Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/78

Rh objective truth depends upon the significance of the will that makes them.

I pass next to an important special instance of likeness and difference, whose consideration will lead us over to the other categories of our list.

The most “subjective” of our classifications, that is, the one most expressive of the point of view of a particular consciousness, is founded on the distinction which any one of us finds himself making between the facts that he just now observes, acknowledges, thinks about, and the “rest of the universe.” We not only recognize in the concrete the facts that we chance to be making the objects of our present and conscious consideration, but we all acknowledge a realm of truth beyond, whose reality we accept, but whose detail is unknown to us. London is real to us when we think of it; but our acknowledgment of its reality is far from being a concrete recognition of the wealth and variety of facts, social and physical, that we regard as being contained in what is meant by the name. It is so with all those distant facts which we found Realism using, at one stage of our discussion of that doctrine, as examples of independent facts that “make no difference” to a given knower, in a certain state of his knowledge. The unseen meteors of interplanetary space, the waves in the far-off seas, the craters in the moon, the ballads and legends of ancient Tartar tribes, the copper mines of Montana, — all such facts, and an infinity of others, equally varied, are lost, at any moment of our human consciousness wherein we