Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/92

And so, in particular, Realism, in addition to being an effort to meet the general problem of Being, is also the product and expression of essentially Social motives and interests. It is socially convenient, for purely practical reasons, to regard my fellow as a being whose mind shall be wholly independent, as to its inner being, of my own knowledge about my fellow. This view of the social relation is indeed suggested by well-known experiences, but in its ideally extreme forms, it is warranted by no experience, and is actually contradicted by every case of the communication of mind with mind. But we also find it socially convenient to view the common objects of our human and social knowledge as independent both of my fellow and myself, even while we still view these objects as the same for both of us, and for all other actual and possible human observers. And so, in the end, we conceive these common objects, abstractly, as independent of all knowing processes whatever. When, to these social motives, we add that interest in escape from our private and finite disquietude of incomplete insight of which we before spoke, the special motives for the more abstract forms of Realism are in substance stated. It is true that there is a deeper and a very general motive at the heart of Realism, — a motive which we shall only later learn to appreciate. This is the interest in viewing the Real as the absolutely and finally Determinate or Individual fact. But this motive is present for Realism in a very abstract and problematic form. And even this motive, as we shall later see, is a practical one. We believe in the determinate individuality of things because we need and love individuality. We can justify