Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/145

absorbed by the wood of the desk, changes the desk. But the absorption itself is due to certain changes occurring in the temperature, movement, density of the water or of its vapor. The man in China who may become my enemy or my neighbor is already such that certain changes in him, if they occurred, would not be indifferent to me. This possibility already makes part of his being. Furthermore, in our ordinary world of experience, beings like meteors and planets, water and wood, men and other men, viz. beings that on occasion may come into a very obvious connection, are already, even before their so-called actual linkage, truly related, yes, linked to one another, by space, by time, by physical and moral ties. What happens when we say that they pass from mutual independence to linkage, is really that we find them, in our experience, passing from relations whose importance is merely to us less obvious, into relations of more obvious human interest. But now the relations of an object in ordinary experience make parts of the object itself. A change in these relations would result from the change of other objects. Hence these empirical objects are never known as independent. If I am already related to the drops of water now in the ocean, to the meteors that might become visible to me, to men whom I might come to know, then you can never say that experience proves me to be independent of the existence of those as yet unobserved relations. What experience can show is only that a certain mutual dependence of objects may long remain unobserved by us men, until this or that meteor-flash in the heavens, or consequence of the damp weather, or meeting with a