Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/368

Rh precisely in so far as it does not in essence agree with this one; while every effort directly to deny the truth of this conception proves, upon analysis, to involve the covert affirmation of this very conception itself. Upon these assertions of the absolute logical necessity of our conception of Being, our whole case in this argument rests. And in order to make this fact clearer, I must briefly review the former argument.

Our argument in the last lecture was based upon the consideration that Being has, at all events, to be that object which makes ideas true or false. The more special features of our analysis of the relation of idea and object were as follows: —

An idea and its real object, in case the idea has any real object, must indeed plainly possess some characters in common. There must thus be general, or abstractly universal, features, belonging to them both. Upon that point all theories of Being to some extent agree. Even the Mystic, at the moment when he calls all ideas vain, identifies your true Self — yes, the very Self that now has your poor ideas — with the Absolute, and says of your object, viz. of the true Being, “That art thou.” Even the Realist, despite the independence of his Beings, holds that the ideas either truly represent the nature of these beings, or else, at all events, have in common with even the unknowable object some features whereby the object embodies in reality the same fact which the idea aims to express when it seeks for the reality. The failure of Realism we found to be due to the logical impossibility of reconciling the independent Being of the object of our ideas with this inevitably assumed