quence. The troubled darkness of the Herbartian realm of the Reals is one such historical example. In Herbart’s world, in an uncanny and impossible way, these Reals, which can have nothing to do with one another, still, according to the philosopher come “Zusammen”; and while nothing can happen to them, they preserve themselves changeless amidst unreal disturbances, by crawling, as it were, like worms, and so producing a “wirkliches Geschehen.”[1] Well, this strange metaphysical scene, in the distracted globe of Herbart’s system, is only one instance of the sort of thing that has to be found in any realistic world, if one confesses the truth, as Herbart nobly confessed it.
V
But we must leave this great problem of the Realistic Ontology for a later and more detailed study. I must proceed, as I close the present lecture, to a sketch of the second of our four forms of the ontological predicate. Realism, despite its prevalence, has long had a very ancient historical foe. This foe was originally not Idealism, in its modern form, but something very different, namely, Mysticism. And so the second conception of what it is to be real is characteristic of that most remarkable group of teachers, the philosophical Mystics. Mysticism as a mere doctrine for edification, is indeed no philosophy. Yet a philosophy has been based upon it.
While this second conception appears to me to have been very generally misunderstood by most of the critics
- ↑ See Mr. Bradley’s observation in Appearance and Reality, p. 30.
