even calls them physical facts. Any way, they are held to exist or subsist independently of mind or knowledge. The nature of a thing, in respect of which it is an object of our thought, the general law of action and construction which dominates it, is spoken of as a universal and as corresponding to our concept. A material object, we are told by other modern realists, consists, apart from mind or knowledge, in a connection of universals.[1] A physical realism of this kind takes us I imagine into a new country, which Reid perhaps visited, but did not explore or subdue. Call us idealists or what you will, we who follow the watchword "Das Wahre ist das Ganze" might prima facie find in it much of what we demand; and what no eclecticism of the materialist type can by any possibility afford us. If (per impossibile, as I still must hold) all that is precious and substantial could truly be fused and focussed in an admitted real, I at least should not be greatly troubled at being ordered to call it
- ↑ Prichard, Kant's "Theory of Knowledge," p. 243.
