Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/261

242 whatever sense energy is real, in that same sense an unindividuated entity, whose very essence is universal, is real. In vain then does one merely scoff at the early mediaeval fashion of speaking of universal principles as if they were real. In a new sense, to be sure, and for new reasons, the ontology of the moment, in the concrete form of the sciences, is constantly recognizing, as in one sense real, objects which, as they are defined, are universals, and which cannot be individuals without altering their definition.

The grounds of this modern recognition of the new universals cannot indeed be judged upon the older scholastic bases. One cannot be fair to these newer concepts without recognizing the changed situation that has resulted from Kant’s labors, and from the prominence now given in thought to the conception of Validity as a basis for the interpretation of our Experience. I mention the issue only to show, by a comparison of various problems, in what world we ourselves, at this stage of our study, are moving.

The Real in this sense is furthermore, as we have all along seen, identical with the determinately Possible only in so far as by that term you mean not indeed the fantastically or provisionally possible, such as a golden mountain, but that which would be observed or verified under exactly stateable, even if physically inaccessible, conditions. At the outset of an inquiry, you to be sure define as possible much that you later find to be unreal. Yet so far you have only the provisionally possible. But, for instance, the liquid or solid state of the interior of the earth, or the liquefaction of air, or the melting of