he insists, that the world is independently real. But to ask what independent reality means is, he remarks, mere morbid curiosity. To doubt the independence, would be to doubt the value of sanity. “When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, and proved it, ’twas no matter what he said.” Such is the spirit of any typically realistic reply to Berkeley. Hence to be realistic is essentially to ignore every fundamental criticism of the ontological predicate. Even Herbart, that most honest and critical of realists, could see no sense in trying to get behind the ultimate fact of what he called the Absolute Position of the real itself. If there is show or seeming, said Herbart, there is what points towards or hints at the real. But the real itself is the finally posited, that hints at nothing beyond itself, and that therefore is independent of the show. That, for such a realism, is the whole story of the ontological predicate, and to inquire further is vain. The rest, even for a man of Herbart’s minuteness and caution, consists in inquiring what subjects, what Wesen, are worthy to receive this predicate.
The only way to deal with Realism is therefore to insist, with equal obstinacy, that a realist shall explain, not what objects he takes to be real, but what he means by their independence. Such obstinacy is hostile. No realist willingly cooperates in the undertaking. The critical task is accordingly ungracious and abstract. For Realism depends upon not knowing what it does; and to point out to it what it is doing seems to it and to any mere bystander like a carping and unkindly assault.
