knowledge makes “no difference,” and so any group of so-called “merely knowing” beings, or of “pure ideas,” can say to one another, concerning the whole world of facts beyond themselves, viewed precisely in its wholeness: —
- “When you and I behind the Veil are past,
- Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
- Which of our Coming and Departure heeds,
- As the seven seas should heed a pebble cast.”
To be sure, as I have indicated, any individual realist may chance to deny altogether that in all this he himself means to be at all practically fatalistic. But in that case he needs a special hypothesis to explain how voluntary agents, according to his system, can use their knowledge to alter the independent facts. Primarily, knowledge shall make precisely what the characteristic phrase of Realism describes as “no difference” to fact. And so the realm of realistic Being that is real beyond your ideas or mine, is, in its wholeness, indeed like a sea, into which any of our ideas about its waves fall like pebbles. Wave and pebble are primarily to be viewed as mutually foreign facts. If the pebble itself creates new waves, that is at first sight something wholly non-essential. The sea is the sea, and Being is indifferent to our mere ideas.
This statement of the general realistic definition of what it is to be real may be set in a clearer light by a comparison with other more or less frequent efforts to state the same historical view. Sometimes Realism is defined as the doctrine that reality is “extra-mental” or is “outside of the mind.” But this mode of definition involves a space-metaphor, and arouses the question as to what the
