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The first of the four is the best known of all. According to this conception, I repeat, to be real means to be independent of an idea or experience through which the real being is, from without, felt, or thought, or known. And this, I say, is the view best known as metaphysical Realism, the view which, recognizing independent beings as real, lays explicit stress upon their independence as the very essence of their reality.

To comprehend what this conception of Reality implies, I must first point out that, of all our four views, this first one most sharply and abstractly undertakes to distinguish the what from the that, in case of every real object, and to hold the two aspects asunder. What objects are in this sense real, the realistic definition does not undertake in the least to predetermine. But by virtue of the definition, you are to know, as far as that is knowable at all, wherein consists the determining feature that distinguishes real from unreal objects. Unreal objects, centaurs, or other fictions, ideals, delusions, may be what they please. Real objects may in their turn possess any what that experience or demonstration proves to belong to them. But the difference between real and unreal objects is an unique difference, and is not properly to be called a difference as to the what of the real and unreal objects themselves. This difference, relating wholly to the that, is a difference expressible by saying that fictitious objects are dependent wholly upon ideas, the hopes, dreams, and fancies, which conceive them; while real