Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/252

Rh through his own perfection. After creation, these same beings assume, with reference to finite knowledge, just the independent type of reality characteristic of Realism, and so the Thomistic conception of Real Being employs, it would seem, all the three types of reality so far in question in our discussion. God’s reality as directly viewed by himself is of the mystical type. The created world is of the realistic type. The divine Ideas are, from our point of view, of the third type. I need not say that St. Thomas himself is not to be made responsible for our definition of these types.

But now at length I pass to the point in the history of philosophy where this our Third Conception of Real Being assumes at last its most explicit form. I refer to a doctrine remote enough from that of St. Thomas, and of direct interest for all modern discussions about the philosophy either of religion or of science. This is the doctrine of Kant.

To speak of Kant’s theory of what he called the realm of Possible Experience, of Mögliche Erfahrung, is to come at once into the full light of the present, that is, into the midst of the doctrines that we have inherited from Kant, and which are current to-day. Whoever wearies of Platonic or of Scholastic subtleties, must recognize, if he knows how to read the meaning of current science, that the notion of Possible Being, or of Being whose reality lies in its validity, or in its value as making assertions about it true, is, as I said at the last time, the favorite type of reality in the writings of a great number