Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/431

412 course of lectures, the Being of my fellow, in general, is, for me, inseparable from my idea of my own Being. As an essentially social creature, I have no rational and self-conscious life for myself, except by virtue of literal and ideal contrasts, and other social relationships, with men whom I conceive as my fellows. I can indeed change or spare very many present relations to other men without losing myself. I can live in the memory of past social intercourse. I can enjoy rational communion with ideal, or at all events with unseen, comrades, as children, as poets, and as many wise souls do; but if you suppose me even in memory and in fancy as well as in fact absolutely solitary, I should lose my very consciousness of my own meaning as this person living in this world. My whole Being then is bound up with my ideas of my real and ideal and unseen fellows, of their esteem or rivalry, of the tasks that they set me to do, of my office as their comrade, opponent, rival, enemy, friend, or servant, — in brief, — of their relations to me.

It follows that their Being also is inseparably bound up, for me, with my notion, not only of my present self, but of the past, present, future, and possible world that I regard as real.

And now, if, with this whole series of considerations in mind, we survey once more the types of objects to which we ascribe Being, we find that the very conception of the various types of Being which we first distinguished, demands, even upon purely empirical grounds, their reunion in one whole conception of what it is to be real. For what we have discovered is not merely that various objects are in physical or in moral ways connected in the