Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/217

198 which you call real “apart from” or “externally to” or “in relative independence of” the experience of any particular observer, but which you, meanwhile, regard as, by nature, “sources” or “causes” or “possible causes” of knowledge. When you say, with such a consciously modified Realism, “The Real is not ever wholly independent of whether it is known or not; it is only relatively independent; and it is, in nature, such as to be knowable, or such as, under conditions, to become a cause or source of knowledge,” — when you modify Realism in this way, what is the true consequence for your fundamental Theory of Being?

The consequence, I insist, is deeper than you might at first suppose. For it is natural to imagine that you can still keep the convenient part of Realism, the practically unapproachable indifference, dignity, and compelling authority, of the Independent Beings, while sacrificing so much of the abstractions of pure Realism as it proves to be logically inconvenient to retain. “The world,” you perhaps now say, “is there, of course, whether or no this or that man knows it. And a man has practically to submit his knowledge to the Real, just as if it were wholly independent of him in every way. Of course no independence is ever really absolute. That has to be admitted. All things are always interrelated. But, practically speaking, the meteors are what they are, whether or no we men see them. And Neptune, when discovered, was not created by the astronomer’s computations nor by his telescope nor by his brain. Now this practical independence of any particular knowledge is what we mean by the Being of things. Before, after, and apart from