Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/228

Rh jects are not viewed by anybody present as real in the same sense in which physical bodies, or the atoms of Democritus, or the Monads of Leibniz, or Mr. Spencer’s Unknowable, have usually been regarded as real by the realistic metaphysicians who have believed in the latter entities. Those other objects of common human interest are viewed, by common sense, namely, not as Independent Beings, which would retain their reality unaltered even if nobody ever were able to think of them, but rather as objects such that, while people can, and often do think of them, their own sole Being consists in their character as rendering such thoughts about themselves objectively valid for everybody concerned. Their whole esse then consists in their value as giving warrant and validity to the thoughts that refer to them. They are external to any particular ideas, yet they cannot be defined independently of all ideas.

Do you ask me to name such objects of ordinary conversation? I answer at once by asking whether the credit of a commercial house, the debts that a man owes, the present price of a given stock in the stock market, yes, the market price current of any given commodity; or, again, whether the rank of a given official, the social status of any member of the community, the marks received by a student at any examination; or, to pass to another field, whether this or that commercial partnership, or international treaty, or still once more, whether the British Constitution, — whether, I say, any or all of the objects thus named, will not be regarded, in ordinary conversation, as in some sense real beings, facts possessed of a genuinely