Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/81

56 become our objects. But when they are not thought of as these and these objects they are not thought of at all.” This theory seems simple. It appeals to natural prejudices. But it is wholly opposed to our own analysis of the relation of Internal to External Meaning. We can entertain it no longer. It lapses with the realistic conception of Being.

For if nothing that exists exists independently of anything else, if the nature of everything is inevitably bound up with the nature of all other things, then knowledge, in facing reality at all, faces in some wise the whole of it at once, and the only question is how this at any instant takes place. The abstractness of our momentary knowledge, the vastness of our momentary ignorance of all concrete facts, no theory of knowledge recognizes more sincerely than does our own. But that all differences rest upon an underlying unity, — this is the very thesis which, in our present series of discussions, we are trying to make more concrete. For us, if you say, “The objects, other than Asia, which the world contains while I think, with conscious definiteness, only of Asia, must be objects of other acts of knowledge, and are in no sense present to this act,” then it is necessary to reply: But the other acts of knowledge cannot, in their own Being, be wholly other than this one. For were they wholly other, they would have nothing really in common with this act. And if so, they would not be acts of knowledge at all. For two acts of knowledge have in common the real character of being knowledge. And this is a single character. If common to two facts, it gives them share in