Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/94

Rh some” belief in reality, and to hurl pathological epithets at opponents. It is thus often amusing to find the same thinker who declares that reality is quite independent of all merely human or mental interests, in the next breath offering as proof of his thesis the practical and interesting “wholesomeness” of this very conviction.

But you will ask, Have no realists then been reformers, liberals, atheists? Yes, I answer, the pure materialists have been realists. But these more unorthodox realists are still what Kant called Dogmatists, partisans of a tradition preached as authoritative, — conservatives as to certain conceptions of a distinctly social, even if unorthodox origin.

Yet Realism, if indeed strictly sane, as sanity goes amongst us men, is a view as falsely abstract as it is convenient. This sundering of external and internal meaning is precisely what our later study will show to be impossible. As a shorthand statement of the situation of the finite being, Realism, laying stress as it does upon our vast and disquieting inadequacy to win union with the Other that we seek, is a good beginning of metaphysics. As an effort to define determinateness and finality, it is a stage on the way to a true conception of Individuality and of Individual Beings. As a summary indication of the nature of our social consciousness, and of our social world, Realism is indeed the bulwark of good order. For good order, in us men, practically depends, from moment to moment, upon abstractions, since we have at any one instant to think narrowly in order to act vigorously. But viewed as an ultimate and complete metaphysical doctrine, and not as a convenient