Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/432

Rh real world, although this is universally true, but that the fundamental fashions of Being themselves which we ascribe to objects, such fashions as are exemplified by past, present, future, determinately possible, or mentally real Being, are, just as ways of possessing reality, logically inseparable, so that we cannot abandon one of these fashions of Being as illusory, without at once abandoning them all, and surrendering, like the mystic, all of our finite distinctions as mere dreams. Thus our world, however many and various its objects, possesses what we may call Ontological Unity, in so far as all its types of Being, concrete and abstract, appear as various aspects of one type of Being. Nor can you sunder any single idea of an isolated real object from the network established by ideas of reality in general. The whole of this world stands or falls together.

Considerations of this sort are by no means stated in ultimate form, for they have been based upon a provisional acceptance of the world of common sense, with all of its classes of facts. Yet only by such provisional acceptance can we get before us the facts of the empirical world ready for criticism. What we now see is that all our human ideas of real Beings form portions of a single system. All varieties of individuals and of individual ideas must be subordinate to the unity of this system.

Our criticism of the constitution of this system, as we men conceive it can be made, for present purposes, very summary. We have no right to limit the constitution of universal life by the categories of human experience