Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/87

68 reality remains when unseen, unfelt, untouched by any external observer. Now realists usually lay great stress upon the substantiality of the real, and the classic doctrine of substance was developed upon the basis of this notion of the independently real. And thirdly, Does the real make ideas true or false? Yes, answers the realist, because ideas, in trying to be true, in trying to shun falsity, seek to express what is independent of themselves, in other words seek to escape from the bondage of their own processes.

So, then, Realism is, as we said, a synthesis of the three popular ontological predicates, although, as history shows, with a preference for the second predicate. Realism is fond of substances, of “inner” or of “deeper” fundamental facts, and of inaccessible universes. Yet sometimes it loves an ostentatious, although never a very thoroughgoing empiricism. As to many other matters, however, Realism, as an ontological doctrine about what it is to be, is neutral. Almost any content you please might belong, as we have already said, to an object real in this first sense. Real in this sense might be, for instance, even a state of feeling, or even the very act of knowledge itself, if only one asserted that this state of feeling, or this act of knowledge, could be anyhow externally known, as an object, by another knowing process. For even an act of knowing would then be independent of the external knowing that knew this act. In this sense, most psychologists prefer, in their usual discussions, realistic views as to the Being of mental processes. These processes are then viewed as knowable, but are also viewed as independent of the knowledge that is sup-