visible. And this change is due to the previous physical and chemical constitution of the meteor, which thereby was always prepared, in one way, to become known to a Being with a power of vision. And this case is a type of the way in which Being and Idea are related. Upon this basis must our metaphysic rest.”
I thus merely indicate a general and a well-known popular view as to the relatively independent reality of things — a view which usually passes, in the ordinary speech of common sense, for Realism; although, historically speaking, the most thoroughgoing realists have avoided such concessions to popular opinion, just because they really ruin the independence of the Real. Neither the Sânkhya, nor Herbart, regards the independent reality as in truth the genuinely physical cause of knowledge, and, as a fact, one who offers such popular compromises, familiar though they are to us all, must be prepared to go much further, on the way towards Idealism, than he at first imagines. Such a compromise is, in fact, an entire surrender of the realistic thesis.
I will not pause to develope, at any length, the various well-known theories that have been held by modified Realism as to the causation of perception, or as to the evolution of knowledge and of knowing beings, or as to the rest of the natural history, both of ideas and of relations of ideas and “real external things.” We are all familiar with such views. They have their important place in psychology and in cosmology. But they are here, in their details, simply not relevant. Our only interest, at present, in such theories, is an interest in seeing what manner of Reality can be ascribed to objects
