Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/268

Rh any more independent sense than this, you struggle in vain to articulate your meaning. You can then only take refuge in the dogmatism of the typical realist. You can, to be sure, call your Realism a “fundamental conviction,” or a “wholesome faith,” or a “truth that no man in his sane senses can doubt.” But the strange consequence which then besets your very dogmatism lies in the fact that even in repeating these confident speeches, you have merely asserted that, in your opinion, certain ideas now present to you are valid ideas. You have employed, then, and have admitted as the ultimate standard, your opponent’s conception of Being, even in the very act of refuting his view. You have appealed to the enemy’s theory as your sole warrant for asserting your own. Or perhaps you may choose, as in an earlier lecture we found Realism doing, — you may choose to call your opponent’s view mere “insanity,” and to hurl pathological epithets at all who doubt Realism. The device is easy. But this procedure once more is an express appeal to your adversary’s own conception of Being as the standard by which you are to be judged. For the very conception of insanity is an empirical conception, and all that your assertion means, comes to an expression of opinion that metaphysical views, other than realistic ones, when seriously entertained, psychologically tend to the possible experiences now called insanity. What you have said is then still nothing but that, in your opinion, the realm of Mögliche Erfahrung has for men a certain constitution, and that your idea of this constitution appears to you valid. In vain is all your