Real

“ Whether the whole constituted by the fact that there is an emotional contemplation of a beautiful object, which is both believed to be and is real, does not derive some of its value from the fact that the object is real? I am asking whether the value of this whole, as a whole, is not greater than that of those which differ from it, either by the absence of belief, with or without truth, or, belief being present, by the mere absence of truth? ”

“ Such a comprehensive world, together with the human characterization it embraces, must then pass before us as real in a tranquil stream, without any undue haste, either as positive history or dramatic action, towards its aim and conclusion. ”

“ Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. ”

“ When one reflects upon these uses of the word "real," one recognizes the fact that, among all the experiences in which things are revealed to us, certain experiences impress us as being more prominent or important or serviceable than certain others, and they come to be called real. ”

“ Whatever his sensations bring home to him as true and real is true and real for him, whatever it may be in itself His sensations are for him true and real, although all beyond should be illusion or nonentity, and these sensations are for him the universe. ”

“ According to this conception, I repeat, to be real means to be independent of an idea or experience through which the real being is, from without, felt, or thought, or known. And this, I say, is the view best known as metaphysical Realism, the view which, recognizing independent beings as real, lays explicit stress upon their independence as the very essence of their reality. ”

“ Was I not present at some undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed, in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited and admired and self-consistent inspiration? ”

“ I might very well, for instance, have started with the self as a given unity, and have asked how far any other things are real otherwise, and how far again the self satisfies its own demands on reality. ”

“ Platonic philosophy that reality is the sun itself, or the perfection whose possession every wise thinker covets, whose presence would satisfy every longing of experience. The real is that beloved object which is "truly beautiful, delicate, perfect, and blessed." ”

“ Yet Realism often makes little of this given character of being, although some forms of realism dwell more upon it, especially when in controversy with sceptics and mystics. But secondly, Is the real, in our present sense, also deeper than what is merely immediate? Yes, in a sense it is, if you mean by the given, merely the felt, or the observed, facts of sense, or of other experience. ”

“ "And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..." ”

“ And other philosophers have suggested that what we mean by "real" is—"connected in some way with a purpose—helping or hindering, or the object of a purpose." But if we look into their meaning, we find they mean—connected with a real purpose. ”

“ And I think, if you look close, that one of the things we've got to learn is how to do less of the little hectoring, wearing messing-round, and to do more of the big, plain, real, true, unvarnished living—like real work, and real play, and real talk, and real thinking. ”

“ The real, as the independent, is as careless of your immediate feelings as it is of the mediation of your thinking processes. It is beyond what you see, feel, touch. For seeing, feeling, touch, vanish; but reality remains when unseen, unfelt, untouched by any external observer. Now realists usually lay great stress upon the substantiality of the real, and the classic doctrine of substance was developed upon the basis of this notion of the independently real. And thirdly, Does the real make ideas true or false? ”

“ We know, they say, that the world is real; but how should we know that its inner Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older sense animistic. ”

“ This question of the purifying power of the Beautiful has brought us back to our starting-point. It illustrates the distinction between contemplating an aspect and thinking about things, and this distinction's corollary that shape as such is yon-side of real and unreal, taking on the character of reality and unreality only inasmuch as it is thought of in connexion with a thing. ”

“ This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature’s essence. ”

“ And in making this comment upon our universal human relation to truth, the present conception of Being is indeed insisting upon perfectly obvious and empirical facts.
When the realist says, “The world is first of all independently real, whether or no ideas refer to it, and it only becomes secondarily and per accidens the object of ideas,” the realist, in his whole view of the nature of Being, begins by abandoning the realm of experience. ”

“ But while Reality as such does not imply that what is real is directly accessible, in its details, to the private and finite experience of any or of all men, it is different with the sort of reality which we ascribe to what we usually regard as the material world. ”

“ Or, otherwise stated, if there is no such inclusive insight there is no world. To the real world, then, this insight which comprehends the world, and which knows whatever is true to be true, and whatever is false about the world to be false--to the real world this insight, I say, belongs. And the whole world belongs to it and is its object and essence. Whatever is real is real for that insight, and is in its experience, and exists as its possession, and as its well-known and well-comprehended content, and as its image and expression and meaning. ”

“ But the present, the Third Conception of Being, has amongst all the four conceptions the unique character that it alone, so far as it has more fully come to understand itself, consciously attempts to define the Real as explicitly and only the Universal. ”

“ And now at last we are ready, having summarized the vaguer popular views, and having seen what situation determines the whole effort to define Being, — we are ready, I say, to pass directly to the alternative conceptions of what it is to be real which have appeared in the course of the history of philosophy. ”

“ This mystical view seems to hold that the only real object is some voiceless and incomprehensible Absolute, and further, that when you feel uncommonly entranced or enraptured, you get some strange revelation as to the nature of the real, and so become one with the Absolute. ”

“ But we delude ourselves with a verbal fiction. What is the meaning of the word real? This is the question which underlies every metaphysical inquiry; and the neglect of it is the remaining cause of the chronic antagonisms of metaphysicians. In the interpretation put on the word real, the discussions of philosophy retain one element of the vulgar conception of things, while they reject all its other elements ”

“ The eyes of your spirit see truths, as your natural eyes see material objects; and truths are real things. There are true principles, which, if obeyed, lead to what is good; and there are false principles, which, if followed, lead to evil. ”

“ A high, pure tone of morality pervades each set of verses, and each strikes the reader as inspired by some real event, or condition of mind, and not by some idle fancy or fleeting sentiment.”—Spectator. ”

“ The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue—or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes. ”

“ The Lamp of Ideality.—The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation. ”

“ In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; ”

“ They may present real men and things, known beforehand, and now reproduced in such a manner as to appear objectively; or they may be ideal forms, the product of the moment, and incompatible with the laws of actual life. ”

“ Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify. ”

“ Do all these passages indicate what is real? No. Do they then indicate what is typical? No, but what is either real or typical. ”

“ And now, finally, after surveying all these so various types of beings, we have to recall the comment often already made in these lectures, and to assert that not only these different kinds of realities, but also the concrete experiences whereby we come to observe, and the ideas whereby we ourselves define, describe, and in general undertake to know these very objects, are themselves also in their own measure real, and are as truly real as are the various finite objects of common sense that we know. ”

“ Produce any instance you please, we said to the realist, whom we had not then learned to know by that name, of what you personally regard as reality, and we will undertake to show that it derives its reality for you from the very fact that it is not ultimately separable from the experience of a subject. A thing is real for you, and not merely imaginary, precisely because in some aspect of its character it enters into and affects your own experience. ”

“ The changeless, although sensuous and materialistic Being of the Eleatics, is only one case of such sharp sundering of the real from the seeming. That true Being is, in some essential way, independent of false opinion, thus comes early to be regarded as a sort of obvious maxim. ”

“ To begin, you surely know how to distinguish the really actual, that which is the true fact of your present experience and life, or that which you actually live and experience, from the non-actual, the merely imagined. ”

“ For the presentations which, e.g., are received in a picture or arise in dreams, or from any other form of apprehension by the mind or by the other criteria of truth, would never have resembled what we call the real and true things, had it not been for certain actual things of the kind with which we come in contact. ”

“ I am surrounded by images, [Pg 96] my present state of being is a shadow, but I crave reality. The symbol is fair, but Truth is fairer. To that verity all types must yield, how beautiful soever they be, or meet to express their burden. ”

“ Men may arrive at real truth in the main, and yet may shape it according to their humours. For instance, let us consider the different modes or forms in which the same truth is represented under the workings of different tempers. ”

“ Such terms as spirit, life, and power are confessedly somewhat dangerous terms to use. Especially the first is liable to misunderstanding. Yet, whatever [p.153] common usage may be, when I say that truth is not a creed but a spirit, that reality is not a thing but a power, the reference is directly to that agent or principle of validity which has been found to hold our experience, naturally so faulty, to contact and intimacy with the real world. ”

“ It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; ”

“ If, indeed, the realities not reflected became unrealities, were annihilated, then there would be some sense in veiling those portions of the mirror in front of which certain features of our life are exposed. ”

“ Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. ”

“ An awakened realist, then, can readily see, if he chooses, that his Realism can get no coherent expression without becoming at once transformed into the very formulas of this our present and Third Conception of Being. ”

“ What noble end is served by the reproduction of ordinary existence? Are you not simply superfluous—and vilely smelling at that? And realism could have given no reply, for the truth is that realism is superfluous. ”

“ There is left us, I reply, just this world of our daily experience, with precisely its stars and milky ways, with its human life and its linkages — this world, only given already a deeper meaning by this very study. For now we already begin to see, as from afar, the realm of truth that is not independent of, but the very heart and life of this fragmentary finite experience of ours. ”

“ Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point—first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these. ”