Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/219

200 cept by taking account of the actual or possible relation to knowledge. But that the meteor is external matter, and has mass, extension, or other primary qualities, — this aspect of the meteor would remain real if there never were any knowledge in the world; and this aspect is not altered in its character by taking account of our ideas about it. Some such division of the real into two parts, one closely and explicitly related to knowledge, and one independent of knowledge, is very commonly attempted. One supposes that one is able to say what the world would still be if knowledge vanished. The rest of the world, the phenomenal aspect of things, the part of Being that has explicit relation to knowledge, one supposes to be also capable of definition more or less by itself. Thus Being has two parts, an independent part, and a dependent part.

But our former analysis of pure Realism, by virtue of the very abstractness and one-sidedness that made it at the time so austere, gives us, as it were, a “razor” wherewith to cut away just the “independent” part of this now divided realistic universe. If the Real were wholly independent of knowledge, it would be self-contradictory. Well, just so, if any part of the Reality, if any division of it, if any group of substances or characters in it, were real in entire independence of knowledge, or were the same whether known by anybody or not, all of our former analysis would apply to just that portion of the real universe. Thus it would be vain to say that the Real is independent of knowledge when or in so far as it causes no knowledge of itself to exist, or is not a possible