Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/218

Rh anybody’s knowledge, things remain, on the whole, whatever they are. To be and to be known, to be knowable and to be actual, — these are of course ultimately related characters in any being. Yet they are characters that, on the whole, fall apart, in the nature of things as they are. Knowledge is, therefore, relatively speaking, an accident in the world. And its business is to conform to the facts, not to create them. Upon so much we still insist, despite the fate of an extreme and abstract, and of course in so far absurd, Realism.”

Yet one must now, in reply, insist upon yet a fresh criticism of the bases even of this modified Realism. And the criticism first takes a very simple form. It asks: Can we, then, divide the Being of things into two parts, as the primary and the secondary qualities of matter have been divided? Can we, then, say of one of these parts of Reality, “That is wholly independent of knowledge; that is entirely indifferent to whether anybody knows it or not?” And can we, then, say of the rest of the Being of things (namely, let us suppose, of the secondary qualities of matter), “That part is not indifferent to knowledge, but alters according to the nature of the particular being who happens to know it?”

The question is momentous for the fate of any modified Realism. It is usually supposed that such a division is easily possible, even if not verifiable in detail. What the meteor is, in so far as it either now flashes or is at least capable of visible incandescence, — that, one may suppose, is an aspect or part of the reality of the meteor which indeed would exist apart from this or that knowledge, but which cannot be expressed ex-