Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/269

250 Realism. Your very speech is in your adversary’s tongue. You come to curse his views. Your words are blessings. You are among your opponent’s prophets. For you appeal to his standards as your own.

An awakened realist, then, can readily see, if he chooses, that his Realism can get no coherent expression without becoming at once transformed into the very formulas of this our present and Third Conception of Being. In the third lecture of this course, to be sure, I made no attempt to express in this present form the criticism there undertaken of the conception of the Independent Beings. I deliberately refrained from that course in that place, because, as I ventured to say, Realism needs no such external refutation. Merely left to itself, it rends its own world to fragments in the very act of creating that world. I therefore preferred to let Realism first judge itself. We explored its empire under its own guidance, and found absolutely Nothing there. But the reason why the Independent Beings proved to be nothing whatever, now at last explicitly appears. It was because Realism, in defining Being, was actually only defining either Kant’s realm of Mögliche Erfahrung, or else indeed Nothing at all. As the realm of the Third Conception was not yet in sight, the realist had only the latter alternative. The Being of the third type is however distinctly not an Independent Being. It is objective, but not isolated from the realm of ideas.

Thus well fortified against attack is our Third Conception of Being. In fact, how could one attack it except by undertaking to show that it is invalid? And