Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/80

Rh cal Rationalism. Just now I prefer to name it by its formulation, the conception of the real as the Truth, or, in the present day, usually, as the Empirically verifiable Truth. The fourth I shall call the Synthetic, or the constructively Idealistic conception of what it is to be. For the first conception, that is real which is simply Independent of the mere ideas that relate or that may relate to it. For this view, what is, is not only external to our ideas of it, but absolutely and independently decides as to the validity of such ideas. It controls or determines the worth of ideas, and that wholly apart from their or our desire or will. What we “merely think” makes “no difference” to fact. For the second conception, that is real which is absolutely and finally Immediate, so that when it is found, i.e. felt, it altogether ends any effort at ideal definition, and in this sense satisfies ideas as well as constitutes the fact. For this view, therefore, Being is the longed-for goal of our desire. For the third conception, that is real which is purely and simply Valid or True. Above all, according to the modern form of this view, that is real which Experience, in verifying our ideas, shows to be valid about these ideas. Or the real is the valid “Possibility of Experience.” But for the fourth conception, that is real which finally presents in a completed experience the whole meaning of a System of Ideas.

I proceed at once to a statement of the first two conceptions. These two are the polar opposite each of the other. Their warfare is very ancient. The history of Theology has been, above all, determined by their conflict.