the same as its independence as a cause.” What is this assertion except an insistence that a certain more or less well-known empirical relation, already regarded as valid within your realm of experience, namely the relation called causality, has validity beyond your present range of experience? And what is this again but merely saying that if your senses were improved, if your horizon were widened, you would then directly observe how the so-called external facts, which would then be merely contents of your enlarged experience, would appear as empirical causes of what you had formerly called your ideas. Thus restated, however, your Realism turns at once into what Kant called a judgment about the texture of Mögliche Erfahrung. Whatever, then, you may attempt to assert, all that your Realism will ever succeed in articulating, is your belief that experience as a whole, that realm of truth of which you regard your present experience as a case and as a fragment, has a certain valid constitution. What Kant says remains then so far the whole outcome of the critical study of Being. You speak of objects, indeed, and these are not the objects of this instant’s experience. But they are also not objects merely independent of the ideas that refer to them. For your assertion that the world is, involves a judgment that your present experience is interwoven in the whole context of the realm of valid or of possible experience. This context, however, is not independent of its own fragments. Your ideas are recognized by the whole that they with validity define.
And if you attempt to assert the Being of things in
