Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/88

Rh posed to be able to know them, so that it makes no direct difference to them whether they are known from without or not. Hence the objects of realistic ontology are objects not necessarily outside of any knowledge whatever, but only independent of any knowing that is external to themselves. A world of conscious monads might be, in this sense, independently real. Nevertheless, any realistic world must contain some objects that are outside of any knowing process whatever, since the relations between the various knowing processes and their objects, even in a world of conscious minds, would have to be external relations, in order to save the realistic type of independence. Hence no realistic world can be through and through a conscious world. It must have some aspects lying outside of any possible knowledge.

As to the relation which Realism assumes between knowledge and its real object, this is a curious relation, — a relation whose obviously practical import at once tends to throw light on the meaning of the whole situation. It is a relation that shall make “no difference” whatever to one of the related terms, namely, to the real object, which is totally indifferent to being known or not known; although this same relation, while inevitably leaving the other term of the relation, namely, the knowing consciousness, itself a fact independently existing, makes all the difference possible to the value of this other term, namely, to the truth or accuracy of the knowing consciousness, since a knowledge without a real object, independent of it, is supposed by the hypothesis to be utterly vain. The real object, in its independence, is not even related to the truth or value of the poor knowing process,