Will; and these hypotheses, as Berkeley states them, are once more essentially realistic in their type, since the God of Berkeley appears, in his relation to our valid experience of the natural order, as an independently real creative power, and since the souls, also, in Berkeley’s account, get a distinctly realistic sort of Being. But his realistic type of theology is the halting and inconsequent side of Berkeley’s doctrine. His critical study of the conception of matter is a contribution to the historical development of our Third Conception of what it is to be. In a similar way, our Third Conception appears in Kant himself, as the result of an attack upon every realistic interpretation of the world of common sense and of physical science, and as a development of the thesis: Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit; only Experience furnishes the ground for truth.
And in fact, if viewed merely as a negative criticism of the realistic conception, the argument for the Third Conception has often been stated, in the history of recent philosophy, in an unanswerable form. How, in fact, shall you maintain that Reality is independent of ideas which refer to it, while at the same time these ideas are other than itself, — how shall you maintain this, when the least reflection shows you that you are using ideas at every step of your discussion of reality, and that whatever you assert of the reality, you can give warrant to the assertion only by first showing reason for regarding your ideas as valid? Suppose, for instance, that you say, as realists have often said: — “Some independent cause for ideas must be assumed. This independent cause has Being. And its being is therefore
