Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/162

Rh realist finds himself driven, the two independent beings of which his world, if reduced to its lowest terms, consists, have no ties, and can never get any. For a similar reason, they have no common characters, and can never get any. The inevitable result is that the very presupposition of the entire doctrine is contradicted by its outcome. For if idea and object have no ties and no common characters whatever, they simply cannot be related as idea and object. The consequence is that both the realistic definition, and the totally independent beings, prove to be contradictory, and vanish together, leaving us, as our result so far, the thesis that, if the Other which our finite thinking, in its disquietude, seeks to attain, is to be defined at all, it cannot be totally independent of the thought which defines it, or remain unchanged if that thought essentially alters or vanishes. The ultimate dualism of the realistic view is false and must be abandoned. This, so far, is all that we have definitely made out concerning the conditions of a consistent definition of real Being.

But hereupon we are brought face to face with that ancient rival of the realistic definition. And this is Mysticism. If the dualism is to be abandoned, must we instead define Being as an absolute and simple unity? Must we say, the phrase “to be real” means something that cannot be asserted of any object whatever, so long as this object is defined through ideas that refer to it, or so long as the ideas themselves, with their endless search for the Other, trouble our consciousness, emphasize differences, and by their very striving after something beyond, keep our knowledge from its true goal? Must we insist that only such an object as quenches thought through the