Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/95

76 half-truth, Realism, as we shall find hereafter, upon a closer examination, needs indeed no external opposition. It rends its own world to pieces even as it creates it. It contradicts its own conceptions in uttering them. It asserts the mutual dependence of knowing and of Being in the very act of declaring Being independent. In brief, realism never opens its mouth without expounding an antinomy.

Its central technical difficulty, as we shall later more particularly see, and as Aristotle’s Metaphysics already laboriously shows you, is that wondrous problem of the nature of individuality and as to the meaning of universals. The independent realities must be individuals, for they are fixed data, finished and unique in advance of any knowing. And in a realistic world, as we shall find, there must be at least two individuals, independent of each other. But there cannot be such individuals; for the individuals of a realistic world are essentially Noumena, objects defined, even for the realist, by a thinking process. And mere thinking, when taken as in opposition to facts, merely abstract thinking, as Plato well and irrefutably observed, — can define only universals, and only linked systems of fact. Herein lies the doom of Realism. Its laws, as universals, contradict its facts, which have to be independent individuals. Whatever is said to be true of its reals is a conceived, and hence an universal truth, linking many in one. But its reals are not universal, and are not to be linked. Their essence excludes universality, and demands mutual independence. Hence, in the end, nothing whatever proves to be true of them. History shows many examples of this conse-