without limit, have been declared real in what their authors have more or less clearly identified with this our first sense of the word real. All these thinkers were in so far realists.
Plainly, therefore, this idea of what it is to be real is not identical with any of the foregoing simpler and popular definitions of reality. The atoms, as we have now learned to define them, are invisible; the Eleatic One is only to be known by thinking; the Platonic Ideas are above all, incorporeal. On the other hand, a portion (although by no means all) of the ordinary realistic metaphysics which one meets with in many text-books of special science, deals with visible and tangible objects. The Monads of Leibniz are Souls. Kant’s Things in Themselves and Herbart’s Reals, are as unknowable as the Power of which Mr. Spencer tells us. Yet to all these different sorts of objects, our first form of the ontological predicate has been applied by thinkers who have had it more or less clearly in mind. Hence neither visibility, nor any other of the forms in which the popular metaphysic conceives immediacy, is adequate to express the present conception. Yet it is true that real Being implies, for this our first notion, that what is real is in a certain sense given, and is so far a brute fact. Much nearer to the present notion is that second popular view, according to which to be real means to be the deeper basis, that furnishes the ground for what is given, or that is somehow beneath the surface of immediate presentation. In some measure, moreover, our present form of technical doctrine is a development out of the third
