Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/229

210 ontological character? One surely says: The debt exists; the credit is a fact; the constitution has objective Being. Yet none of these facts, prices, credits, debts, ranks, standings, marks, partnerships, Constitutions, are viewed as real independently of any and of all possible ideas that shall refer to them. The objects now under our notice have, moreover, like physical things, very various grades of supposed endurance and of recognized significance. Some vanish hourly. Others may outlast centuries. The prices vary from day to day; the credits may not survive the next panic; the Constitution may very slowly evolve for ages. None of these objects, moreover, can be called mere ideas inside of any man’s head. None of them are arbitrary creations of definition. The individual may find them as stubborn facts as are material objects. The prices in the stock market may behave like irresistible physical forces. And yet none of these objects would continue to exist, as they are now supposed to exist, unless somebody frequently thought of them, recognized them, and agreed with his fellows about them. Their fashion of supposed Being is thus ordinarily conceived as at once ideal and extra-ideal. They are not “things in themselves,” and they are not mere facts of private consciousness. You have to count upon them as objective. But if ideas vanished from the world, they would vanish also. They then are the objects of the relatively external meanings of ideas. Yet they are not wholly separable from internal meanings.

Well, all of these facts are examples of beings of which it seems easiest to say that they are real mainly