Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/161

142 genuine unity of Being. Before we proceed, however, to a closer study of the first historical rival of Realism, namely, to the Mystical definition of the ontological predicate, something is still needed by way of a reminder of our precise present position.

The genuine essence of Realism consists, as we saw, in defining any being as real precisely in so far as in essence it is wholly independent of ideas that, while other than itself, refer to it. We insisted, at the last time, that this thesis implies an absolute dualism within the world of real being, since an idea also is an existent fact, and is as independently real as is the supposed independent object. No realist can consistently reduce the world to one independently real Being, however complex and wealthy in inner structure this One Being might be permitted to become. At least two mutually independent Beings, such that either of them, by its changing or by its vanishing, would imply no correspondent change in the other, remain in the realist’s world. Moreover, these two beings, once defined and real, would forbid us to speak afterwards of their having any real tie, or real fashion of cooperation, unless this so-called tie is really a new fact, independent of both the beings that are to be linked. Such a tie, however, is a tie only in name. If beings are, like the objects of our ordinary experience, already interdependent, they can indeed consistently assume new ties, as young people who are already members of the same social order or of the same human family can marry. But in the supposed, and distinctly not empirical realm, to which the consistent