Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/89

70 as is the sedate big dog to the little dog when the latter barks. For the big dog at least presumably hears the barking. The realistic relation of the knowing being to its object is more like the relation of a horse to a hitching post, only that even here the horse can strain at the post when he pulls, while realistic knowing is absolutely naught to its object. By doctrines about the Will, to be sure, the more ethical amongst the realists generally try to correct the externality of the relation between knower and object. Knowledge, they say, moves will, or sets it moving itself, and hereupon will often alters independent object. But these volitional relations are another story, although, as I may add, they are fatal to the consistency of the realistic conception.

And now for some hint of the historical fortunes of Realism. I have pointed out how wide-spread is this realistic conception of Being in the history of philosophy. I may now add that I think that this conception has never been held wholly alone, and apart from other conceptions of reality, by any first-rate thinker. The general rule is that any great system of philosophy has some objects in it which are earnestly insisted upon as real, but which are yet obviously, even explicitly, not real in the realistic sense, or which have a reality only in part definable in a realistic sense. Thus Aristotle’s God, as viewed from the side of the world, looks at first like another real object, whose reality is wholly of the independent type. Yet if you examine closer the self-centred