LECTURE VII
THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL MEANING OF IDEAS
With the former lecture our inquiry into the
conceptions of Being reached a crisis whose lesson we have now
merely to record and to estimate. That task, to be sure,
is itself no light matter.
I
Experience and Thought are upon our hands; and together they determine for us the problems regarding Being. Realism offered to us the first solution of this problem by attempting to define the Reality of the world as something wholly independent of our ideas. We rejected that solution on the ground that with an Independent Being our ideas could simply have nothing to do. Or, if you please so to interpret our discussion of Realism, we pointed out that our ideas, too, are realities; and that if Realism is true, they are therefore in their whole Being as independent of their supposed realistic objects as the latter are of the ideas. If, then, it makes no difference to the supposed external beings whether the ideas are or are not, it can make no difference to the ideas whether the independent external Beings are or are not. The supposed dependence of knowledge for its success upon its so-called independent object, proves, therefore, to be contradicted by the ontological independence inevitably possessed by the knowing idea, in case Realism is once
