Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/264

Rh the idea to its own end as the primary topic of any ontological assertion, and as the object which any one who asserts Being first of all inevitably means. And in making this comment upon our universal human relation to truth, the present conception of Being is indeed insisting upon perfectly obvious and empirical facts.

When the realist says, “The world is first of all independently real, whether or no ideas refer to it, and it only becomes secondarily and per accidens the object of ideas,” the realist, in his whole view of the nature of Being, begins by abandoning the realm of experience. He can therefore never empirically verify for you his independent Beings. He can only presuppose them. You ask him to show you an Independent Being. He points at the table or at the stars. But those, for you, and for him alike, are empirical objects, bound up in the context of experience. Nor could any possible enlargement of experience ever show anybody a Being wholly independent. The only way to judge Realism, since experience is thus abandoned by the realist, is to examine the inner consistency or inconsistency of realistic doctrine. And we have seen that Realism is wholly inconsistent. But our present conception begins by observing that an experience of facts which send you beyond themselves, and to further possible experience, for their interpretation, is the only conscious basis for any assertion of a Being that is beyond the flying contents of this very instant. The Third Conception of Being refuses to ignore this conscious, this empirical element, present wherever the assertion of Being is made; for the only possible warrant for any ontological assertion must be found in this element. What