Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/80

Rh of the relation of the Asiatic peoples to the British Empire, or to the world’s history. But in what more concrete sense this idea of Asia needs and gets supplement through other realities, you are not conscious, so long as you fix attention upon the assertions about Asia alone.

Every concrete act of knowledge, in our conscious life, includes, then, a more or less deliberate abstraction from the background of recognized reality which we conceive as the world, for the sake of a clearer attention to certain special objects of our present acknowledgment. There results a contrast between this foreground and background of knowledge, the one containing the consciously distinguished objects of our present beliefs, the other containing only what is acknowledged in the lump, as the single and undifferentiated whole called “the rest of the universe.”

Now this classification at once arouses a question as to its own basis and meaning. The question takes the form of the inquiry, What is the true relation of those various real objects of which at any moment we do not think in the concrete, to the whole state of our knowledge at that moment?

Realistic theories of knowledge, and in fact most of the popularly familiar philosophical views, even where they are only in part under the influence of technical Realism, reply to this question simply: “The objects now thought of by us are not present to our knowledge at all. They are absent objects, which do not now affect the mind. In some other state of our consciousness they may acquire a meaning for us. Then they