Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/560

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Now, it would be wholly useless for a realist to attempt to escape from this consequence by persistently talking, as some realists do, about the defective nature of our poor human thought, and about the Unknowability of the Real. For the question is not as to what we do not know, but merely as to what we do know, about the supposed Independent Beings. And what we do know is, that by definition they form a Kette of the type now in question. They cannot escape from this consequence of their own definition by declaring their true Being to be unknowable. For if they attempt thus to escape, we shall very simply point out that, as unknowable, and as thus different from our definition of their Being, they, the realities, have now merely a twofold form of Being, namely, their Unknowable and their Knowable form. For, after all, we are supposed to know that they are, and that they appear to us in the form of a Kette. The problem of the “two natures” in one being, is, then, upon the hands of any realist who, like Mr. Spencer, thus divides his world; and this relation, whether knowable or unknowable, between the Knowable and the Unknowable aspects, or regions of Reality, will become something different from either of the two; and the new system will once more be a Kette, precisely like its predecessor, and for the same reason.

But, finally, one may attempt to escape from the entire situation by declaring that F, in the foregoing account, is, by hypothesis, a fact that does not need f, since f is, by supposition, a conscious process, — an idea, — and F is F whether or no anybody supposes it to exist, or knows it in any way. “Suppose now,” a realist may say, “that there were no knowledge or ideas at all, but only the facts independent of all minds, and totally separate from one another. Then the realistic world would not be an endless Kette.” Therefore it only becomes one, per accidens, when known.

In reply, I should point out, that if the world that contains F contains also any other facts, any diversity whatever, Mr. Bradley’s repeated analysis of the “endless fission” will at once apply, and the world will become a self-representative