makes “no difference” to the king; it is no part of the definition of the king’s real being that he should be known or observed by a cat. On the other hand, the cat’s idea of the king may be as false as you please. The “mere idea” in the cat’s mind in no wise essentially determines the existence of the king. Just so, Realism asserts that existent causal or other linkage between any knower and what he knows is no part of the definition of the object known, or of its real being, or of the essence of the knowing idea if viewed in itself alone as a “mere idea.”
In the second place, however, Realism, taken in its unmodified form, asserts that the independence here in question, namely, the logical or essential independence of object over against knowledge, is, indeed, in its own realm, absolute. For it is the whole Being of the object, spatial, temporal, inner, and outer, and all that is really true of it, that is independent of the fact that anybody knows this truth.
This view of Being may, for the sake of precision, receive still a little further development, and we may now afresh state the matter in the most general terms thus: —
Let there first be conceived any possible object, let us call it o. We want to know what would happen if this possible object o were real. To this end let there be conceived a second object, other than the first; and let this second object be called somebody’s knowledge or idea or opinion, true or false, about the first object o. For brevity, let us simply name this second member of our pair “the idea of o.” We shall first view it merely as a knowing process. We care in no whit whose idea
