realistic fabric, with all those “suns and milky ways” to which Schopenhauer, in a famous passage, so prettily referred, vanishes, — leaving not a wrack, not even a single lonely Unknowable, behind. For an Unknowable, too, would be an independent real object. Our present idea of it would have to refer to this object, if it were real; and no idea, as we know, can refer to any independent reality, since in order for such reference to be itself real, two irrevocably sundered beings would have to destroy