Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/85

66 dence to which the realistic view refers. You have an idea or an experience, — say a perception. You declare that this experience or idea is cognitive, and that hereby you know something real. Now the first of our four conceptions of what it is to be real, essentially declares that if you thus know a real object, and if thereupon your knowledge vanishes from the world, that vanishing of your knowledge makes no difference, except by accident, or indirectly, to the real object that you know. For example, you look at a real mountain. You see it. That is a case of knowing something real. Now look away. Your seeing ceases; but the mountain, according to this view, remains just as real, and real in the very sense in which it before was real. This, I say, is what any genuinely realistic view presupposes. Now our first conception of reality asserts that just this independence of your knowing processes, and of all such knowing processes, as is your seeing, i.e. of all actual or possible external knowing processes whatever, is not only a universal character of real objects, but also constitutes the very definition of the reality of the known object itself, so that to be, is to be such that an external knower’s knowledge, whether it occurs or does not occur, can make no difference, as mere knowledge, to the inner reality of the known object.

A real object, in this view, may then be a known or an unknown object, or it may be sometimes known, and sometimes unknown, or, above all, it may be known now by one person and again by another, the two knowing it simultaneously or separately. All that makes no sort