Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/86

Rh of difference to the object, if, in this first sense, it is real. To use this supposed independence as a means of defining reality, is the essence of our first conception of being.

Let us look back for an instant at our three popular ontological predicates, and see for ourselves afresh how they are related to this new predicate. And first, Is the real, in this new sense, a given or immediate fact? The realistic philosopher answers that in a sense it is given, although he often answers that the way in which it is given may go far beyond anything that can be merely felt. The real, he says, is in one sense given, or immediate, just because no knowing process, in us who know the object, creates, affects, or otherwise mediates the known real object. There it is, the real. You may “struggle as you like.” It is a datum. In this sense of being mediated by nobody’s knowing, the Platonic Ideas were given as real, although they could not be felt. Hence, they are so far as much realistic beings as were Herbart’s Reals. Yet Realism often makes little of this given character of being, although some forms of realism dwell more upon it, especially when in controversy with sceptics and mystics. But secondly, Is the real, in our present sense, also deeper than what is merely immediate? Yes, in a sense it is, if you mean by the given, merely the felt, or the observed, facts of sense, or of other experience. The real, as the independent, is as careless of your immediate feelings as it is of the mediation of your thinking processes. It is beyond what you see, feel, touch. For seeing, feeling, touch, vanish; but