Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/220

Rh cause of knowledge; and that only when it is an actual or possible cause of knowledge it is in essential relation to the latter. Any such view would be destroyed by our former attack upon the Independent Beings. If no Reality can have entirely independent Being, no part of reality can win such Being. And this consideration ends at once every effort to divide off one section of Being as the independent part.

When we say, then, that the real is in any sense practically or partially independent of knowledge, we do not mean that it has two parts, one in essence independent of whether it is known or not, the other essentially linked to ideas. No, the Real must be through and through, to its very last quality, to its very inmost core, such as to be fitted to be known. Its nature is through and through thus tainted, if you please so to say, by adaptation to ideal purposes.

If, then, Being is to keep its practical independence of any particular knowledge, our modified Realism must indeed be not only modified, but transformed. Yet how?

In answer, one has merely to state afresh and more carefully the situation now reached. The Real, for our modified Realism, is to be somehow “outside of any particular knowledge.” It is to be “authoritative” over against our “mere ideas.” They must “conform” to it. On the other hand, it is such that, under conditions, they may "correspond" to it. If they do so “correspond,” they will be true. Independently of this essential relation to knowledge, Being is indefinable. It is there as that which, if known, is found giving to ideas their validity, as that to which ideas ought to correspond, and as