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THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL
GIFEORD LECTURES
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THE WORLD AND THE
INDIVIDUAL
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SECOND SERIES
NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
BY
JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., LL.D. (Aberdeen)
PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1901
All rights reserved
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v. 2
COPTKIGHT, 1901,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
NortaooS \Bxtae
J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
The discussions upon which the present volume is
based formed the second and concluding series of my
Gilford Lectures on "The World and the Individual."
They were delivered before the University of Aberdeen
in January, 1900. The delay in publishing them is
largely due to the revision to which I have subjected
the original manuscript. This revision amounts, in a por-
tion of the lectures, to a rewriting, and has also come to
include statements and arguments that I had not pre-
viously put into shape at all. These additions have
caused me, in some cases, more trouble than I had antici-
pated, and more, as I hope, than the text will directly
make manifest to the reader.
The general need for such changes did not spring, I am
sure, from any lack of effort on my part to adapt the
lectures, actually read at Aberdeen, to their announced
purpose. The variety and the complexity of the topics
of the present volume require the printed book to contain
much that could not have been adequately stated in any
oral discussion; while these same characters of my sub-
ject-matter led, at some points, to a diffuseness in the
original lectures which I found it possible to abbreviate
in preparing the volume for publication. In the public
lecture-room the hearer has no time to meditate, and the
speaker too little opportunity to be either concise or
vi PREFACE
exhaustive. While some of the same general grounds
for a change from the originally prepared text existed in
case of the revision of my former series of these lectures,
they proved to be less effective than here, since, in that
series, the single problem of the Conception of Being
dominated the entire discussion, while here the relations
of the Theory of Being to various problems of empirical
research, and to the demands of our ethical consciousness,
have complicated the undertaking.
The scope of this closing volume includes a sketch of
an idealistic Theory of Human Knowledge, an outline
of a Philosophy of Nature, a doctrine about the Self, a
discussion of the origin and destiny of the Human Indi-
vidual, a summary consideration of the world as a Moral
Order, a study of the Problem of Evil, and, finally, an
estimate of all these views in the light of what seem
to me to be the interests of Natural Religion. This is a
large and manifold programme. It was required of me
by my interpretation of my task as Gilford lecturer. I
well know how inadequate the consideration of each
topic has necessarily proved to be.
As to the first of these topics, the idealistic Theory
of Knowledge, what I here have to say is founded upon
studies which I began as a student at the Johns Hopkins
University in 1876-1878. The first formulation of these
studies I made in my thesis for the Doctorate at that
University. A further stage of my inquiry was pub-
lished in 1881, in a paper on Kant's Relation to Modern
Philosophical Progress, printed in the Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy of that year. The interpretation of
our knowledge of finite facts as largely due to an active
PREFACE vii
"acknowledgment," whose significance is ethical, rather
than to a mere passive acceptance of "given" contents
of present experience, was insisted upon in the conclud-
ing section of that paper. When, in preparing my Reli-
gious Aspect of Philosophy (published in 1885), I had
definitely passed over from my earlier sceptical position
to the constructive Idealism that I have ever since en-
deavored to work out, I attempted at once to take up
this former view of our finite knowledge into what was
then, in my own personal growth, a new doctrine as to
the nature of the Absolute. In 1892, in my Spirit of
Modern Philosophy, I essayed a still further development
of this theory regarding human knowledge, in the lecture
entitled The World of Description and the World of Appre-
ciation. Since then, in the paper called Self-consciousness,
Social Consciousness, and Nature, published as one of my
Studies of Good and Evil (1898), as well as in other
essays, I have attempted to apply the same essential view
to the explanation of the bases and characteristics of
our human knowledge of the physical world. In recent
years I have been much interested in comparing my
views about this matter with those of my colleague and
friend, Professor Munsterberg, who has independently
reached a somewhat similar doctrine regarding the two-
fold nature and basis of what he also consents to call our
"descriptive" and our "appreciative" knowledge. This
topic, as well as the ethically significant character of our
"acknowledgment" of facts, has been discussed sum-
marily in Professor Miinsterberg's book, entitled Psy-
chology and Life, and, more exhaustively, in his important
G-rundziige der Psychologie (Vol. I, 1900). In giving
viii PREFACE
final form to my present statement, I have undoubtedly
felt the influence both of these expressed opinions of
Professor Miinsterberg, and of the admirable monograph
by Professor Rickert entitled Der Gegenstand der JSr-
kenntniss, a work to which Professor Miinsterberg first
called my attention, shortly after its publication in 1892.
In my own former accounts, so far as they bore upon
this doctrine, the contrast between these two types of
human knowledge, the " descriptive " and the " apprecia-
tive," has been made to depend solely upon the difference
between the " social " and the " individual " points of
view. I still defend, and, in the fourth lecture of this
volume I expound afresh, the thesis that the contrast
between our " descriptive " knowledge of the physical
world and our " appreciative " knowledge of the facts of
finite life, is determined precisely by this difference be-
tween our social consciousness of what is " valid for all
individuals " and our personal consciousness of what is
valid for the Self. But it is true that one must still seek
within the consciousness of the individual Self for the
motives that make it logically possible for this Self to
regard the abstraction called " a view valid for all indi-
viduals" as a possible abstraction. We must show how
the Self can make such a view the object of its own con-
templation in any sense whatever. For the human Self,
although (as I have shown in the course of these lec-
tures) it comes to be aware of itself in terms of its social
contrast with other Selves, still (in so far as it has be-
come self-conscious at all) acknowledges its objects as
valid, in the first place, from its own point of view, and
not from the point of view of another Self. How comes
PREFACE ix
it, then, to interpret its world of facts as such that
another Self could find these same facts, or some aspect
of them, to be also its own facts ? The power to make
this abstraction, however much social intercourse is needed
to give it definition, must have its logical roots in the
consciousness of the Individual. Accordingly, in the
second lecture, I have here presented a theory of how far
the general contrast between the World of Description
and the World of Appreciation can be logically (not
psychologically) defined, apart from explicitly social ex-
periences, on the basis of a certain contrast that arises
between two aspects of the inner personal consciousness
of any intelligent individual whose relations to the world
are such as are our human relations. This logical deduc-
tion of the primal contrast between the " descriptive "
and the " appreciative " points of view does not set aside
my still emphasized doctrine that both the psychological
development and the concrete logical application of the
categories of the World of Description are possible only
under essentially social conditions. For, as I point out
on p. 96, sqq., of the text, the World of Description is
essentially a world of abstractions, valid for the Self only
in so far as it conceives itself as at present unable to
find how the facts express its own conscious purpose, and,
consequently, valid for the Self only in so far as the Self,
in its submissiveness, conceives these facts as also valid
for an indefinite number of other points of view, which
it has not yet made its own. Thus, within the individual
consciousness, I point out one of the roots from which
the more abstract interpretation of the world that is
" valid for all " the members of a society grows. My
x PREFACE
present account of the logical basis of the " descriptive "
view of things is therefore a supplement to my former
discussions. This present account contains, moreover, a
good many elements which are to me, as I think that
they will be to others, decidedly new, so that the result-
ing view of the theory of our finite knowledge is at any
rate not the conventional one. The views here ex-
pressed, so far as they are new, have been, in my own
mind, the outcome of an effort to study some of the
recent literature of the Logic of Mathematics, a region
in which the Supplementary Essay of the former vol-
ume of these lectures sought for light. The second lec-
ture of the present volume carries still further the train
of thought of which that Supplementary Essay was a
part. Whatever my success or failure, I am convinced
that such study of the Logic of Mathematics is a region
where the philosophical student of to-day ought to work.
I call special attention here to the doctrine of the two
forms of Serial Order, and to their respective relations
to the " descriptive " and " appreciative " points of view.
The Theory of Time and Eternity which follows, in
my third lecture, was briefly outlined in one passage of
the former volume, but is here developed at length. It
is of central importance for all the problems of the later
lectures.
The cosmological discussions which follow, in the fourth
and fifth lectures, constitute a deliberate effort to mediate
between Idealism and our human experience of Nature.
I have tried to show that an idealist is not obliged either
to ignore or to make light of physical facts in order to
maintain his theory of the Absolute. That the latter
PREFACE xi
theory is, in the only reasonable sense, itself an empirical
doctrine, I have set forth in the former series of these
lectures. Here I attempt to point out what links connect
our general idealistic interpretation of all experience with
our special interpretation of our experience of Nature.
Hypotheses are, in such an undertaking, unavoidable.
I pretend only to provisional views regarding all the
details of the discussion. But that one has a right to
such hypotheses, at the present stage of our knowledge,
I have tried to make plain so far as my space has
permitted.
In these first five lectures of the present series, I have
come nearest to the ground which was covered by the
much more thorough and closely reasoned lectures of my
predecessor in the Gifford Lectureship at Aberdeen, Dr.
James Ward. I had intended to find room in the text
for some discussion of the volumes entitled Naturalism
and Agnosticism, in which these lectures appeared. But
discovering that I could not adequately deal with Dr.
Ward's volumes under the present conditions, I have
preferred to leave until a future opportunity a treatment
of the relations between his views and mine. Apart
from such usually minor differences of opinion as exist
between us, I feel that the two lines of argument are
complementary to each other. Dr. Ward has approached
the problem of our knowledge of Nature from the side
of a criticism of special doctrines that have been held,
and of special problems of science. I have made the
topic one to which my previously stated general theory
of Being is to be applied. At certain points, as I have
been rejoiced to find, we have independently reached the
xii PREFACE
same special statements both of our questions and of our
solutions, although by very different roads. Dr. Ward's
account, in his second volume, of the unity of the uni-
versal and the individual experience, his treatment of the
dualism which has come to make the two seem divided,
his consequent criticism of the mechanical conception of
Nature, all these are matters with which I find myself
in close agreement. I shall be glad indeed if my own
much more superficial discussion of this portion of my
task can be of any service to the readers of his work.
From Nature these lectures pass to the Human Self.
Characteristic of this part of the argument, and of pre-
vious statements of my own upon the same topic, are : my
entire willingness to lay aside all assertion of the exist-
ence of a substantial Soul ; my unreserved acceptance of
the empirical evidence regarding the dependence of the
Human Self, for its temporal origin, for its development,
and for its preservation in its present form of life, upon
physical and social conditions; and my insistence that
various Selves can possess, in the whole or in a part of
their lives, identically the same experiences, so that one
Self can originate, or can develope iviihin another Self,
and so that the lives of various Selves can be interwoven
in the most complex ways. The known empirical facts
of " multiple personality " possess nothing surprising for
such a doctrine. The individual Human Self appears, in
my account, as a part of the Selfhood of the race. Social
intercommunication amongst Selves is explained as a phe-
nomenal indication that they share in a common larger
Selfhood. The phenomenal dependence of Mind upon
Matter is interpreted as another sort of evidence whereby
PREFACE mi
our personal participation in the various forms and stages
of Selfhood that are present in Nature is indicated. No
facts upon which Materialism has ever based its argu-
ments need be either overlooked or belittled by such a
view. Death, for my theory, no longer appears as a " sun-
dering of soul and body." Dualism in the interpretation
of the relations of the Self and its environment is wholly
laid aside. And yet, as I undertake to show, no spiritual
possession of the true Self is endangered, no aspect of
its ethical dignity is belittled, no sense in which it is
near to God is called in question by this very doctrine
of the temporal origin, and of the social, physical, and
divine relations of the Self. The reconciliation of our
natural knowledge about the Self with our Idealism and
with our fundamental religious interests, is indicated, in
these discussions, in a fashion that I believe to be, to a
considerable extent, new. If my views have any cohe-
rence, the importance of the subject ought to insure for
them a serious hearing. They are, again, not the con-
ventional views about the Human Self.
As to the problem of Immortality, it is one that I long
deliberately declined, as a student of philosophy, to dis-
cuss in any formal way, because, for years after I pub-
lished, in my Religious Aspect of Philosophy, my first
statement of that general idealistic view of Being which
I have ever since maintained, I was not clear as to how
the general doctrine ought to apply to the case of the
finite Individual. The problem of Individuality, as I
have since more clearly seen, and, in the first series of
these lectures, have explained at length, is the most cen-
tral and important one in the idealistic Theory of Being.
x iv PREFACE
I felt this fact, although with less clearness, from the
first. I was of course sure, from the time of the first
statement of my doctrine, that I attributed conscious
individuality to the Absolute ; and I plainly insisted, in
my Religious Aspect of Philosophy, that, in the Absolute,
all finite individual lives, wills, meanings are consciously
recognized, fulfilled, and justly expressed, precisely as
they deserve to be. But I was not clear as to what
consequences were involved in this thesis when one ap-
plied it to the question as to the continued existence
of this man, as he at present conceives himself. Now a
philosophical student waits for light ; and does not teach
a doctrine until he finds light about that doctrine ; and
is careless what other people think of the practical value
of his teachings, so long as he is conscious that he is sin-
cerely looking for truth. I can at all events say that my
own little contribution to the doctrine of Immortality,
such as it is, has been no product either of a feverish
desire for the endurance of my private consciousness, or
of a similar longing regarding any friend of mine, or of
any wish to conform to the traditional lore upon the
subject. In my discussion with Professor Howison (pub-
lished in the book called The Conception of G-ooT), in my
more recent Ingersoll Lecture on The Conception of Im-
mortality (published at Boston in 1000), and, finally, in
the present volume, I have simply reported the results
to which meditation on the nature of the Ethical Self
and on the place of Individuality in the Theory of Being
have led me. To make clearer my personal equation, I
may add that, since childhood, I have never had any
faith about the problem of Immortality except in so far
PREFACE xv
as I have seemed to myself to see philosophical reasons
for such faith, and that I regard the whole issue as one
for reason, in precisely the sense in which the properties
3f prime numbers and the kinetic theory of gases are
matters for exact investigation. That all our beliefs
about truth of any grade and that all theories have a
practical meaning, I do indeed explicitly teach. That,
in fact, as my reader will see, is my whole philosophy.
But the process of coming to consciousness as to what
we can rationally desire, mean, and believe, as the ful-
filment of our highest purposes, is a process in which
private desires must be subordinated. We must obey
in order to triumph. And such obedience, for the stu-
dent of philosophy, takes the form of a cool reflection
and a patient wandering in the wilderness of ignorance
until he sees the road home. That has been my own
method in dealing with the problem of Immortality.
My treatment of the Problem of Evil, in the eighth
and ninth lectures of the present volume, is inevitably,
in the main, a restatement of what I have elsewhere
repeatedly discussed. Yet I have tried to bring to light
several new aspects of this issue, in particular its relation
to the theory of the Temporal and the Eternal. The
doctrine of Freedom and of the Moral Order, as pre-
sented in my later lectures, touches upon several matters
that I have not before formally discussed. The discus-
sion of the Union of God and Man, in the closing lec-
ture, will also, as I hope, appeal to some theologically
minded fellow-students as containing some relatively
novel suggestions.
In sum, these lectures have tried to be not a perfunc-
xvi PREFACE
tory defence of the faith, and not a mere repetition of the
common tradition of modern Idealism, but the expression
of an individual experience of the problems at issue. I
do not want to make mere disciples; but I hope that I
have helped some fellow-students toward a clearer knowl-
edge of God and of themselves. Such knowledge, how-
ever, they can never get by merely accepting my views.
They must use their own labor.
My further acknowledgments are still due to many
helpers. First, I must here remember my own pupils,
whose criticisms have frequently aided me, in particular,
my friend, Dr. Richard Cabot, who for years has stood by
me with counsel, encouragement, and criticism, even while,
from time to time, he has found room, amidst the duties
of his own medical profession, for some continuance of
his philosophical studies in connection with my Seminary
at Harvard ; and Mr. Reginald Robbins, who, while also
an occasional member of my Seminary, has written sev-
eral closely reasoned criticisms of my work, by which
I have profited more than he knows. My indebtedness
to the influence of Mr. Charles Peirce continues in the
present volume, remote as my views often are from his.
And in closing the task that for two years gave me an
official relation to the University of Aberdeen, I must
especially acknowledge my indebtedness to my colleagues
there, and to colleagues in the other Scottish Universities
with whom I came in contact during my two visits. In
particular, Professors W. R. Sorley (now of Cambridge,
England) and W. L. Davidson, not only brightened my
stay by their kindness, but aided me, by their counsel, in
adapting especially this second course of lectures to its
PREFACE xvii
academic purpose. To the Senatus of the University of
Aberdeen I offer, as my last word, not only my thanks
for the opportunity which that body gave me to put into
this form my philosophical studies, and for the kind
hospitality shown to me personally, but my cordial recog-
nition of the interest thus expressed in closer relations
between Scottish and American University life and work.
May we learn still further the arts of cooperation with
our brethren.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
September 29, 1901.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
PAGE
The Recognition of Facts 1
LECTURE II
v The Linkage of Facts 43
LECTURE III
* The Temporal and the Eternal 109
LECTURE IV
Physical and Social Reality 153
LECTURE V
^ The Interpretation of Nature 205
* LECTURE VI
The Human Self 243
LECTURE VII
The Place of the Self in Being 279
< LECTURE VIII
The Moral Order 333
xix
xx CONTENTS
LECTURE IX
PACE
The Struggle with Evil 377
LECTURE X
The Union of God and Man 413
LECTURE I
THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL
SECOND SERIES: NATURE, MAN, AND THE
MORAL ORDER
LECTURE I
INTRODUCTION : THE RECOGNITION OP FACTS
With no question is the student of Philosophy more
familiar than with the inquiry : Of what bearing upon
life are the studies in which you are engaged? This
challenge, when uttered by one not engaged in the study
of philosophy, comes home with especial force to the
investigator of the fundamental problems of metaphysics.
For such problems are, upon their face, of the most uni-
versal character. It would seem as if their significance
for the whole business of every man ought to be imme-
diately obvious, unless indeed the philosopher who ex-
pounds them has failed in his task. What concerns any
man more than his place in the world, and the meaning
of the world in which he is to find this place ?
But when the layman listens to the actual teachings
of students of philosophy, as they discourse concerning
knowledge and being, concerning truth and duty, and
when, after listening, such a layman then asks afresh,
" What is it that I have learned about my life, and my
duty, and my world of daily business ? " the answer of
many a listener is too well known : " I have learned,"
B 1
2 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
such an one will often say, " not at all what I hoped to
learn. I have learned that problems are intricate, and
that truth is far away. I have learned how little the
wise men see, and so I am fain to turn back again to life,
that I may there find how much the good men do. The
philosophers do not help me as they promised. Action
is more enlightening than speculation. I will work while
it is called the day, but I will not try, like the philoso-
phers, to look with naked eyes upon the sun of truth.
Such researches only hinder me."
Both this confession of too many listeners to philosophi-
cal discourses, and the resulting question to which I have
just referred, are to nobody more familiar, I have said,
than to the student of philosophy himself. Nobody, in
fact, ought to know better than he does the limitations of
mere speculation. Does he not often feel them bitterly
himself ? Is not the imperfection of what he would like
to call his wisdom, brought home to him at every moment
when he has his own practical problems to solve? But
a confession of weakness is not a cry of despair. Part of
the business of life, and no small part of it, is to learn
to live with our inevitable defects, and to make the best
of them. The inevitable defects of philosophical study
are to nobody clearer than to one who, sincerely loving
philosophy, devotes his life, as best he can, to seeking
clearness of thought and a soul-stirring vision of the
truth. The way of reflection is long. The forest of our
common human ignorance is dark and tangled. Happy
indeed are those who are content to live and to work
only in regions where the practical labors of civilization
have cleared the land, and where the task of life is to
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 3
till the fertile fields and to walk in the established ways.
The philosopher, in the world of thought, is by destiny
forever a frontiersman. To others he must often seem
the mere wanderer. He knows best himself how far he
wanders, and how often he seems to be discovering only
new barrenness in the lonely wilderness.
Yet if such defects are to be freely confessed, and if
the philosopher even glories in them, because they are
for him a part of the search for truth, the practical good
sense of mankind is to be respected when it demands that
the solitary labors of the seeker for truth shall in the end
be submitted, not only to those theoretical tests which
philosophy recognizes as, in its own domain, the only
decisive ones, but also to the social and ethical judg-
ment of practical men. The truth of a philosophy is
indeed a matter for reason alone ; but the justification
of the pursuit of philosophy as one of the tasks to which
a man's life may honestly be devoted, requires a recogni-
tion of the common interests of all men. The frontiers-
man may wander ; but he must some day win what shall
belong to the united empire of human truth. Those are
wrong who ask him merely to stay at home. He wan-
ders because he must ; and God is to be found also in the
wildernesses and in the solitary places of thought. But
those are right who ask that the student of philosophy
shall find, if he succeeds at all, a living truth ; and that
the God of the wilderness, if indeed he be the true God,
shall show himself also as the keeper of the city.
Now, in the former series of these lectures, appealing
as a student of philosophy to fellow-students, I undertook
what was, from the start, and confessedly, a wandering
4 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
into the most problematic regions of theory. And
in the present course, especially in the earlier lectures,
I shall still be busy with highly theoretical issues, and
I shall still appeal, above all, to my fellow-students.
But we have now won the philosophical right, and have
become subject to the practical obligation, not only thus
to follow out our theoretical interests, but also to show
how the philosophy set forth in our earlier lectures stands
related to the more immediate problems of life. I shall
devote the present lectures, in the main, to considerations
that, however abstract they may seem, are meant to help
us towards an interpretation of Man's place in the uni-
verse ; and I shall be guided by a determination to attempt,
before I am done, a definition of man's nature, duty, and
destiny. The former lectures emphasized the World ;
the present course shall be directed towards an under-
standing of the Human Individual. The previous dis-
cussion dealt with the Theory of Being ; the aim of
what is to come shall be a doctrine about Life. This
doctrine will still belong to philosophy ; but its outcome
shall have to do with the practical interests of Religion.
The order which has so far been followed is, indeed,
as I must hold, the only order for a student of philoso-
phy. Therein, if you please, is just where lies the practi-
cal defect of philosophy, viz. in that it can only reach
the civilized realm of our daily business by the way of
the wilderness of solitary reflection ; that it must first,
to use Emerson's word, meet God in the bush, so that
only later, and painfully, it learns to find him in the
mart and the crowded street. I confess the defect. I
want to show also some of the excellencies of the very
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 5
way which this defect has required me to follow. Faith
has its glories ; but the hard toil of critical reflection
brings its own rewards. None prize the home-coming
more than those who wander farthest.
I
My first task, in the present lecture, is to indicate in
what spirit the Theory of Being, to whose definition and
defence the first series of these lectures was devoted, is
hereafter to be applied to the treatment of the more
special problems of experience and of life. Our Theory
of Being had especially this character, namely that it"
did not undertake to demonstrate a priori what par-
ticular facts we should meet with anywhere in the
world, but that it did undertake to show us a certain
method whereby we ought to proceed in attempting to
estimate those facts, to interpret them, to find what
rank they held in the realm of Being. People come
with false expectations to philosophy when they expect
it to furnish them any substitute for special science, any
peculiar power to anticipate the particular results of
experience, any intuitive capacity to see in the finite
world facts that other methods of inquiry have not made
evident. For the primary purpose of a Theory of Being
is not thus to discover what special finite beings are
real, but to interpret the sense in which any fact what-
ever can be real. Its application, therefore, does not
come in advance of experience. On the contrary, it is
a critical study of the meaning of experience, which it
therefore presupposesj And we are now to endeavor to
find of what nature such applied Philosophy may be.
6 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
For just in such application lies, as we shall come to
see, the peculiarly intimate relation between what is
deepest in philosophy, and what is truest and most abid-
ing in religion. Some people have expected the philos-
opher to construct for them, a priori, a precise scheme
of all things in heaven and in earth. But just so other
people have looked to their religious faith to tell them,
in advance, their private fortune, to assure them that
their days would be long, their flocks prosperous, and
their health abounding. And just as too enthusiastic
students have thus anticipated from philosophy a certain
magical insight regarding the detailed structure of na-
ture and of man, so an unenlightened generation has
asked its religious teachers for signs and wonders, and
has held that the true faith must manifest itself through
special Providences. But the one hope is as little
founded in the deeper spirit of reasonableness as is the
other ; and the demand for a direct sign from heaven
is not the abiding expression, either of the religious or
of the philosophical consciousness.
Applied philosophy is like practical religion. It
illumines life, but it gives no power to use the arts of
the medicine man. What religion practically gives to
the faithful is not the means for predicting what is
about to happen to themselves, but the strength to
endure hardness as good soldiers. Religious faith
involves no direct access to the special counsels of
God; but it inspires the believer with assurance that
all things work together for good, and endows him with
readiness to serve in his station the God who is All in
all. Such religion is not, then, the power to work
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 7
miracles, but it is the wisdom to find in all things,
however obscure, or fragmentary, the expressions, how-
ever mysterious, of the Divine Love. The faith of the
devout does not forewarn them as to the future, nor
does it annul the value of worldly prudence ; but it
makes them glad to suffer, and willing to wait, and
sure that however far off God seems, he actually is
near. Now what faith accomplishes in the daily prac-
tice of the devout, a Theory of Being must also under-
take, in so far as it is successful, to provide for us in
our efforts to understand Nature and Man.
What we men call Nature comes to us as a matter of
our extremely finite common experience. In dealing with
nature, we feel our way ; we pass from fact to fact ; we
collect fragments. When our special sciences succeed in
joining these fragments into some sort of empirical unity,
the procedure is distinctly human, and the result is al-
ways provisional. Now no philosophy can predetermine
in this realm, either what special facts shall be observed,
or what particular hypotheses as to their connection shall
first be attempted, or what provisional theories shall
prove best adapted to the purpose of any special science.
Philosophy is powerless to act as a substitute for special
science, precisely as it is powerless to add to the prod-
ucts of the industrial arts. It is as unable to formulate a
thesis in the realms properly belonging to physics or to
biology as it is to build a steam engine.
And in the same way, when we deal with Man, with
the concrete issues of his daily life, with the problems
of private passion or of public policy, we have to do,
primarily, with human nature as it is, and with all the
8 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
unconquerable naivete of our desires, of our imperfec-
tions, and even of our virtues. Philosophy does not
create men, but reflectively considers their life. And
man is as full of mystery as is the rest of nature, and is
known to our experience as a mere fragment of a whole
whose inmost unity is far beyond the reach of our pres-
ent form of consciousness. Psychology, viewed as one
of the special sciences, studies man ; and so also do all
the human branches of inquiry, political science, eco-
nomics, anthropology. Philosophy cannot predetermine
the course and the outcome of any of these sciences.
The Theory of Being is not based upon our knowledge
of any such special regions of experience, but is due to a
thoroughgoing reflection upon the presuppositions of all
experience. In its turn the Theory of Being teaches us
neither anthropology nor psychology, neither economics
nor politics. Into such regions the philosopher, as phi-
losopher, enters like any other layman, to learn the facts if
he desires to know them, but not as one endowed with
any magic power of divination.
And yet, just as the devout are required by their
religious faith to see God's hand in whatever happens,
and to view their life as his constant revelation of his
will, although they can work no miracles, and cannot
tell what a day shall bring forth ; just so our philoso-
phy, if indeed our former Theory of Being was sound,
has its strength in the general interpretation of the facts,
when once they have been found. The Theory of Being
requires us to view every fact of nature, and of man's
life, as a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life, as
a revelation, however mysterious and to us men now in
INTRODUCTION : THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 9
detail illegible, of the unity of the perfect Whole. Why
we hold this to be a true theory, we have set forth at
length in the foregoing series of lectures ; and the de-
tailed proof of the general thesis concerns us here no
longer. But the spirit in which we are to apply our
doctrine to the theory of our knowledge of particular
facts, and to the interpretation of such facts, interests us
here in much the same way in which practical religion
is interested in the spirit that the faithful ought to pre-
serve amidst the cares and sorrows of daily life. What
is it to believe, as the faithful do, that God is in all their
fortunes ? What is it to maintain, as our Theory of Be-
ing does, that, amidst all the complexities of Nature and
man's life, we are dealing with fragmentary glimpses of
an Absolute Unity, of the type depicted in our foregoing
series of lectures ? The two problems, in many respects,
resemble each other. What you already know of the
solution of one problem goes far to prepare you for the
other.
II
The scope and the proposed order of the present series
of lectures may be more precisely indicated as follows :
I shall begin our inquiry by a preliminary study of
some of the conditions that are characteristic of our
human type of knowledge. Knowledge, such as we have
of particular facts, is only one special case of what we can
and do conceive as the range of the possible forms of
knowledge. Not only theology and philosophy, but also,
as we shall see, the empirical sciences themselves depend
upon conceiving of higher types of knowledge, higher
10 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
"forms of consciousness," than our human type, as at
least possible. By contrast with such ideally definable
higher types of insight we constantly become aware of
our own limitations as human seekers for truth. We
shall, accordingly, try to characterize in general terms
some of the most marked limitations and powers of man's
intellect. As we do so we shall be led to state the first
principles of a theory of the Organization of Human
Experience. Kant's problem of the Categories, which
determine in what way we conceive the objects of human
knowledge, and which also, in giving form to our experi-
ence, define the unity that we ascribe to Nature and to
our own life, is one that we can only touch upon very
briefly. But so far as our time permits, we must outline
our view as to the essential forms in terms of which we
conceive concrete facts and their connections. Upon the
basis of the general theory of human knowledge thus
broadly sketched, we shall next pass to a study of the
questions offered to our scrutiny by Nature, when
viewed in its relation to Man. Here our main purpose
shall be to apply our general idealistic doctrine, concern-
ing what is meant by Reality in general, to the problem
as to the sense in which Nature and Man are real.
In case of Nature we have to deal with a realm whose
material seeming, whose unchanging laws, and whose ap-
parent indifference to all individual interests, and to all
ethical ideals, constitute a formidable obstacle in the way
of every interpretation of Reality in the interest of the re-
ligious consciousness. It will be our task to scrutinize the
reasons that make Nature wear, to our vision, this forbid-
ding aspect. Hereby we shall be led especially to consider
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 11
the centrally important place that Man, when viewed as a
product of Nature, occupies in our ordinary views about
the cosmos. And so the development of our Metaphysics
of Nature will enable us, before we are done, to sketch an
hypothesis as to the meaning of the processes known to
us men, at present, under the now favorite name Evolu-
tion. The sense in which Nature is a realm of fixed law
will also engage our attention ; and in the same connec-
tion we shall prepare the way for our theory of the Free-
dom of the Will. Passing over, after we have studied
these problems, to what is properly called the Moral
World, we shall, in our closing lectures, apply our general
interpretation of Being to a study of the Human Self,
of its Place in Being, and of the Moral Order, to a
consideration of the problem of Evil, and finally to
a statement of what seem to us to be the results of
Idealism regarding the final relations of the Absolute
and the human Individual, or in ordinary speech, of God
and Man. In this connection we shall be led to state
briefly our own thesis regarding Immortality. Herewith
the task of these lectures will be completed.
Ill
I pass to the promised general considerations regard-
ing the limitations of our human type of knowledge, and
regarding the organization of experience.
All knowledge is of matters of experience, this prin-
ciple we ourselves have maintained as part of our Ideal-
ism. But what does this proposition mean when applied
12 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
to the case of human knowledge ? WJiose experience is in
- question when we speak of truth?
By any man's private experience, taken in the narrowest
sense of the words, we mean what a man now has present
to his consciousness. As I speak, I am conscious that
these words are now uttered. This is present experience.
You have a corresponding present experience as you
listen. One's whole present consciousness of his meaning,
i.e. of what we before called the Internal Meaning of his
J. ideas, is, in a similarly limited sense, empirical. But the
term experience, as customarily employed when our human
science is said to be founded upon experience, is used in a
much broader sense. The term, as thus applied, refers to
a wide range of facts which are said to have been expe-
rienced by various men at various times. But, as we had
occasion to point out in the Eighth Lecture of our former
series, 1 it cannot be asserted that any human experience
(taking that word in the narrowest sense) ever makes
/ present to any man the fact that various men besides him-
self have their various experiences present to them. The
broader conception of what is called " human experience "
| is a conception that thus obviously transcends every par-
| ticular present human experience. The very existence of
the body of facts called "man's experience" has never
been verified by any man.
Now this perfectly simple observation gets a serious im-
portance so soon as we consider its bearing upon the ques-
tion : What shall constitute, for an empirical theory of
knowledge, the test of an " accredited fact " ? When and
how is any fact known to be a " fact of human experience " ?
1 See First Series, p. 364, sq.
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 13
We often say that the results of scientific observation
and experiment, or the contents of the world of common
sense, as known to men in their daily life, are typical ex-
amples of " empirically accredited facts." These, as we
add, belong to the "accessible realm." These we cannot
deny without "running counter to actual observation."
On the other hand, the contents of any religious faith,
assertions about God, about Immortality, or about the
" Unseen World " in general, these are typical examples
of what we frequently regard as lying " beyond the range
of human experience." These, then, are "inaccessible"
matters. What is in such regions fact " nobody amongst
men can verify." Equally, of course, a philosopher's as-
sertions about the Absolute, as, for instance, an idealist's
Theory of Being, are concerned with what "lies beyond
all human experience " ; and such theories attempt to
"transcend the range of verifiable fact." This contrast
between the "empirical" and the " metempirical " realm
is very familiar. It is apparently a fairly definite con-
trast. And to be sure, if you first define arbitrarily the
limits of the collective whole called " human experience,"
you may, with equal arbitrariness, define a realm of what
is to be called "transcendent" or "inaccessible" fact,
lying beyond this whole.
But what now concerns us is not an arbitrary classi-
fication of conceived ranges of knowledge, but a closer
consideration of a very obvious and natural distinction
between the two conceptions : (1) Of that which any man s
at any time experiences as present ; and (2) Of the
totality of the several facts that are, or that have been
experienced by the various men. The question is :
14 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Does any man experience the fact that there exists any
s collective whole to be called the totality of human
experience ? Does any man experience the fact that
any other man has experience? Surely, the astronomer
does not observe in his world of presentations the fact
that the physician observes the phenomena of disease, or
that the carpenter observes the making of houses. But
if the carpenter, the physician, and the astronomer
believe, as they do, each one, that the others have
experience of facts, then each believes in an existence,
viz. in the existence of the totality formed of their three
/orders of experience, although this totality is "inaccessi-
ble " to the personal experience of any of them. And
still more, when the astronomer or the physician or
the carpenter appeals, as a man of science or of common
sense, to the "general experience of mankind," or to
the experience of any selected company of experts, as
the guarantee of the truth of any of his beliefs, each
of them appeals to a body of fact which, as such a body
of fact, has never been present to the experience of any
man at any time.
It is plain, then, that if we say : " That only is to
constitute ' accredited fact ' which some individual man
has verified for himself through its presence in his
experience," our doctrine can be interpreted in either
one of two ways. The first and in fact the usual way
of interpreting the thesis is as follows : " There does
exist the body of accredited facts, a, b, c, etc., such
that any fact belonging to this body of facts as, for
instance, a has been verified by the experience of some
man, let us say by A, while some other man, as B, may
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 15
have experienced as present to himself the fact 5, and
so on, some of the various facts having been observed
indeed by the same man (as a Galileo or a Faraday-
observed, each for himself, various physical facts), while
different facts, in many cases, have been severally pre-
sented in the experience of different men. Now only
such facts as belong to this body of ' facts of experience '
are to be regarded as duly 'accredited.'" The thesis
thus stated, with various added provisos regarding the
sorts of experience, or the types of observers whose facts
are of enough importance or exactitude to count as
sufficiently verified, represents a frequent interpretation
of the meaning of the doctrine called empiricism. But
it is obvious that, in this formulation, familiar though it
be, the thesis simply contradicts itself. For it expressly
asserts the existence of the various facts, a, b, c, etc.,
while referring them, in general, to the experience of
various observers, A, B, etc., whose existence is also
regarded as "accredited." But since A, by hypothesis,
has never had present to his experience the experience
of B, nor any observer the observations of another ob-
server, it is plain that there is no one man who has
personally experienced either the existence of all the
several observers, A, B, etc., or the presence of their
various facts, a, b, c. Yet these existences and these
various facts are, according to the thesis, " accredited
facts," in case the thesis itself is to be an accredited
truth. And, nevertheless, according to the same thesis,
no facts were to be regarded as " accredited " unless some
man, A, or B, or some other, had verified them in his
experience. The thesis, as stated, consequently asserts
16 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
the existence of an indefinitely vast range of fact that
it also declares to be not "accredited fact." To become
consistent our thesis would have to be amended thus :
" No fact is ' accredited ' unless it belongs to the system
> * above defined, except, to be sure, the fact that this system,
together with its various observers, exists. That fact,
indeed, is present to no human observer's experience.
And yet, although it thus transcends every man's observa-
tion and verification, it is an 'accredited' fact." But the
thesis, as thus amended, is no longer even a relatively pure
empiricism. It is a synthesis of an appeal to human
experience with an admission of principles that, whatever
they are, or however they are grounded, transcend every
man's experience. This is a simple, but a curiously
neglected, consideration.
The second form in which the thesis may be held is
this : " No fact is ' accredited fact ' except in so far as it
is verified by the present momentary experience of myself,
here and now, to whom it thus becomes accredited fact."
So stated, the thesis is indeed remote enough from com-
mon sense, since it excludes me from recognizing, not
only your experience, but my own experiences of an
hour since, or of yesterday, or of last year, as "accred-
ited fact," and so excludes me from regarding as "ac-
credited fact " either the observations of experts, or the
experience of mankind in general, or the results of my
own observations during the course of my brief life, as
far as that life lies beyond the limits (whatever they
are) of what I call the present. We are not concerned
with examining here all of the metaphysical implications
of this form of the thesis now in question. The result
^
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 17
of such an analysis, if thoroughgoing, would involve, as
we indicated in the passage just cited from the Eighth
Lecture of our First Series, the same dialectic process
by which we were led through the series of the con-
cepts of Being from Realism to Idealism. For we should
have to ask : What form of Being have the facts that\
are at present so verified by me as to constitute a realm,
however apparently insignificant, of "accredited facts"?
And the answer to the question would lead us to ob-
serve that these facts, in so far as they have true Being
at all, are neither wholly independent, nor wholly imme- ^
diate, nor merely valid, but are what they are by virtue : '
of their place in a self-determined system of facts, whose
totality is simply our idealistic Absolute.
Meanwhile, however, although it concerns us not here
to go again over the ground of our whole metaphysic,
it will be of service to us to recall so much thereof as
to let us see that the thesis, in this second form, is, as
it stands, quite as self-contradictory as it was in its first
form, unless, indeed, it means to assert that at the pres-
ent instant I can verify an infinity of facts.
A moment's reflection serves to show me, for the first,
that I do not clearly know what constitutes the whole,
the totality of fact, that I can and do just now verify
in my present experience. Nor can I clearly distinguish
between what is now verifiable and what is not now
verifiable. I may say that I verify the fact of my pres-
ent speaking of these words, so that thus much, at least,
is, in the sense of my thesis, " accredited fact." But what
is it to speak these words? What is it that I verify in
observing my own speech? Nothing is harder than to
18 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
say how, at any one instant, taken, so far as possible, by
itself, my words are present as facts in my own con-
sciousness. Nor can I easily verify how far I just then
realize what I mean by them, or how far their sound,
their connection, or the act of uttering them is empha-
sized or obscured in consciousness by my concern that
you should hear me, or by my chance consciousness of
how the light of yonder window falls upon this paper,
or by my muscular sensations as I turn the leaves of
my manuscript. Ask me, then, to tell what is now pres-
ent to my consciousness, and the notorious difficulty
of every introspective problem reminds me that by what
now is actually present to my consciousness, I mean
much more than I can be said, in every sense, now
consciously to verify. Even my verification itself occurs
- in degrees. I may verify without being clearly conscious
that or what I verify.
And thus the present moment has about it all the
, mystery that everywhere clouds finite facts. I am con-
scious just now, but I am not wholly conscious of my
consciousness. If I were, I should be capable of verify-
ing an infinity of facts ; for, as the Supplementary Essay,
published with the former series of these lectures, has
shown at length, to be self-conscious, in any complete
sense, would be to be aware of the completion of an
infinite series of presented facts. But if, as is true,
I am not completely self-conscious, then I never com-
pletely verify ivhat it is that I am just now verifying.
" But," you may insist, " surely I can now verify some
present fact of experience, the sound of this word, the
presence of this feeling of discomfort, or of this intel-
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 19
lectual inquiry." Yes, I answer, the present moment
may answer, and does answer up to a certain point,
although never completely, certain specific questions that
have been submitted to it, by my former processes of
inquiry, for its definite verification. Jf I have asked a
specific question: "Does some word now sound?" "Is
this definite hypothesis now verified? " then a present,
although always a fragmentary and unsatisfactory answer,^,
may be possible. But my consciousness, even now, has
its background as well as its foreground, its obscurity
as well as its clearness, its presented questions as to its
own constitution as well as its presented answers to
definite questions. And nobody amongst us human be-
ings, as now we are, can verify precisely the whole of
what it is that the present moment furnishes to his
experience. In other words, the present experience it-
self, or even the verification of the facts of this present
experience, has more Being than I am able now to
observe. It is more than it at present shows ; it means i.
infinitely more than it brings to the light of passing |
human consciousness. Just this aspect of the present
moment was the one that we emphasized when we
defined our Fourth Conception, and our relation to the
" Other " which a finite consciousness always seeks as
its own fulfilment.
Whatever, then, it is that I now verify, and whatever
sense or degree of verification I count as sufficient, still,
the very fact known to me through verification may be
also known, through an indirect demonstration, to contain
more Being than I verify. Thus let us suppose again that
I verify the fact of my present utterance of words. If I do
20 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
so, then the fact that I verify my utterance of words is as
much a fact as is the fact verified, viz. the utterance
itself. For the whole fact defined is, by hypothesis, the
fact of my verification of my utterance of words. But to
be conscious of my consciousness involves something more
than merely to be conscious without such self-conscious-
ness. In general, unless a philosophical argument calls
my attention to the matter, I shall verify the fact of my
utterance of the words without verifying, i.e. without
consciously observing the first verification itself. That
is, I shall verify without being aware that I do so. Now
not only is this the case, but to deny that our verifications,
whatever they are, always are facts that in their turn con-
tain more Being than we at present verify, would be to
assert that at present we consciously verify an infinity of
facts. For to verify the fact that we make verifications,
and to verify again this verification, and so on, all at the
present moment, would indeed involve a present and com-
pleted infinite complexity of consciousness. Whoever
asserts the thesis, however, that no fact is " accredited "
from my point of view unless I now verify it, asserts a
fact, viz. the fact of my verification of facts, while not
meaning to attribute to me the infinite present knowledge
that would be implied in declaring that my verification
itself is reflectively and exhaustively verified.
Moreover, whoever asserts this same thesis defines as
real the fact that "I" experience. "I," then, am a fact.
But at this moment, unless I have completely solved the
problem of self-consciousness, I am in some respects, yes,
obviously in nearly all respects, ignorant of who I really
am, or of what the true nature of the Ego is. What
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 21
deeper human mystery is there than the Ego ? On the
other hand, if I have completely solved the problem of
self -consciousness, and if I am aware at this instant of the
solution, so as to verify all that, as a fact, I am, then, for
the same reason as the one before cited, I have present to
myself an infinity of contents of consciousness. The
maintainer of our thesis does not intend to assert that the
Ego of this instant, of whom he speaks, does at present
consciously verify this infinity of facts. It is clear to me
just now that I do not do so. But the only alternative
for the defender of our thesis is the assertion of a fact,
viz. the Ego, a fact whose Being is not wholly verified
at present, although it is indirectly known as a fact, and
as a fact possessed of this verified wealth of reality. And
thus the thesis is indeed reduced to a self-contradiction.
For the result is that there are " accredited facts," implied
in the very acceptance of the thesis, which are still not facts
now verified by me.
IV
It is quite impossible, then, to assert that there are no
" accredited facts " in the world, as known to us men, ex-
cept those which have been verified, or which are verified
in the experience of some individual man, or in the several
experiences of various men. Human experience is logi-
cally and inseparably bound up with elements which re-
main for us men, in our present form of consciousness,
metempirical. The assertion that we know the world only
in so far as individual human experience has verified the
facts of the world cannot be consistently stated, and is
never consistently applied, even by the most ardent and
22 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
most sceptical empiricists. While then philosophy is un-
able to predict a priori the special contents of human
experience, it is forced to insist that by the term " human
experience " we always mean more than the facts that are
verified by individual men.
It remains perfectly true, of course, that the empiristic
thesis which has just been examined is not without its deep
significance, and that what empiricism has intended to
emphasize is, when its statement has been properly modi-
fied, a truth, and one of the first importance. In the
former series of lectures, 1 we had occasion, when discuss-
ing the Third Conception of Being, to point out the sense
in which, even in pure mathematics, "experience is the
only guide to concrete results." As we there indicated,
all our transcending of experience is in a perfectly defi-
nite sense based upon our experience. When we reason
about the unseen, as, for instance, about the " infinite as-
semblages " of recent mathematical theory, or about our
idealistic Absolute, still, in all our investigations, " actual
experience guides," "presented facts sustain" us, just as,
in the passage cited, we set forth. Yet there is no incon-
sistency between observing this truth, and still rejecting
the thesis of the empiricist in the form in which it has
often been stated. Our whole argument in our transition
to the Fourth Conception of Being illustrated how it is of
the very nature of our human experience of our Internal
Meaning to point beyond what is presented, for the sake of
defining the very fulfilment which our presented meanings
demand, and without which they have neither truth nor
Being. It is true that every exact and demonstrative
1 See p. 253 of that series.
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 23
proposition which does transcend the presented and verified
data of our experience is capable, for us nien, only of an
indirect demonstration, such as we in fact gave for our
conception of the Absolute in the Eighth Lecture of the
foregoing course, and such as we have just given for our
assertion that every human experience is inseparably .
bound up with elements which remain, for us^men, metem-
pirical. Yet an indirect demonstration involves precisely
an appeal to present experience (namely to the present ex-
perience of an incongruity in the form in which given ideas
now present themselves to us), for our warrant and guide
in an undertaking whereby we transcend present expe-
rience. In fact, then, our presented experience is indeed our
only guide ; but it always guides us by pointing beyond itself
to that without which it becomes self -contradictory . We
know of no metempirical truth except by means of presenta- K
tions. But our presentations, in our present form of con-
sciousness, get their whole sense from their reference to what,
for us, remains metempirical truth. No fact gets "accred-
ited"''' unless our experience gives it credit. But experience,
when rationally interpreted, in the light of our indirect dem-
onstrations, never gives credit to any facts except to those
which, in some aspect, transcend our presentations. ^
The most manifest lesson of memory, of our social
consciousness, and of our reasonings about mathematical
and physical truth, is that, for us men, the office of
what is given to us, as presented fact, is to point beyond l
itself to what is not presented. Common sense generally
makes this transition too easily, on grounds of mere habit,
of prejudice, or of traditional faith. Philosophy has to
criticise the grounds of the transition, and does so,
24 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
hoping to learn to distinguish prejudice from rational
insight, and well-grounded assurance from uncertainty.
But while we live in presentations, and think in terms
of them, we all constantly use them, whether rationally
or irrationally, only to transcend them. What is given is
indeed our guide; but what is not now given, namely,
the whole true Being of things, is our goal.
In still another respect, as we also saw in our former
course, the assertion of empiricism conveys a deep truth
in an inadequate expression. The term " metempirical,"
which we have just used, is only a relative term. We
have here employed it with express reference to the
transcending of the narrow limits of human experience.
^But of course such transcending, so far as we get our
indirectly demonstrable right to the assertion that facts
y lie beyond these narrow limits, is not a transcending of
all experience. What lies beyond our presentations is
still, in so far as it has true Being, presentation. For
the world of fact exists in so far as it is presented in
\ unity to the Ahsolute Experience. That we have
asserted throughout. In so far as a consistent empiri-
cism is opposed to Realism, our own argument has
- fully accepted the theses involved in such opposition.
Every question about Being is also a question about
the organization of experience, that is, about the organiza-
tion of the true, the final experience, of which our own
is always a fragment.
The characteristic limitation of human experience is,
then, that it grasps, within the narrow limits of this
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 25
or of this instant, fragments of a meaning which can
only be conceived with consistency by regarding it as
embodied in an experience of wider scope, of determinate
constitution, and of united significance. That this is
true, our general Theory of Being undertook to show.
How in the concrete it takes place, in what special
ways our consciousness is at once transcended, and in-
cluded in a wider experience, it is the purpose of our
whole present series of discussions to make clearer;
and not until the end of the undertaking can one
judge the degree of our success.
We proceed next to the characterization of certain
more special principles that consciously determine us,
at any moment, to acknowledge as real one rather
than another fact or system of concrete facts, such as
the existence of our fellows, or of Nature, or our own
past lives. Herewith we enter upon the promised study
of some of the fundamental Categories of human ex- -
perience. We care not to write out or to defend any
table of such Categories. We make no attempt to be
exhaustive or systematic. But some specification of our
general theory, in such wise as to show its application
to our special type of human knowledge, is indeed a
necessary preliminary to our study of Nature and of
Man.
As in our general discussion of Being, so here, we
must take our starting-point from the fact that our
knowledge always involves deeds. In so far as I now
consciously mean anything, I am acting. But, as I find, ;
I am acting at present under a trvofold limitation. I '
neither know the whole of what it is that I mean to
26 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
do; nor do I know more than the most insignificant
fragment of the facts that express my will. In conse-
quence, the problem of philosophy, as of life, is two-
fold : (1) A practical problem, viz. the problem, What
am I seeking? What is the Self whose purpose is mine,
and whose life is the world ? and (2) A theoretical
problem, viz. How is this purpose expressed in the facts ?
Now our discussion will throughout undertake, so far
as that is possible, to treat these two problems in close
connection. But they will tend, at various points, to
fall apart in the argument. In the present lecture, in
dealing with the most fundamental Category of Experi-
ence, we shall indeed be able to show very explicitly
that our acknowledgment of facts as real is determined
by definite, and philosophically justified, practical motives.
But when we pass on, in the next lecture, to more special
categories, we shall be led to make a provisional sunder-
ing of the two points of view, viz. (1) that of our appre-
ciative or more explicitly volitional consciousness, and
(2) that of our descriptive or more theoretical, conscious-
ness. We shall know indeed that the sundering is pro-
visional ; but under our human limitations, it will prove, in
its own place, inevitable. It will be by means of a further
definition of just these contrasted points of view that
we shall be able to explain the relation between our
belief in the physical world, and our belief in the minds
of our fellow-men. We shall express the opposition
of the two points of view by calling the realm of Being
as our more abstractly theoretical consciousness defines it,
the World of Description ; while the world as otherwise
interpreted is the world of Life, the World of Appre-
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 27
ciation. 1 We shall show that, while the two points of
view are contrasted, they arise in our minds in close con-
nection with each other. The only justification for the
more abstractly theoretical conception of the World of
Description is its value as a means of organizing our
conduct, and our conception of what the will seeks.
On the other hand, without such a definite conception
as the World of Description furnishes, the finite will is
left only to vague longings. The two points of view will
first be considered (in the next lecture) as they appear
in the individual consciousness of any one of us. Then
they will be discussed in their social aspects in the
lecture on our conceptions of Man and of Nature.
For the moment, however, we begin not with the sun-
dering of the two points of view, but with their unity.
When I know, I am acting. My theoretical life is also
practical. But, from my own conscious point of view,
my acting is also a reacting. I am acting in what I
often call "the given situation." And the word given
here means, not only what is strictly the given, that is, not
only the situation as now presently verified by myself, but
also the whole situation which I acknowledge as real. I
am conscious that I can mean something only by pre-
supposing something ; that I can seek an end only by
acknowledging a starting-point and a goal ; that I can
create only on the basis of a recognition of what I am
1 I made use of this terminology for expressing the contrast between
the two aspects of Reality in 1892, in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy,
Lecture XII. The choice of the term Description in that work was
determined by the known usage of Kirchhoff, Mach, and others, in
defining the purpose of natural science as the exact "description" (as
opposed to " explanation") of facts.
28 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
not now seeking to create ; in brief, that the fulfilment
of my will through my present search logically depends
upon my accepting a foundation on the basis of which I
will, and an environment in which I work. Now what
I thus presuppose as the hidden ground of my mean-
ing, what I acknowledge either as the starting-point
or as the goal of my seeking, what I thus recognize, not
as my momentary creation, but as the condition of my
activity, this the foundation of my present will
. constitutes for me that concrete reality in which, at any
moment, I believe as my special "world of facts."
A fact, then, is at once that which my present will
implies and presupposes, and that which, for this very
reason, is in some aspect Other than what I find myself
here and now producing, accomplishing, attaining. Be-
cause of that aspect of a fact which the word Other
very properly emphasizes, we are prone to insist that it
is of the essence of facts to be " stubborn," to be " for-
eign to the will," to be, as facts, "beyond our power,"
"necessary," "forced upon us." But it is equally im-
portant, from our idealistic point of view, to remem-
ber that, in so far as I purpose, intend, pursue, or find
myself accomplishing, it is of the very essence of my
will to demand its own Other, to set its fulfilment
beyond its present, and so to define its own very life
as now in some sense also not its own, or as in some
wise now foreign. Our rational purpose in living as
we human beings now do, is essentially and always the
wanderer's purpose. We seek our home, our city out
of sight, our lost truth. I But in the very search itself
lies the partial embodiment of what we ourselves will. 1
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 29
It is, then, not merely our fate that makes our home
far off, or the truth a lost truth. It is we ourselves
who demand our object as the Beyond; and we are
pilgrims and strangers in a world of seemingly foreign
facts, not only because the facts, as such, are stub-
bornly foreign, but also because we insist that ours
shall be the wanderer's portion. The very attitude of
any questioner illustrates this truth. To question is to
be active, to express an interest ; and so it is to seek,
as the relative fulfilment of one present purpose, a state
of mind which also involves the dissatisfaction and
instability of viewing something as still unknown and
foreign. Nor can we here say that it is the compulsion
of the foreign facts which is the sole awakener of our
questions. Even a child's questions often illustrate the
free play of a consciousness that restlessly longs to
inquire, and that seems to us deliberately to create its
own recognition of mystery, in order that it may have '
wherewith to concern itself. Still more, however, does
the theoretical work of pure science illustrate this
nature of the will to inquire. What foreign "compul-
sion " of facts is solely responsible for the astronomer's
inquiries into the classification of stellar spectra, or for
the modern theory of algebraic equations? Yet our
whole modern conception of Nature and of Man has
been the product of just such a free activity of asking
questions.
Facts, then, are never merely Other, or " stubborn," or
"compulsory." My will is never compelled merely by
what is foreign to itself. It always cooperates in its
own compulsion. The disappointed lover is such, not
30 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
merely because his mistress rejects him, but because he
wills to love her. If he did not so will, she could not
reject him, and would lose her " compelling " character
altogether. She controls his will by his own conni-
vance. All this we saw in general in our former con-
sideration of the concept of Being. It follows, however,
that no account of the categories of experience, which
founds our consciousness of facts solely upon our expe-
rience of their compulsory or foreign character, can be
just to the nature of knowledge. What we experience is,
- in one aspect, always our own will to be compelled by facts.
The most universal character, belonging to all the
various types of concrete facts that we recognize, is
'" accordingly a synthesis of their so-called " stubborn " or
" foreign " character, with their equally genuine character
as expressions of our own purpose. A fact is for me,
at any moment, that which I ought to recognize as deter-
mining or as limiting what I am here consciously to do
or to attempt. For a particular fact I recognize, at any
moment, only in connection with a particular attempt at
action. This is the obverse aspect of what is defined,
in Psychology, as the principle that all our cognitive
processes accompany "responses to our environment."
In explaining, for psychological purposes, the natural
history of cognition, one presupposes an environment
whose facts already have a recognized form of existence.
One supposes also a conscious process as an existent
fact, whose development is to be described. The basis
of one's description is then the principle that the exter-
nal facts, which are supposed directly or indirectly to
determine the conscious process, arouse responses in the
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 31
organism of the being whose consciousness is in ques-
tion ; and that the conscious states which constitute
cognition accompany these responses of the organism to
the environment. But our own theory of the categories
of experience cannot thus base itself upon the assump-
tion that the objective world, first existing, produces a
series of corresponding responses in an organism, and 5
consequently in the cognitive life which accompanies the
processes of this organism. On the contrary, our pur-
pose, in such a theory of the categories of experience, is
to point out the principles that lead us, from within,
i.e. from our own conscious point of view, to make any
particular assertions whatever about the objective world.
For us, therefore, in this theory, the objective world is
not first known as prior to the cognitive responses, but
is viewed as it is because the conscious process regards
itself as meaning a response to a situation. The world
of " accredited facts " is known to us to exist, because
we know it to be acknowledged as existing. And
it is thus acknowledged because the purpose of any
instant of rational consciousness is fulfilled better by recog-
nizing it as thus and thus existent than by viewing it other-
wise. This assertion is the application of our general
Theory of Being to the case of our concrete knowledge
of any special fact or range of facts. ""
I acknowledge a particular fact, then, in connection with
a particular attempt at action. My particular action is
willed by me under certain limitations. These limitations
are given to me, at the moment, in the form of my sense -
of incompleteness, of dissatisfaction, of imperfect expres-
sion of my present will. But they are not merely thus
32 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
given to me as immediate contents of consciousness. They
are denned for me by my consciousness that such and such
further determination of my present actions would mean
a completer expression of my will. The correlative of
such completer action would be, as I hold, the experience
of such and such, more or less completely denned, further
contents of experience. And these further contents of ex-
& perience constitute the facts that I acknowledge as real.
When I say to myself, " Such and such deeds, not now
done by me, would more fully express my will," my practi-
cal consciousness is the one which is summoned up by
further saying, " Then I ought to tend, even now, towards
such acts." And the theoretical Ought of our judgments
about facts, like the practical Ought of Ethics, is after all
definable only in terms of what Kant called the Autonomy
of the Will. I ought to do that which I even now, by
implication, mean to do. My Ought is my own will more
rationally expressed than, at the instant of a capricious
activity, I as yet consciously recognize. The consciousness
of the more rational purpose, of a purpose looming up,
as it were, in the distance, beyond my present impulses,
and yet even now seen as their own culmination, like a
mountain crowning the ascent from the foothills, the
consciousness, I say, of such a purpose, is what we mean in
Ethics by the Ought. This Ought may appear foreign,
but yet it is never at once the Ought and still something
wholly foreign to my own will. Constraint, as such, is
never moral obligation. The Ought is another will than
my impulse, yet it is one with my own meaning ; and it
expresses more fully and rationally what my impulse even
now implies. But if the practical Ought of Ethics is thus
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 33
the fuller determination of my own will, viewed at once as
mine and yet as superior to my present capricious and
imperfect expression of my purpose, the theoretical Ought
of our present discussion of the categories of Expe-
rience is similarly related to the theoretical aspect of
my present conscious activity. The expression of my s
Internal Meaning, as I now embody my purpose, has
contents and a structure, has characters and relations
within itself, and so is not only a "mere Idea," but
also has the correlative character of being, as we have
all along seen, a fragment of Reality. The fuller expres-
sion of my will, defined by the Ought, has, in the same
way, its own correlative embodiment in the Real. This
embodiment constitutes my world of recognized facts. In
recognizing the Ought on its practical side, as that to
which I should even now conform my deed, I inevitably
recognize the embodiment of this Ought, in the world of
my completed will, as a fact. The present deed should
be, then, at once a conformity to the Ought, viewed as a
mode of action, and an adjustment or response to the
facts, as the Ought, which is embodied in them, requires
me to recognize them. The facts, as real, are embodiments
of my purpose, yet not of my purpose as just now it tran-
siently seems, but as it ought to be viewed. In recognizing/
them, I limit my present expression of myself through
deeds, by virtue of my reference to these facts themselves.
That shall be now (namely, in my deed), which conforms
to the whole system that I mean, viz. to the world of the
facts. To view my present act thus is to recognize the facts
as such.
The extremely manifold and subtle implications of this
V
34 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
view of our consciousness of the realm of concrete facts
can here only be indicated. Our later discussions of
Nature and of Man must supply the details. It is plain,
' x at once, that, according to .our view, every concrete fact
in the universe becomes for us, just in so far as it is
/ acknowledged, the expression of a purpose, and so is
never a mere datum of anybody's present experience, and
is never a mere constraining power, that from without
simply forces our assent. A fact may be acknowledged
while yet many aspects of it remain mysterious. In so
far it remains a " foreign " fact. But it is also our thesis
that no purpose in the universe either is, or can now be
rationally viewed by me, as wholly foreign to my own ;
while facts, so far as I understand them, become ipso facto
expressions of ideas, and so of purposes. All purposes
seek the expression that even now I am consciously seek-
ing. Thus I myself am real, and I regard nothing real as
a me alienum.
But, on the other hand, facts unquestionably limit me,
and now seem to possess, at this passing instant, their
often overwhelmingly foreign aspect. Why ? In so far
as I remain in suffering unreasonableness, no answer is
apparent to such a question. But then, suffering un-
reasonableness, a merely fragmentary mood of finite
life, if taken by itself, asks no very definite questions.
For definite questions are reasonable, and imply successful
inner deeds. But the mood of the unreasoning sufferer
is lost in its mere failure to act successfully. It expresses
its purpose only in so far as it is now conscious of its
suffering. The rest of the universe it finds merely
as something negative. Its word is, " True Being is
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 35
not here." Whoever, on the other hand, not only suffers,
but also asserts : " These and these are the objective facts :
my disease is this or this my enemy has won against
me thus or thus cruel Nature, indifferent to my will,
has such and such a constitution" any such more
rational sufferer lays himself open to the question,
" How do you know these ideas of yours about those
foreign facts to be true ? " If the answer is, " Such is
the verdict of human experience in general," then we
already know that this very conception involves what
we called relatively metempirical elements. No man of
us has ever experienced what the general verdict of
human experience really is. But if one answers, " This
is what I myself now experience," then we reply,
" But you do not now experience the constitution of those
external facts which you yourself characterize as foreign
to you. You now only experience that you are not now
succeeding." But if the sufferer goes on to say, "It
would be, in view of my experience, simple folly, mere
unreasonableness, to admit the doubt that the foreign
facts really are such and such " then his position, as
far as his comprehension of the facts enables him to go,
is at once substantially identical with ours. He recog-
nizes that he reasonably ought to view certain facts as in '
particular ways external to the internal meanings of his
own ideas. But a world where that is real which now
ought to be regarded as real, is a world where explicitly
at least a certain aspect of one's Internal Meaning is
already recognized as expressed by the facts. For the
Ought, as such, is never merely foreign to my own will.
To recognize the whole fact-world as the final embodi-
36 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
ment of Internal Meaning is merely to carry out to the
end this same procedure.
Yet, as one may still insist, the question is not an-
swered, Why do the facts often seem as foreign as they
do ? Why is their explicit conformity to our purpose,
as denned by the Ought, joined with aspects of such
hostility to all our purposes? In part this question is
simply the problem of Evil, which will concern us later
in another connection. In part our further discussion
of the categories of experience, in our next lecture, will
suggest its answer. In order to express the whole will
which comes to our present consciousness in this so frag-
mentary human form, the facts, as we shall soon see, have
to involve aspects that must now seem to us infinitely
remote, and consequently, beyond our detailed compre-
hension at this instant. Thus, as we shall see, even the
foreign aspect of the facts fulfils a purpose.
VI
It should be sufficiently plain by this time that in
regarding our acknowledgment of facts as an expression
of the Will, we do not assert that the will acknowledges
facts in any merely capricious way. The will, whose
\ relative satisfaction in this or in that present belief, or
\ undertaking, or act of acknowledgment, or acceptance
\ of the Ought, we have been observing, is known to us at
any moment as by no means an altogether free or uncon-
strained will. Of the relative freedom of the finite will
we shall speak hereafter. But for the present, when we
say, " It is our own will which expresses itself in our
interpretation of the real world," we are not to be
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 37
answered by such a retort as, for example, the following :
"Surely, you cannot help believing as you now do in these
physical and social facts, in these rocks and hills, in these
fellow-men, and in the rest of your well-known world.
Therefore, it is not of your own will that you thus
acknowledge their presence. If it were, you could cease,
at pleasure, to believe in their existence. For if it is
your will that causes your belief, your will could, if it
chose, cause a change of belief, and at pleasure you could
instead acknowledge the truth of the Arabian Nights
tales, and believe yourself a dweller in Sirius. As a fact,
you must believe in the facts of common sense, whether
you will or no."
I reply to such an objection, first, that I do not call
our will the cause of our present recognition of an
external reality, and so still less the wholly free cause
of this recognition, as if the will were a power that could
now of a sudden change all our beliefs. What I say is
that our present recognition of the concrete things in
which we all believe is not a mere acceptance of any
content of sense, but does include an intention to act,
and does fulfil, as far as it goes, a purpose, and our own
conscious purpose. How we came to get this purpose
I do not here in the least care to explain by the hypoth-
esis of any natural or supernatural causal process. Still
less do I care now what psychological conditions enable
the purpose to get itself expressed in our special beliefs.
I report the observable inner facts, as the singer observes
his own singing. It is so. I care not now what causes
made it so. All our doctrines about causes, and about
causation, whatever they are, are instances of just
38 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
such expressions of rational purposes, not means of
explaining the fundamental fact that rational purposes
get expressed in our conscious life. The so-called
axiom of causation, or even the more generally stated
" principle of sufficient reason," is only one of the forms
in which the Idea gets partially embodied in our thought
about things. And the only warrant for believing in
such a principle at all is the Ought, whose deepest basis
\ lies in our fundamental assurance that all reality embodies
purpose. So I do not base my view on the assertion that
the will causes our beliefs and is free to change them.
I point out simply that to believe as we do about men
and things seems just now more reasonable to us than
does any other belief which we chance to have in mind
as an alternative. But seeniing reasonable means seem-
ing to fulfil a purpose. And I prove my doctrine not
only by this appeal to consciousness, but, indirectly, by
letting my opponent try to refute me. If he does so,
it soon appears that he rejects my account as something
that seems to him unreasonable, i.e. as something that
ought not to be held, just as our realist, in our former
discussion, was found appealing to the " sanity " of his
beliefs, to their usefulness for practical human purposes,
as part of his warrant for maintaining that the reality
is independent of all purposes. One thus refutes our
doctrine of the Ought only by appealing to it. All
logical discussion is, in fact, appeal to a norm, and a
norm is a teleological standard.
Meanwhile, to say that my will is just now expressed
in a given way, is by no means equivalent to denying
that, in large measure, I must just now will thus. For
INTRODUCTION : THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 39
that must be whose denial conflicts with what is already
recognized as actual. If I am this way of willing,
then one can express the fact in terms of a must. In
one aspect rny will may indeed possess freedom. In an-
other aspect I am obviously as much under " constraint "
in willing as in any other aspect of my conscious life.
Only the constraint is not wholly external. It is my
own. If I were to find my hand too near the fire, I
should will to withdraw it, and should express my will
in struggles if another man constrained me. But my
willing itself, my determination to struggle for my free-
dom, would here be as clear a case of something that I
just then must will, from the very internal nature of my
will, as the act of my enemy who held my hand towards '
the fire would be the case of a condition externally forced
upon my attention. In such a case I will, but to say
that I also must will thus, is to express an aspect of
what my will actually and consciously includes. So, too,
it is in case of our disappointed lover, whose will gives his
mistress power over him. His love is his will, but just
now he ?nust love. So our acknowledgment of the Ought
is an act of will, but there may be a must bound up with }
this acknowledgment. Will is not mere wavering. It
has a determinate nature. And whatever has a definite
character, is such that you can express certain aspects
of this character in terms of what you then call necessity.
VII r
The category of the Ought thus has two aspects, and
implies their unity. The aspects are those which, in our
40 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
general Theory of Being, we defined as the External and
.Internal Meaning of Ideas. Only, in that general dis-
cussion, we were considering our relation to the universe
as a whole. Here we are concerned to point out how
our relations to the particular objects of experience
result from those involved in our general theory of real-
ity. When we define any particular object as real, we
are indeed momentarily conscious of the aspect of exter-
nal necessity, foreign constraint, compulsion ; and this
aspect, as a rule, is, in our present life, predominant. But
when we were inquiring into the general metaphysical
issues, our whole attitude was deliberately reflective, self-
conscious, observant of the demands that our ideas con-
sciously make. Hence the bridge that leads over from an
idealistic metaphysic to a theory of our knowledge of
Nature and of Man is always difficult to find. The reader
of idealistic theory accordingly often says, " All this seems
plausible, but what has it to do with hard facts ? " Now
we have pointed out that the " hardness " of particular
facts depends upon their having a more or less determi-
nate structure. We human beings, however, never verify
at any one moment this structure in so far as it is
"hard," i.e. stubborn, enduring, valid for all men, and
real beyond the range of our momentary wishes and
purposes. We can at any moment verify the fact that
just then we do or do not find present what we seek.
And we always do verify the fact in some respect, what
we seek is present, since our seeking is already an act,
and our act is already an expression of an idea. We also
always verify the fact that, in some respect, what we
seek is not present, since we are always dissatisfied. But
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS 41
the " objective facts," in Nature or in the life of Man,
are not thus ever to be verified, at any one instant of
our lives. They are real for us, but they are real as the
acknowledged objects whose structure transcends what
is now given to us. * Our question in the present dis-
cussion being this, " What determines us to acknowledge
as real one rather than another system of particular
facts ? " we have here pointed out that the first deter-
mining principle, namely, the Ought, requires us to
acknowledge at each moment as real certain particular
facts which, even while they are conceived as limiting,
constraining, and so determining our acts, are also con-
ceived as thereby enabling us even now to accomplish
our will better than we could if we did not acknowledge
these facts. The "constraint" to which we here refer is
meanwhile not first known as due to a cause, but comes
to us in the form of the fact that our will is not now
wholly expressed. .
The Category of the Ought may thus be defined as^
implying three subordinate Categories : first, that of
the Objectivity of all particular facts ; secondly, that
of the Subjectivity of the grounds for our acknowledg-
ment of every particular fact ; thirdly, that of the univer-
sal Teleology which, from our point of view, constitutes
the essence of all facts. Objective^ are the facts that our
experience suggests to us, because they are always, in
some respect, other than what we now consciously find
presented to us, as the relative fulfilment of our purposes,
within our momentary experience. In this aspect they
appear foreign to our will, and they so appear in various
degrees, so that many writers have maintained that our
_-*
42 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
" sense of resistance " is the fundamental warrant for
our belief in facts external to ourselves. Such a view
is inadequate, because it makes use of the category of
causation as a primitive and irreducible conception. But
unquestionably the facts do resist our momentary de-
sires. Subjective^ however, are all the grounds for our
present acknowledgment of the facts. For in recog-
. nizing that our present wills are limited and controlled,
we also recognize that only through such control can
they win their determinate embodiment. And so it is
our own will to acknowledge these foreign and objec-
tive limitations of our will. And thus no fact can
f furnish to us, wholly from without, the evidence that
it exists. Nature embodies my will even in appear-
ing foreign to my will ; and thus only can I know that
Nature exists as a system of facts denned by my ideas,
but beyond my presentation. And, finally, the synthe-
sis of these two characters appears in the essential Teleo-
logical constitution of the realm of facts, a constitution
which we shall soon have occasion to point out in the
region where it seems least plausible, namely, in the
so-called "mechanical," or better, in the seemingly non-
teleological realm of natural law.
Such, then, is the beginning of our account of the Or-
ganization of Experience as human wit conceives that
organization.
1
.
i%
LECTURE II
o
LECTURE II
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS
That all our acknowledgment of facts is a conscious
submission to an Ought, is a principle which still leaves
numerous aspects of our world of human experience very
ill-defined. We turn to a study of some of these aspects,
and of their corresponding most fundamental Categories.
Let us give at once a list of the features of our experi-
ence which are here in question. First, then, the world of
Facts is a world of Likenesses and Differences. These I*''
characters we find interwoven in our world with a most
baffling complexity. We endeavor to deal with them, in
an elementary way, by discriminating and classifying
facts. But secondly, as we proceed to classify our world,
we discover, for reasons which this lecture will have to
study somewhat minutely, that the acknowledged facts
appear as forming Ordered Series, and so as more or lessK
obviously grouped into Systems, and subject to Laws.
These laws, which have come to characterize all our mod-
ern views of Nature, appear to us to be universal in what
I have called the World of Description. A decidedly
new deduction of the most fundamental categories of this
World of Description will be presented in this lecture.
But thirdly, the very structure of this World of Descrip-
tion proves, upon closer analysis, that it cannot be the
final expression of the inmost nature of things. We are
45
46 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
led, then, in a way that profoundly concerns the interests
of religion, to view the true world in another light. The
- genuine Facts of the universe are the facts of Life ; and
this, the necessary result of our general idealistic doctrine,
will get a special expression in consequence of our pres-
ent way of stating the contrast between the World of
/ Description and the World of Will or of Appreciation.
The one aspect of reality we shall later find embodied in
the conception that nature s laws are invariable. The other
aspect will receive embodiment in our Social Conscious-
ness. The two aspects will be reconciled in subsequent
lectures, by means of our Interpretation of Nature. We
shall maintain that all special physical laws are only
relatively invariable, and that our deepest relations to
Nature are social.
To the consideration of the foregoing Categories in
general, as leading up to our later study of Nature and of
Man, the present lecture is to be devoted.
I
And first as to the Likenesses and Differences of Facts.
The logic of the relations of likeness and difference first
came to our notice when we were dealing with the prob-
lem of Realism in our former series of lectures. 1 We be-
came better acquainted with the bearing of the general
concept of Being upon these relations in the course of the
Ninth and Tenth lectures of that series. Here we have
to deal with the topic still more at close range. Every
student of these problems knows that likeness and differ-
ence are two aspects of the world that simply cannot be
1 First Series, p. 129, sqq.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 47
sundered even by the utmost efforts of abstraction. In a
sense, any two objects that you recognize as real, or as
possible, have points of resemblance. In a sense, also,
any two objects, however nearly alike, have differences.
Moreover, if you detect a difference between two objects
and are asked in what respect the two differ, or are asked
for what is often called the " point of difference," a mo-
ment's reflection shows you that what you name in your
answer is not onlyja point_of difference, but also a point of
agreement orj^eseniblance between the two objects. Two
artists differ in style or in degree of skill. That is, they
also agree in both possessing style or skill. Two solids
differ in contour. That is, they both have contour, and in
so far are alike. No skill of abstraction ever enables you
to sunder the likenesses and the unlikenesses of facts, so \
as to place the two aspects of the world apart in your
conception. Each depends upon the other. Where you
estimate degrees of likeness and difference, and call ob-
jects " more " or " less " different, you get further illustra-
tions of the same principle. For two objects do not grow
appreciably " more " different, for your usual fashion of
estimate, merely by losing points of agreement. What
you may often call a " very wide," or even the " widest
possible " difference, comes to your consciousness in con-
nection with contrasted or opposed objects, such as com-
plementary colors, violent emotional changes, conflicts of
will, and the like. But in such cases the difference is
recognized as resting upon similarity. The complementary
colors are more obviously contrasted than a color and an
odor would be. Joy and grief, rage and gentleness, love
and hate, are alike in being emotions, and the contrasted
48 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
emotions of each pair resemble each other in being of the
same more special types. Wills can differ or conflict by
virtue of their relation to the same objects. On the other
hand, where points of difference between objects multiply
until we no longer recognize the correlative agreements,
the objects in question become disparate for our conscious-
ness. And disparity means at once the possession of so
Imany differences that we can no longer recognize what
they are, and a kind of secondary appearance of vague
likenesses ; since all objects whose relations we cannot
clearly make out tend to lapse into a sort of blur in the
background of our consciousness. There are countless
differences amongst the miscellaneous objects that one sees
in a crowded market-place, in case he himself is not seek-
ing for the wares, or caring for the buyers and sellers.
One observes that these differences are in one sense end-
less. One also observes that all this seems much alike to
him ; because it all means crowd and confusion, and leaves
him "indifferent."
Herewith, however, we come to a point in the theory
of our consciousness of likeness and difference which is,
in my opinion, of critical importance for our whole
doctrine about the particular facts of the world, and for
our final interpretation of the problem of the individual.
"The likenesses and differences that we observe in facts
are not merely thrust upon us without our consent or
connivance. They are the objects of our attentive Interest.
And they obviously vary with this interest. Nowhere
more clearly than in case of our consciousness of likeness
and difference do we see how significant the will is in
determining what we shall regard as actual.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 49
To attend, namely, is to take note of differences (and
consequently of resemblances) which, were we inatten-
tive, we should ignore. To turn our attention from
certain facts, is to disregard differences of which we
were before taking account. Now we are here speaking
of attention, not as of a causally efficacious psychological '
process (for cause and effect concern us not yet), but
as of one_aspect of that relative fulfilment of p urpose
in present consciousness of which I have all along spoken.
That to which we attend interests us. In attending to
a sound, to a color, to an abstract conception, we find
our purpose in some degree fulfilled by the ignoring or
observing of some specific likenesses and differences.
And the correlated likenesses and differences which appear
before us in the observed facts are such as the direction of
our attentive interest in some measure favors.
The world of facts is thus n ot merely g iven as li ke^
or different ; it is at any moment regarde d as possessing
the^correlative likenesses and differences to which we,//'
then and there attend. In fact, that r eaction t o our
world, of which at the last time we spoke, is in great
part an attentive attitude of the will, and is in so far
a regarding of that to which we attend as more defin itely
different from the 36irckground.^of con sciousn ess] than it
otherwise would be. It is perfectly true that we are
not conscious of creating, i.e. of finding our purpose
presently fulfilled in, more than a very subordinate aspect
of the differences and correlative likenesses that we at
any moment observe in the facts of our world. That
is because of that relatively "foreign" character of the
facts of which we spoke in defining the Ought. But it is
E
50 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
also true that the more closely I observe, and the more
carefully I submit myself to the requirement " to see
the facts as they are," the more surely it is the case
that the attitude of my attention in all this process of
observation does, in its own degree, determine what
/differences amongst facts shall come to my observation.
f Car eful measurem ent, for instance, that most charac-
teristic of the processes upon which exact empirical
science is based, involves a typically objective, "self-
surrendering," su bmissive attitude of attention. Yet,
on the other hand, we must insist that just this attitude,
observant as it is of certain small differences which our
less exact activities ignore, finds what it seeks, and what
otherwise gets forced by outer nature upon nobody's
observation, viz. precisely these small differences them-
selves, which meet our intent to be exact. What ex-
perience shows us as to the quantitative aspect of the
world is, not that such differences exist wholly apart
from our own or anybody's attention, but that the
attentive will to measure does find a successful expres-
sion of its purposes in experience, so that a conscious-
ness of small differences in lengths, times, masses, etc.,
comes to be recognized, where untrained and careless
attention had ignored every such difference. Here, too,
J then, the fact observed is the fulfilment of our intent
to observe that kind of fact.
In general, we may say : Likenesses and differences
are not recognized by us as aspects of the world exist-
ent wholly apart from any of our specific purposes, but
as correlative to certain tendencies of our will, i.e.
to certain interests, which are fulfilled in recognizing
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 51
these specific sorts of likenesses and differences which
we come to observe. In the concrete, then, we must
say, our intelligent experience involves at every step
an interest in regarding facts as like or as different. This
interest wins its way ; and herein consists one aspect
of the expression of purpose in fact which is characteristic
of our own view of Being.
Most clearly this correlation of fact and purpose ap- |j
pears in all our Classifications. To classify is to regard
certain facts as different (just because we find that to us
certain differences are im por tant), and certain objects as
in a specific sense alike (because our interest in their like-
ness predominates over our interes t in making certain
possible sunderings). What classes your acknowledged
world of fact contains, your own interest in classification
obviously cooperates in determining. Hence the possibil-
ity of the well-known and endless disputes over whether
our classifications in science stand for the truth of things,
over whether our general ideas represent " external reali-
ties," and over the other historically significant problems
of the theory of Universals. From our own point of
view, these controversies get a very simple solution. _Of
course all cl assificatio n is relative jto^he_j^int of view,
varies with that point of view, and has value only as
fulfilling the purpose of whoever classifies. And, never-
theless, the question, How ought I to classify? has an
objective meaning in precisely the sense in which any
question about the facts of the world has meaning. Just
now, when I classify mankind into two groups, you who
hear me, and the rest of humanity, the classification ful-
fils a purpose of mine. It involves emphasizing certain
52 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
presented or conceived differences, and regarding as
equivalent certain facts that, from another point of view,
could be subdivided or contrasted. The question whether
' this classification expresses anything " objective," any-
thing bearing on the "true nature of things," is simply
jSj the question, How far is my momentary purpose in classi-
fying thus an explicit and conscious expression of a cer-
i
'tain iufinitely wealthy purpose? This larger purpose
comes to my present consciousness in the form of the
assurance that I ought to acknowledge humanity and the
universe, together with all that infinite wealth of meaning
which my present thought of these objects even now hints
to me, and hints to me as that complete expression of
my will which at every moment I am seeking.
The true problem about the objective validity of my
classification is then the problem of the Ought, only here
considered with reference to the question, What ought
to be regarded as different or distinct, and what as equiv-
alent, and in what respect ? This is a teleological prob- /
lem. It is to be solved, if at all, upon the ground of a
consideration of the relation of this moment's passing
purpose to the whole world-purpose of which it is a hint
and a fragment. God distinguishes what it pleases him
to distinguish. The logical as well as the moral problem
is, Does my will accord with God's will ?
So much, then, for Likeness, Difference, and Classifica-
tion in general. The sum is so far this : Likeness and
Difference are inseparable aspects of the world. Their
recognition, and their very existence, are correlated with
the interests which they fulfil. We express our own
interests in them by means of our classifications, whose
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 53
objective truth depends upon the significance of the will
that makes them.
II
I pass next to an important special instance of likeness
and difference, whose consideration will lead us over to
the other categories of our list.
The most " subjective " of our classifications, that is,
the one most expressive of the point of view of a particular
consciousness, is founded on the distinction which any
one of us finds himself making between the facts that he
j ust no w observes, acknowledges, thinks about, and the
"rest of the universe." We not only recognize in the
concrete the facts that we chance to be making the objects
of our present and conscious consideration, but we all
acknowledge a realm of truth beyond, whose reality we
accept, but whose detail is unknown to us. London
is real to us when we think of it ; but our acknowl-
edgment of its reality is far from being a concrete
recognition of the wealth and variety of facts, social
and physical, that we regard as being contained in what
is meant by the name. It is so with all those distant
facts which we found Realism using, at one stage of our
discussion of that doctrine, as examples of independent
facts that " make no difference " to a given knower, in a
certain state of his knowledge. The unseen meteors of
interplanetary space, the waves in the far-off seas, the
craters in the moon, the ballads and legends of ancient
Tartar tribes, the copper mines of Montana, all such
facts, and an infinity of others, equally varied, are, lost,
at any moment of our human consciousness wherein we
54 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
do not concretely acknowledge the ir realit y, in the nebu-
lous blur of what we call "the rest jjf_ the wo rld."
And so, what we seem to know, at any instant, consists
of two regions, whose contrast is of more importance, in
many ways, than is the one upon which we insisted at the
opening of our former lecture. There we laid stress
upon the difference between what is pre$?ited, at any
instant of our consciousness, and what is then recognized
or acknowledged as the expression of the theoretical Ought
which controls our thinking. Here we draw the line
of our classification at another place. We distinguish
what either is presented or else is in some detail the
object of belief, from what is acknowledged only as a
whole and undifferentiated. Think of Asia, and think
of some definite belief of yours regarding Asia, and what
you think of is an object that, as you believe in it, is
indeed not now presented to your observation. But it
is present to your thought. The i dea of it, as an Inte r-
nal Meaning, is something of which you are definitely
conscious. Yet, in addition to believing this or that about
Asia, you unquestionably do recognize, however vaguely,
even at the moment, that Asia is but a pa rt of _t]ie_mii-
verse whose reality ^ou also acknowledge. Now this
universe in its wholeness is real for you, at the moment,
over and above Asia, because, as we have insisted, your
idea of Asia is by itself unsatisfying, and so is inevitably
viewed as something that cannot be expressed alone. It
is felt to be essentially a fragment ; and this feeling con-
stantly tends to lead you to further thoughts, which still
remain for your consciousness latent, thoughts of the
relation of Asia to the rest of the Eastern Continent, or
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 55
of the relation of the Asiatic peoples to the British
Empire, or to the world's history. But in what more
concrete sense this idea of Asia needs and gets supple-
ment through other re alities, you are not conscious, so
long as you fix attention upon the assertions about Asia
alone.
Every concrete act of knowledge, in our conscious life,
includes, then, a more or less delibemte_abstraction from
the background of recognized reality which we conceive
as the world, for the sake of a clearer attention to certain
special objects of our present acknowledgment. There
results a contrast between this foreground and back-
ground of knowledge, the one containing the consciously
distinguished objects of our present beliefs, the other
containing only what is acknowledged in the lump, as the
single and undifferentiated whole called " the rest of the
universe."
Now this classification at once arouses a question as to
its own basis and meaning. The question takes the form
of the inquiry, What is the true relation of those various N >
r eal obje cts of which at any moment we do not think in ;
the concrete, to the whole state of our knowledge at that
moment ?
Realistic theories of knowledge, and in fact most of
the j> P u larly familiar philosophical views, even where
they are only in part under the influence of technical
Realism, reply to this question simply : " The objects
now thought of by us are not present to our knowledge
at all. They are absent objects, which do not now
affect the mind. In someother state of our conscious-
ness they may acquire a meaning for us. Then they
56 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
become our objects. But when they are not thought of
as these and these objects they are not thought of at
all." This theory seems simple. It appeals to natural
prejudices. But it is wholly oppo sed to our own analysis
of the relation of Internal to External J NIeaning. We
can entertain it no longer. It lapses with the realistic
conception of Being.
For if n othin g that exists e xists independe ntly of
anything else, if the nature of everything is inevitably
bouliaT^up^with the nature of all other things, then
; knowledge, in facing reality at all, faces in some wise
I the whole of it at once, and the only question is how
this at any instant takes place. The abstractness of
our momentary knowledge, the vastness of our momen-
tary ignorance of all concrete facts, no theory of knowl-
edge recognizes more sincerely than does our own.
But that all differences rest upon an underlying unity,
this is the very thesis which, in our present series of
discussions, we are trying to make more concrete. For
us, if you say, "The objects, other than Asia, which
the world contains while I think, with conscious definite-
ness, only of Asia, must be objects of other acts of
knowledge, and are in no sense present to this act,"
then it is necessary to reply : But the other acts of
knowledge cannot, in their own Being, be wh olly ot her
than this one. For were they wholly other, they_jvould
hflff ^ 7-I rolling T-P^ll y in pnm rpnn W if|| jjvjg fl^t And if
so, they would not be acts of knowledge at all. For
two acts of knowledge have in common the real char-
acter of being knowledge. And this is a single char-
acter. If common to two facts, it gives them share in
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 57
one Being. Just so, if the other objects besides Asia
were wholly other than Asia itself, there would again
be no community ; and if Asia has Being, these other
objects could have no Being. And so, in knowing
Asia, I, in some sense, already know these other objects.
And my knowledge, too, is in some sense one with the
knowledge that more concretely possesses them. They
are not, then, wholly absent objects. Even now, I, in
some sense, mean them all.
Wh oever denies th is, after all, by implication, affirms
it. For he asserts that there exist various objects, and
various states of knowledge. He implies in his very
assertion that his own present idea of these existences,
his present meaning, is expressed in the existence of
these same facts. This assertion, if true, implies a gen-
uine unity, including, and by its nature differentiated
into, the variety, not only of his sundered facts, but of
these facts and his own knowledge of them.
And therefore, whoever knows any concrete object,
knows in a sense all objects. In what sense is he then
ignorant of any ? This is for us the truly important
problem. x
We reply at once : The objects now co ncretely a c- \
knowledged are relate d to the objects not now con-
cretely known, in precisely the same general sense as
is that in which, at any instant of our conscious life,
the objects which our at tention focusses are relat ed to ivhat,
altho ugh pres ent, is lo st in the backgroun d [j conscious-
ness . Ig norance always m eans inattention to det ails. In^i
our momentary conscious life, such ignorance, so far as
it relates to the presented contents of sense, is often
58 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
due to a direction of attention which we can then and
there alter by an instantaneous and voluntary shifting
of our point of view. In such cases we speak of volun-
tary inattention, as when, in order tojis ten bett er, we
neglectjthe_Ja^ts_jQf-vision, or, in order to think bet ter,
disregard a bodily_dis^pjnifort. But even within the
limits of our momentary consciousness, our attention and
inattention, although expressions of our will, are not
always just then alterable at will. And even so, our
inattention to the countless real facts, which at any
moment of our human existence we altogether fail con-
cretely to acknowledge, is due to conditions of our
attention and of our inattention which we cannot at
present alter except by the infinitely numerous small
steps that together make up what we call the process of
experience. This process of experience itself, of which
empiricism justly makes much, is not, however, something
determined wholly from without, by the mere coming of
the facts to us. It is determined also from within, by our
going to meet the facts, as we actually and restlessly
do whenever we inquire, observe, or reflect. And every
least shifting of our conscious momentary attention is
one of these small steps whereby we continually under-
take to make good the original sin, as it were, with
which our form of consciousness is beset. On the other
hand, this narrowness of our actual attention, tliisJjjnita-
ti on to a few concre te_Jacts, and this ignoring of the
infinite detail of a world that, at any moment, we ac-
knowledge as real only in its vague wholeness, is a con-
dition fixed for us, not by a power wholly external to
our own will, but by the very WilLof w hich our every
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 59
act of attentio n is the passing expression, namely, by
the Will whose embodiment is the whole world of facts.
And this very narrowness itself there foFe ""constitutes,
not indeed a present momentary act, but a state of our
own will, a character of our present interest in the
universe. This character is that we attend to only a
few facts at a time, while the rest is the vague back-
ground of the world. Just as the disappointed lover
of our former illustration is defeated, not without the
connivance of his own will, although against his main
conscious wish, so here, too, it is a present constitution
of our own will that is in a genuine sense expressed in
our very failure to know the detail of the universe,
despite our conscious wish to know more than we do.
For this inner conflict of the World Will with itself,
this tragedy of satisfaction through the establishment
and the overcoming of endless dissatisfaction, is a char-
acter of the universal purpose which we shall learn here-
after to appreciate, even as here we meet with an instance
of it in the most elementary phenomena of the knowing
process.
Our finitude means, then, an actual inattention, a lack
of successful interest, at this conscious instant, in more
than a very few of the details of the universe. But the
in finitely niumersms-. othex details are i n no tvise w holly
abs ent from our kn owledge* even now. They do " make a /
difference to us." Consciously we know them all at
once, but know them abstractly, in the form of our
acknowledgment of the "rest of the world" as real,
over and above the few things we now recognize in
detail. And since we are even at this instant, ourselves,
60 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
in one aspect, a resultant of the meaning of all the " rest
of the world," it is true, even now, that were the facts
which we fail to know in detail, other than they are, our
appreciation of what we do concretely know, our present
attentive attitude, would be other than it is.
This is the general expression, in terms of our own
theory, of the source of the present imperfections of our
knowledge. Observe that we do not explain these mat-
ters by first assuming the existence of a certain being,
called a finite knowing Subject, an entity amongst
others, by next pointing out how knowledge gets im-
pressed upon him from without, say through his sense-
organs, and by then finally referring his ignorance to
his lack of impressions. All such views, in so far as
they are defensible at all, belong either to psychological
theory, or, at best, to the developed metaphysical theory
of the many individual Selves, and not to the general
Theory of Knowledge. But Psychology, as a special
science, is one result only of a particular human interest
in the natural world which we shall come to know a
little better in our fourth lecture. That special interest
concerns us not as yet. Nor can we here presuppose
that theory of the many individual Selves which we
shall hereafter develope. In our general theory of finite
knowledge we have to do only with the fact that a
certain state of inattention exists at a certain moment
of time. We know here, as yet, nothing of soul-sub-
stances, or even of metaphysical individual Subjects,
such as, acted upon from without, come to build up
their knowledge upon the basis of their impressions.
Nor are there, from this point of view, separate series
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 61
of " mental states," correlated to physical processes called
brain states, and capable of being studied as to the laws
of association which determine their sequence. All such
conceptions can be viewed either as relatively valid, or
as metaphysically final, only upon the basis to be estab-
lished by a general theory of what constitutes our own
type of know ledge. And for such a theory, our
whole present concern, experience and reality alike
contain only fulfilment of purpose, complete or incom-
plete, conditions of irubexest and attention, expressed or
partially expressed in present consciousness, acknowl-
edgments of facts, and i gnorance of facts, beliefs, and
truths related to beliefs. And of these only does the world
of oar considerations in this lecture consist. Hence we
say, While the world in its entirety is the embodiment
of our whole will, the fragment of that will, which this
passing moment of human consciousness embodies, is a
fragment that so far gets expressed in an attention to
a few only of the world's real facts, and in such an in-
attention to the countless others as lets them all lapse
into the vague background of acknowledged reality as
"the rest of the world." Expressing the matter wholly
in teleological, not at all in causal terms, we can there-
fore answer the question, " Why do we not now con- x
sciously and explicitly know all things, since the Being
of all things is involved in our present meaning ? " by
saying simply, Because, as we are, we do not attend to
all things, but only to a few. Or, again, Because we
are not duly and sufficiently interested in the " rest of
things," so that they fade into the background of knowl-
edge, as the forests upon distant hills are lost in the
62 NATURE, MAN AND THE MORAL ORDEft
contour of the rocky masses and become one with the
whole. Thus simple, and in seeming no doubt paradoxi-
cal, is our formula for what is to be finite.
Ill
But the simplicity of the formula will prove endlessly
fruitful. For this theory of our relations, as finite
knowers, to the real world, predetermines what Fjjrm
we ascribe to the system of facts who se reality we
acknowledge.
We dealt at some length, in our study of the Third
Concept of Being, with the definition of both physical
and mathematical things as "objects of possible experi-
ence." But from the point of view which we have
reached at the present stage of the inquiry, the facts that
we acknowledge as real are for us, at any one conscious
instant, Obj ec t s ., of Possibl o Attention . That is indeed
noMjieir whole Being. But it is one valid aspect of their
Being. In the u ndifferentiated background of our pr es-
ent consc i ousne ss of " the rest of the world," all those
real faets_jj^_jevjeii-_iiaw--^>resent, but not as distinct
objects. Any one of them could now be known, if only
we were able to attend to its actual presence. Hence its
real relationships are such as to permit, upon occasion, its
discrimination from other facts in the way in which con-
scious attention discriminates.
Here, however, we meet, in its most elementary form,
with that abstract way of viewing the world which expresses
itself in the categories of the World of Description. The
situation, at the moment, is this : A certain attitude of
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 63
will, just now unchangeable by us, has determined each
of us to a stubborn present inattention to the vast totality
which we just called, in our discussion, " the rest of the
world." To undertake to define the concrete facts of
that world by a direct application of our general concept
of Being is prevented, at the outset, by the consideration
that the inattention in question hi des f rom us not only
the particular facts themselves, but the rejQ^ciiyeJknowl-
edge of what it is tha t we ou rselves will. For of all our
human ignorance, our reflective ignorance as to the Self
seems most stubborn. It is just this limitation of ours
which requires us from moment to moment to view the
facts in terms of the category of the Ought. We must
submit in order to succeed, and must be conscious of sub-
ordinating ourselves before we can hope to find ourselves
expressed. Or, to state the matter in other terms, we are
in a position where we can only hope to view the world
as, in the concrete, the e xpression of nnr w ill, in case we
first can learn definitely to act ; while, on the other hand,
we can view o ur acti on, at the_ present stage, only as a
miction. We have to presuppose our facts in order to
make concrete our purposes, while we can define our facts,
if at all, only in terms of our purposes. This is the fatal
circle of our finitude, from which we can indeed escape,
as we do in some measure, at every instant, by acting,
more or less blindly, more or less at haphazard, seek-
ing in the process of experience both our own purpose,
and the means of executing it, both our dream, and the
interpretation thereof.
But when we still try to give our undertaking the
clearest definition possible at this stage, the only way
64 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
is to repeat, deliberately, a process which, in a still
blinder form, one sees in the early life of any being
that is destined to win intelligence. Not knowing
what it craves, the youn g creatur e first acts vaguely,
driven by un consciou s_impulses. Its__action is so far
planless a nd disorg anized. When trial and error have led
to some few little successes, it then begins to organize
its life in a more definite way how ? By watching its
environment. B y discrim wMing- By engaging in a
sort of action which involves, in a sense, a temporary
resignation of all more immediate efforts towards self-
expression. This stage of g rowing; intelli gence surrenders
itself to what, in us men, becomes the deliberate under-
taking to de scribe tli e_jacts_of exp erience as the y come,
and so to win indirectly a plan for what may prove to be
the expression of the Self.
This effort, to be sure, is still a kind of action. It
is creative as well as passive. It involves in its least
movement an ack nowledgm ent of what is not g iven,
as well as an obser vation of what is given ; for, as we
have seen, there is no rational conception of experience
except by means of a linking of present and past experi-
ence ; and this act _of linki ng is always a transcending
x of what is_mfiiely found. But then, this watchful, dis-
criminating activity is seeking to attend to what is con-
ceived as already there in the vast background of the
world ; and it abandons, for the time, the immediate
effort to win the expression of any other purpose but
the purpose to wait, and to distinguish. So (to use an
example from what appears to us as the workings of a
! | far lower form of intelligence than our own) I see,
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 65
from my library window at home, sometimes, a young
cat, despairing for the time of succeeding in her cherished
desire to catch the gray squirrels that play about from
branch to branch in the trees, and that occasionally tempt
her to vain crouching and springing when they descend
to the ground in pursuit of nuts. She has long hoped
to find the world the expression of her Internal Meaning
by getting her claws upon them. But these swift phe-
nomena still baffle her finitude. They escape her sly
approaches with a maddening agility. They scold her
from above, and throw down bits of bark to insult her.
At length she abandons all apparent efforts at direct
attack. It becomes her will to lie for hours nearly
motionless, simply watching them. She chooses, as it
were, to pursue science rather than any more drastic
course of action. She Avill learn their ways, and dis-
criminate one of their habits from another. In her dull
patience, she seems to give herself over to the study of
the World of Description. It is an enlightened patience
of a sort somewhat similar to this that has created for
us our sciences.
Now my purpose just here is not to define the methods
and the tests that are used in any special science, but
to point out the most fundamental conceptions to which
this way of taking the world leads us, so long as we
try to abstract it from any more deliberately creative
fashion of viewing things. It is plain that in this way we
can hope foji no final view of the whole _ trjath_of things. (
We shall be dealing with a realm _of abstractions, yet
they will prove to be fruitful abstractions, everywhere
founded upon final truth, although in themselves not
66 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
final. For, that the world permits us, up to a certain
point, t o describ e it, does help to th row light on the
true nature of things. For the rest, I shall of course
attempt here no account of the psychological genesis of
our describing intelligence, or of its categories. I am
concerned only with the logical genesis of these ideas,
that is, with the way in which their simpler forms deter-
mine their more complex ones.
We return then to the view that the r eal worl d con-
sists of f acts which are, so to speak, waiting_iox_us to
\ attend_to _ their pres ence. What co nstituti on must such
la world possess?
In reply- to this question, I must next point out
certain accompaniments of the process of discrimina-
tion which are of fundamental importance for our inter-
pretation of the structure of any r ealm t hat we are to
conceive as an obj ect of possible .a ttention. If I discrim-
inate attentively between t wo facts in space, such as
two marks on a blackboard, or two sides of the same
coin or die, I observe, in general, that there is some-
thing between these two discriminated objects, and also
that there are reg ions of s pace b etw een which these two
distinguished objects are to be found. So that, in such
a case, o ne disc ri mina tion demands, as it were, another.
One analysis of a whole into elements calls for further
analysis. And every union of discriminated elements
into a new whole (as, for instance, the two sides of the
die form, when taken together with the material between
them, a single whole), every such union, I say, leads
us to distinguish only so much the more clearly between
this new whole and the " rest of the world," which
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 67
limits the observed portion so as to set it between other
portions. Thus, at all events in such cases as our own
consciousness of the extended world, ou r proces s of
attentive discrimination tends to becom e a Recurrent
Process, 1 i.e. a process in which every step leads to con-
ditions which demand, or at least appear to demand, a
repetition of the very ty pe of act^ that led to the step in
question itself. For if I have discriminated, then, at
least in this sort of instance, I have found a basis for
a repetition of discriminations. *"
Now it is also plain, at least in case of such an object
as the world of extended things, that this very recurrent
character of our process of discrimination becomes to us
a motive for interpreting what we take to be the " real
structure " of space itself. Because we are led, upon any
clear distinction of positions in space, to an observation
of an interval between two positions, while this interval
itself becomes the basis for new discriminations between
the positions that lie once more within that interval,
we find ourselves started upon a process which we can
define as recurrent, that is, as capable of repeating itself
indefinitely ; and since we see no reason why this pro-
cess should meet with any limit in the nature of extended
facts, we come to the fa miliar pos tulate of the infinite
di visibil ity of space. And because every such observed
collection of spatial objects, once discriminated, and then
viewed as a whole, turns out to be between still other
regions of space, which its very presence leads us to
discri minate fro m itself, this process oiL_discrimination
1 See the Supplementary Essay to the First Series, p. 495, sqq., for
the general definition of such a process.
68 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
also becomes recurrent, and we are led to the other
familiar postulate of the Vjoaindles.sne.ss o-space.
What such an instance shows is : (1) that, in certain
cases at least, our tendency to discriminate two objects
leads us by itself to discriminate a third object, m, as
between them, and to distinguish other objects, let us say
/ and I, between ivhich both a and b are ; (2) that this
observation may of itself lead to new discriminations, and
so become, or tend to become, recurrent ; and (3) that
the result hereof may be to give us an idea of an infinitely
complex objective structure which we are then disposed
to ascribe to a system of facts (such as the points in
space). So here the law of our discriminating process
gives us a conception of a law of structure in the world
of facts. This law may then be to any extent confirmed
by further experience.
That not only space, but also time, suggests similar
recurrent processes of discrimination, is familiar.
Now these well-known instances lead us to a more gen-
eral question. Is this character of the process of dis-
crimination something general in its nature, so that,
wherever we discriminate, the conditions of such recurrent
processes of finding new differences are present, or is the
tendency to look for points between points, and so forth,
I a tendency determined by s peciaL cxuiditions, such as
those of our experience of space and time ? And what
follows with regard to the conception that we tend to
form of the structure of the world of facts ?
At first, the answer would seem to be that we may,
upon occasion, come to perfectly clear limits in our dis-
criminations. In the world of our pure conceptions, we
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 69
find that between successive whole numbers, such as 2
and 3, 3 and 4, it is impossible to conceive other whole
numbers inserted, so long as one takes the whole numbers
in their natural order. And the same holds true, in the
world of empirical things, regarding any simple series of
objects whose type is that of the whole number series,
where every object of the series is followed by a next one,
with nothing between that belongs to the series. A series
of this type we shall hereafter call, in accordance with
recent mathematical usage, a Well-Ordered Series. But,
on the other hand, as our Supplementary Essay showed
at length, any collection of objects in the world is part of
some infinite collection ; and so the objects of any well-
ordered series are themselves portions of the expression
of a recurrent process, or of a well-ordered series of such
processes. And in every such process, as was shown in
the Supplementary Essay, an infinite number of dis-
criminations are already implied. Hence, although it is
indeed possible to find cases where we can no longer look
for objects between a given pair of objects which have
already been discriminated, it still appears that discrimi-
nations which are logically completed, merely by our
distinguishing between two objects, are not to be found.*-
Discrimination seems to be not merely of pairs, but of
triads, or of larger systems of facts. 1
1 For the sake of later use, it is proper to note here, regarding the defi-
nition of the Well-Ordered Series just given, that, while its type is that
of the whole-number series, in so far forth as every term has a next
following term, recent mathematical usage has extended the concept
to include the so-called Transfinite Well-Ordered Series of Cantor, in
which infinite series may follow infinite series without end, but so that
every term has its own next following term.
70 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
It is then worth while to examine the matter a little
more closely. For if we can find whether or no every
discrimination logically leads to some such recurrent pro-
cess as the empirical instance of our consciousness of
space has just exemplified, we may come to a result of
great importance for the formulation of the Categories in
terms of which we conceive the structure of the world of
facts, so far as we view them merely as objects of possible
discrimination.
And may I venture already to anticipate something of
what this result will prove to be ? Matters of this kind
are not to be studied, except by a consideration of very
subtle and abstract logical relationships. The inquiry,
even in the fragmentary form here adopted, can be toler-
able, in this context, only by virtue of its bearings on
more concrete issues. May I, therefore, say, at once,
regarding the outcome, simply this? I hold that by
studying more closely what the process of discrimination
logically implies, we shall be led to see something regarding
what enables us to view all acknoivledged facts as linked in a
single Ordered_Si[stem, in which co untless j &jmable Series
of real facts are interwoven ; and hereby we shall be led to
a more definite idea of ivhat is meant by the acknoivledg-
ment of Law in the natural, in the social, and in the moral
order of the world. Thus our notions of the Unity of the
world will become, in one aspect at least, more concrete.
How come we to the recognition of Law as an aspect of
the real world ? By means of some primal " intuition,"
which (despite its name) inflicts itself upon us as an
opaque assurance ? Our Idealism knows of no such
primal assurances. Every assertion must bear criticism.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 71
No assertions can escape such a test by pleading that they
are "primal." Or again, has the Creator, in making our
souls, stamped upon them a system of principles which is
in preestablished harmony with the real order, so that our
metaphysical theory, if true, will teach us that our ideas
of order must correspond to an order present in the facts
beyond us ? With Kant we reject such a Prci formations-
System der MenscUichen Vemunft. Our special reason
for rejecting it is contained in our thesis, so fully set
forth in Lecture VII of the previous Series, to the effect
that correspondence is never the most fundamental rela-
tion between Idea and Object, and that, accordingly, the
world is not merely a world of facts to which our knowl-
edge conforms. Our own view has in common with Kant
(from whom we, of course, derive this portion of our funda-
mental doctrine) the thesis that the laws of the objective
world are the expression of Categories which the nature
of every subjective process, and the Unity of Appercep-..
tion wherein all truth is embraced, together dejtermine.
Only, for us, the Categ ories are not stamped, as Kant's
Categories were, upon a foreign matter, but are in some
measure, i.e. as far as they are really valid at all, at once \
objective and subjective. This last thesis we have in
common with many forms of recent Idealism. But our
own doctrine is not" wholly identical with any of these
forms. The differentia of our doctrine will be found,
however, in the method whereby we define the special i^
Categories, and in the special form that we accordingly
give to them. Our logical genesis of the concept of real
Law will determine the definition that we shall give to
the term. It will also determine the limits of the subjec-
N
72 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
tion of fact to law in the universe. It will free us from
that bugbear of popular metaphysic, the superstition that
whatever is, is somehow subject to an absolutely rigid
Necessity. We shall see that necessity is only one aspect
of the fact-world, and the more abstract one, which is a
valid aspect only in so far as it serves to make possible
Individuality and Freedom.
To my mind, as I may at once say, our best single word
for expressing what is essential to a lawful_order in the
world of facts is the ter m S eries. Facts are subject to
law in so far as they are a rranged in definable seri es, or in
systems_ _of interwoven am-i nl orders. The relation of
physical cause and effect, whose consideration we have so
' often postponed in our previous discussions, becomes a
definite relation at all only when it is viewed a s an in-
stance (and by no means the most important instance) of
the exis tence of_series of fap.ts in th&J injyerse. All com-
prehension of particular facts which goes beyond a bare
abstract classification of them, and which still falls short
of a satisfactory teleological view of their meaning, de-
pends upon conceiving them as in the same series, or sys-
tem of series, with other facts. This is the essential'
nature of the categories that have to do with Law. As'
we shall see, the general concept of S eries is common to
the W orld of Desc ription and to the world of the actual
life of the Will. Only th e types of Seri es differ in these
two worlds, the Well-Ordered Series being characteristic
[of the life of the Will just in so far as it is self-conscious,
and consequently alwaysjyimvs w hat next to do, while the
World of Description is characterized, in general, by
another and less perfect type of serial order.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 73
To illustrate empirically of what wide application the
concept of Series is, and how it is present wherever the
concept of Law is present, and vice verm, is useful in
beginning a discussion of this category, although any-
thing like present completeness in such illustrations is
hopeless. You find serial order wherever you look in
the world of definitely conceived or of exactly describable
fact. Space and Time illustrate our principle in their
every detail. They and the Number- Series are the most
familiar of the forms in which serial ord er appears to us.
As for more special classes of instances, I conceive my
own life as a particular and connected series of events,
and yours in the same way. All the more significant
social_relations involve, directly or indirectly, the estab-
lishment of se rial order-s ystems such as those of debtors
and creditors, of friends and neighbors, of fellow-citizens,
of teachers and pupils, of official superiors and inferiors,
of the various grades of relationships in families, and so
on indefinitely. For a social relationship of the type of
debtor, friend, neighbor, fellow-citizen, teacher, superior,
ancestor, cousin, has the logical character illustrated by
saying that if A stands in this relation to B, B may, and
frequently does, stand in the same relationship to C, C to
D, and so on, the collection of social individuals A, B,
C, constituting in this way an o rdered series, sometimes
of a very limited, but more often of a very widely ex-
tended scope. In natural history, the classification of liv-
ing forjjis, the study of the structures and functions of
organisms, the accounts of the evolution and decay of all
types of life, involve the conception of or dered se ries.
Geology, on its descriptive side, is similarly a science of
74 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
serial order-systems of rocks, fossils, formations. Nor
does this character cease to mark the conceptions of sci-
ence when one passes to chemistry, to physics, to astron-
omy, or to mechanics. The serial system of the chemical
elements, which forms so important a topic of considera-
tion in recent chemistry, is a notable example of how
various masses of facts which once seemed in certain
respects ultimate and mutually sundered, tend, upon fur-
ther examination, to assume their places as stages of a
single, though highly complex, order-system. Any natu-
ral process which is capable of a mechanical description,
such as the processes studied in the more exact regions
of physical science, is made comprehensible by conceiv-
ing all of its occurrences as stages in a single series, or
system of series, of what the mathematicians call " trans-
formations." Such a series of transformations is exempli-
fied by the successive states of a body cooling under
definable physical conditions, or by the successive configu-
rations of a system of bodies moving under the influence
of definable forces. In astronomy, the apparent places of
the stars are reduced to order by the use of a system of
astronomical coordinates, just as we reduce to order our
knowledge of geographical positions on the earth's sur-
face by the conceptions of latitude and longitude. But
such ways of viewing facts are conceptions of definitely
complex order-systems of places. In recent astronomy,
moreover, the classification of the stellar spectra has led
to a still tentative arrangement of stars in order-systems
whose bearing on problems of evolution seems to be
important. At all events, one thus finds a new sort
of definable relation between the physical processes
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 75
occurring in the very bodies that would appear, from
one point of view, to be amongst the most discon-
nected and mutually sundered objects of the visible
universe. 1
And now, as to the more universal meaning of this
serial structure of our world of facts, we may note
in passing still one further consideration. It is a com-
monplace that the exact sciences of Nature have owed
their exactness, up to the present time, and in the main,
to their qua ntitative treat ment of facts. The logic of the
conception of Q uantity has its own very complex prob-
lems ; but thus much is clear : Any system of quan-
tities, such as distances, times, masses, temperatures,
pressures, is a serial order-system of facts, or is a complex
of such serial order-systems. For the relationshi ps, Equal,
Greater, and Less, which mark systems of q uantities, in-
volve arrangements in s erial order-system s. Therefore,
one has much to say for the thesis that the whole logical
value of the quantitative conceptions in science is due,
not to any peculiar advantage of the con cept of qu antity,
as such, but to the exactness of the forms of serial order li
which are discoverable in case of any quantitative realm
of facts. From this point of view it is not, then, the
quantitative character of exact science which is its most
essential feature, but the precision and relative exhaustive-
ness of its reduction of its own ranges of fact to serial
1 That plans of action, reflective systems of Ideas, and the structure of
the Self in general, illustrate the concept of Series in the form of the
Well-Ordered, or self-representative Series, we have shown in the Sup-
plementary Essay, and we shall have occasion to return to that fact
soon.
76 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
1 order-systems. Not Quantity, but Order, is the funda-
mental category of exact thought about facts. 1
Now what is the logical derivation of the category of
serial Order ? The answer to this question requires us to
return to the study of what is logically implied in coming
to discriminate between any two objects. To such a study
I must devote a little space, despite the painfully abstract
nature of the topic. 2
IV
/
In certain cases, as we have seen, to compare attentively
two objects, as to their differences and likenesses, is to
observe a situation which implies that something is between
the two, and that the two themselves are again between
another pair of objects. The process of discrimination
and of synthesis thus initiated proves, at least in some
such cases, recurrent, or self-repeating, and leads us to
form postulates about the objective structure of the sys-
tem of facts to which the things in question belong. In
order to estimate more carefully the meaning and the uni-
1 1 am principally indebted for the substance of this remark to Mr.
Charles Peirce, and to the study of Dedekind and Cantor. See the
article on the Logic of Relatives in the Monist, Vol. VII, p. 205, sqq.,
by Mr. Peirce.
2 The best way of forming, from a psychological point of view, a
general sense of the practical importance of the process of conceiving
facts in series, is to read the brilliant passages on the topic in Profes-
sor James's larger Psychology (Vol. I, p. 490 ; Vol. II, pp. 644-669).
What Professor James there takes as a fundamental psychological feature
of the process of comparison, I here try to analyze in certain of its logi-
cal aspects. The discussion in the Supplementary Essay in our First
Series has already dealt in full with that primary form, the Number-
Series. Here we deal mainly with a derived type of Order.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 77
versality of such processes, we next need a generalization
of the relation expressed by the word between.
Such a logical generalization has been suggested,
although for a purpose decidedly different from that of
my present inquiry, by Mr. A. B. Kempe, in a very re-
markable paper on " The Relation between the Logical
Theory of Classes and the Geometrical Theory of Points." 1
If I venture to follow out the suggestion of Mr. Kempe's
work, it is in my own way, and his discussion must not be
viewed as responsible either for the intent or for the out-
come of my speculations. In Mr. Kempe's research, what
is most important for us at the moment is that a relation
of a logically identical character is shown to exist in two
apparently very different cases. When three points are
on the same line, one of them is said to be betiveen the two
others. But when two logical classes of objects, a and b,
are so related to a third class, m, that this class includes
all the objects which are common to both a and b, and at
the same time is included within the class of the objects
which are either a or b, then Mr. Kempe defines the class
m as a class between a and b. The interest of the identifi-
cation of the relation between in the geometrical and in
the logical realms, lies in the proof, given at length by Mr.
Kempe, that the exactly definable properties of any com-
plete system of logical classes, or " Universe of Discourse,"
are, up to a certain limit, identical with the properties of
1 Published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society,
Vol. XXI, for the year 1800. Another statement of his main results was
printed by Mr. Kempe in Nature, Vol. XLIII, pp. 156-162. These papers
have been far too much neglected by the students of exact logic to whom
they were addressed. Their interest goes far beyond that of the special
idea which I here borrow from them.
1
78 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
a geometrical system of poi?its. Mr. Kempe shows, in fact,
that the system of points possible in a space of any number
of dimensions differs from the system of logical classes
possible in any " Universe of Discourse," merely by the
addition of a single new property, viz. that which is
geometrically expressed by saying that two straight lines
have only one point in common. This very striking iden-
tification of laws belonging to the kinds of orderly arrange-
ment present in such different realms as a system of ideal
logical classes and a system of points in space is associ-
ated, in Mr. Kempe's discussion, with an observation
regarding the nature of the generalized relation between,
which I here propose to use, although I have no time to
state either fully or very exactly the reasoning that I
found upon this observation.
If one visible point were between two others on a line,
and if all three were (to fix our ideas) luminous points,
and if you went just far enough away from the line
to be unable longer to observe the place of the point a
as diverse from that of the point b, so that the two
blended to your eye in one luminous point, then ob-
viously m, the intermediate point, would blend with
both of them. Just so, however, if you abstract from
the difference between the classes a and b, while still
recognizing, in a measure, the possibility of objects
that, as a fact, belong to one or to another of them,
then, so long as you thus regard the two classes as
equivalent, it makes no conscious difference to you
whether an object is in the class a, or in the class b, or
both at once. So that you do not observe, in that
case, Mr. Kempe's intermediate class m as a class different
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 79
from either a or b. The same result follows if you not
merely neglect or abstract from the difference of the two
classes, but positively know them to be identical classes.
For in that case both a and b become identical with m.
i Generalizing from these cases, one may go quite beyond
Mr. Kempe's instances of the classes and the points and
say, Let there be any system or collection of objects
such that, if they are really different, these objects can
be discriminated by an attention once properly directed.
Let it be also possible for a given intelligence not to
discriminate two objects belonging to that collection.
Or again, let it be possible for this intelligence, although
discriminating them, still to regard two of them at will
as " equivalent," that is, as such that their difference
does not count for a given purpose. Then let an object
m of the system in question be so related to a and
to b that if you, either by inattention, neglect, or
deliberate choice, disregard their difference, so that in
any way they blend or become equivalent, m thereupon
of necessity blends with both^or becomes equivalent to
both. In this case we shall say that, in the generalized
sense, m is such a member of the system in question as to
lie between a and b. The mathematical way of sym-
bolizing this relation would be briefer. It would take
the form of merely saying : " m is such that, if a = b, then
m = a = b. And if this is the case, m is regarded as
between a and 5."
Now the advantage of this formal generalization is the
power that it here gives us of facing an important logical
aspect of all discrimination, comparison, and differentia-
tion. We usually say that the relation between a and
80 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
b, where we discriminate them, or regard them as un-
equal, is a relation of the pair of them, a dual relation.
The generalization here founded upon Mr. Kempe's paper
will show us that contrast and comparison involve, in
general, a relation of at least three objects, viz. a and b,
and something else that helps us to keep them apart, or
that illustrates the point wherein they differ, or that
helps to determine the sort, degree, or direction of their
difference. This something may be an object of the
exact character here ascribed to m. That is, it may
be conceived as an object such that, if a and b were to
blend, or were to be viewed as equivalent, it would
blend with both, or be viewed as equivalent to both.
In such a case, the relationship emphasized by the con-
trast belongs not to the pair, a and b, but to the triad,
a, b, and m. In other words, it is what one may tech-
nically name a triadic relation. The possibility of observ-
ing this relation is due to the fact that, since our
discriminating attention is a voluntary act, possessed of
its own internal meaning, we are able to see, by refl eotion^
how one discrimination follows from another.
Let us look yet a little more closely at the considera-
tions which come into view whenever we make any defi-
nite discrimination. I attend to a and to b. I note that
they are different. It follows, as we saw at the outset,
that they differ in some character, and that they also,
although of course in another respect, agree as to this
same character. It may be color in which they differ.
Then they agree also in having color. In magnitude,
then they agree in having magnitude. Tell me the
character in which they differ, and I will at once under-
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 81
take to show you the sense in which, in respect to this
same character, they also agree. I inevitably note,
then, if I look closer, the " common nature " of a and b.
Of course I can never, in any realistic sense, so abstract
this "common nature" as to make it appear by itself
as an object existing independently of their difference.
Yet it is there, and arouses my interest. Otherwise I
should not be comparing a and b. They, as they come
to me, appear as specifications of this "common nature."
Now when I view them as such specifications, the
problem of the One and the Many arises afresh. How
can this One Nature be the same in these two ? This
ancient question is here a question of fact. It is a
question about what I actually observe when I discrim-
inate. As it comes to me, it is already a question about
a Triad, not as yet of objects, but of aspects of the whole
situation before me. There is an unity here. There is
also the diversity of these two objects ; and this unity
is not something merely glued to this diversity in an
external way. The situation is this : That a certain One
(viz. the "common nature " of these two objects) is
observed, not as something over and above these two,
but as in them, as their nature, diversified into their
differences. Yet this one is itself, nevertheless, con-
trasted with these two ; for neither of the two, a or b,
is by itself the other member of the pair ; while the
" common nature " is expressed in them both. How
this can be, I so far am led to inquire. But that this is
so, the discrimination implies. Here, then, I have one
of those "bare external conjunctions " of the One and
the Many of which Mr. Bradley, in his Appearance and
82 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Reality, has so much to say, and which, for him, constitute
the insoluble problem of our finitude.
Now the effort to answer the question thus raised is
not merely an idle subtlety of the philosophers. As a
fact, all the sciences are full of specific contributions
towards the answers to just such questions. Yes, even
unreflective common sense daily undertakes to do some-
thing towards answering problems of the sort. Common
sense and science, however, go about the matter more
concretely than the philosophers have usually done. In
ordinary life we recognize the problem of the presence of
One in a pair of discriminated objects only by proceed-
ing at once to look for still another instance of the same
kind of likeness and difference. Baffled by the so formal
triad just named, viz. the triad of the One nature and
the two expressions, we help ourselves by searching out
a more concrete triad. We compare, if possible, both
objects with a third object, as concrete as themselves, which
serves us as a "common standard." This third object
is preferably an already known one, whose choice sums
up the results of a long course of previous experience.
To help us at all, however, it must obviously possess
something of the "common nature" that interests us in
b and c. It will, of course, differ from both of them.
But most of all it helps us when it is so much like a and
5, and yet so definitely unlike them, that the triad, a, b, <?,
leads us to definite observations of the sort characterized
in the foregoing exact definition of the relationship
between. If one of the triad is such that upon reflection
we observe a particular order of dependence amongst the
acts whereby we distinguish the three objects, i.e. if one
I
THE LINKAGE OE FACTS 83
object appears, as in our present sense, between the two
others, then we have the first beginning of a single series
of distinctions. And the rule of our discriminating intel-
ligence is that, while the problem of the One and the
Many is hopelessly baffling if we deal merely with two
terms, and while it is equally hopeless so long as we deal
with an indefinite number of objects not arranged in
series, we begin to see the light so soon as we get one
of our objects between the two others, and so begin to form
a series possessing a definite character and direction.
And by " direction" we here mean, not spatial or temporal
direction, but direction of logical dependence.
And now why does this getting of one object between
two others help us? I point out that the generalized
definition of the relation between, which we owe to Mr.
Kempe, suggests at once the answer to this question. I
can comprehend the relation of One and Many just in so
far, and only in so far, as I observe the unity of my own
purpose demanding, itself of itself, a variety of expres-
sion. 1 Now, when I discriminate, I at first find the fact
*As our Supplementary Essay showed at length, the precise under-
standing of the relations of One and Many which we get in case of the
Number-Series, or of any " self-representative system," is due to the fact
that there our own purpose in creating the system is just such a con-
sciously self-differentiating Unity. Hence, as I there said, the order of j
the number-system is the original type of all order in heaven and upon
earth. But we are here following out a process that leads us to a con-
ception of order-systems very different from the number-system. For in
the latter, each term has a next following term. In the system that we
shall now be led to conceive, no term has a next term. Yet we reach
these other systems by means of the first form of order, since, as we shall
see, the recurrent character of our discriminations is the source of these
derived order-systems.
84 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of difference as something that is indeed an expression of
my attentive purpose, but that is still more an instance
of the limitations of my insight. I look for light, and
so far I find a problem. The object a differs from b.
How ? I cannot so far tell ; for I do not yet see the
structure of the difference as the expression of any one
plan. But when I conceive, and then am able to find
in experience, some third object c, which behaves like the
m of my former definition, then, while my insight is still
infinitely limited, I see the differences of a, 5, and c, or,
(as we may now say, in case c is the intermediate object
of the triad), I see the differences of a, b, and m, as such
that the recognition of the difference of b from a follows
for me inevitably upon the recognition of the difference,
either of a and m, or of b and m, or of both. I make this
fact clear to myself by trying the ideal experiment of
annulling or disregarding the difference of a and m, and
of b and m. I can try this experiment with exactness,
because, in making it, I am observing my own voluntary
acts. I observe hereupon that the difference between a
and b vanishes. In convincing myself of this fact, in
seeing how the distinction of b from a follows from first
distinguishing one of them from m, I gradually begin to
find that the nature expressed in a is such that I am led
over from a to b by a single definable process of drawing
distinctions. Or again, I thus conceive the nature of a not
as static and as merely given to me, but as a stage in a
process that now has an actively appreciated and logically
significant direction, a direction determined by my own
purposes, and also by the facts. Hereupon I can pro-
ceed in the direction of b by passing, in the course of
I
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 85
this process, through m. For the very discovery of m,
and of the dependence now in question, constitutes for
me the direction of this ideal process. I now begin to
construct the Many by one sort of activity. And in
doing so, I also find what structure my objects themselves,
as so far known to me, appear to possess.
It is perfectly true that such a process as this is far
from answering all my questions about the One and the
Many. On the contrary, it constantly arouses new ones.
But it also suggests a systematic plan for attempting to
move towards an answer to every such question. Let me
find, if possible, by means of further experience, not only
the triad, a, m, b, but also yet other objects similarly dis-
posed, a whole series of further intermediaries (jn l
between a and w, m 2 between m and b, and so on). If I
succeed in my search, I then gradually get, by means of a
well-ordered series, of acts of my own, a series resembling
a collection of points in order on one line, thus :
But there is room, in this series, for the conception of
new intermediate terms indefinitely ; and I can continue
the search for such in my experience. The objects of the
series are such that any three form a triad, with one of
the triad between the two others (in our present sense of
between), while all the triads are thus linked in one series,
beginning with a, ending with b, and having interme-
diaries such as are determined by a recurrent process of
conceiving, and, if possible, of finding in experience, ever
new triads within the series. The whole series, so far as
I can conceive and verify it at all, will define stages
86 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of a single process of ideal construction, which I can
conceive in volitional terms, as a process that expresses
how one can pass from a to b, or (to borrow a mathe-
matical term, again) can transform a into b. And the
unity of this series, as the expression of a single voli-
tional process, will be due to the fact that I can every-
where see, as I pass along the series, how one distinction,
or act of holding apart two objects, depends for its very
existence on another and previous distinction. For in this
way my ideal process, going from distinction to distinc-
tion, establishes between every pair of distinct objects, an
intermediary, which is viewed by me as making their dis-
tinction possible, or as holding them apart. Yet the inter-
mediary terms, while they hold apart, also link.
V
This is, then, our general statement of how it is that
every discrimination tends to lead us to the definition of
series of objects, observed or conceived. At the same
time we begin to see how and why every such series helps
us to comprehend the structure of the world that we are
to acknowledge as real. Now my main thesis here is
that, in the World of Description, all understanding of
facts in terms of general laws depends upon the conception
and verification of such serial order in facts as I have
been characterizing. The whole logic of our conception
of general law in this World of Description turns,
in my view, upon the single question, What for us
is implied in discriminating a from b ? For the world
acknowledged as beyond is presented to us at every
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 87
moment as a single whole, within which the facts are
present. These facts are for us, in one aspect of their
nature, objects of possible attention. Attention begins to
succeed when we discriminate. And so we have for one
postulate about the acknowledged facts this : They are t
such that any pair of them could be known together through
a single possible act of discrimination and comparison. )
This is the primal notion of linkage. Any pair of real
objects are thus linked. But this postulate leads to
others. Whatever pair of objects there may be in that
world, since both members of the pair could be the
object of a single act of discriminating attention, those
two objects are already like each other and different from
each other. Hence the single discrimination of the two
presents a new problem, that of the union of One and
Many. What is the unity, what the variety of this pair ?
The only way that we have of proceeding towards a solu-
tion of this problem, so long as we are still ignorant in
the concrete of what One Will is expressed in these
objects, is by passing from the pair to the triad, and defin-
ing an object that lies between the members of the first
pair, in the sense of Mr. Kempe's generalized definition
of this relation. We then seek for this fact in experience.
If we find it we are helped towards an understanding of
the One and the Many. For in so far as we define such
a triad, we discover how we could conceive one member
of our original pair as transformed into the other, by
means of a process that involves first distinguishing the
intermediary between the two from one of the extremes,
and then the other member from the object thus distin-
guished. The direction of the process of transformation,
88 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
thus defined is determined by the logical sequence, accord-
ing to which one distinction is observed to follow from an-
other. But because we are thus led better to comprehend
what the objects discriminated are, we now make still a
further and provisional postulate: Between any two objects]
of the world there is always another to be found. Our J
power to illustrate this postulate in our empirical investi-
gations is very wide, but is also always limited. And the
postulate itself would indeed fail wholly to receive appli-
cation beyond a certain definite point, if we could only
come to understand all the objects of our world as a sin-
gle ordered series of the type of the whole number-series.
For then any pair of directly successive objects would
have no object between them. But, then, to be sure, the
objects of the world, if so understood, would no longer
need to be discriminated merely in pairs. They would
be logically given, all at a stroke (like the whole num-
bers), as an expression of a single self-representative Pur-
pose, 1 and we should have to look no further than this
purpose for the transparent definition of all our facts.
But in discriminating pairs and then triads of facts, we
come as yet upon no purpose, but our own descriptive
purpose, of trying to find the One in the midst of this
given Many. Our own process of discriminating proves
indeed to be recurrent, but it looks always for yet another
object between any two objects already distinguished.
Hence, while the process of defining the intermediate
terms is a Well-Ordered Process, that leads us from each
stage to the next one, it tends to make us conceive a
series of facts in which no term has any next neighbor,
1 See once more the Supplementary Essay, p. 501, sqq.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 89
because, as we conceive, there is always another between.
So the postulate : Between any two there is a third, is the
working postulate of our process of comprehending things
through our successive discriminations. And this is the
process upon which all scientific description of given
facts depends.
Now the definition of between suggested by Mr. Kempe's
papers has quite freed us from the need of limiting the
application of this postulate to the extended world, or to
the numerical and quantitative aspects of things. The
points on a line, as conceived by the geometer, the series
of rational fractions arranged in order as greater and less,
and the series of the real numbers, all indeed illustrate
our postulate. 1 They are conceptual systems of objects
especially wrought out by the mathematician in such wise
as to conform to the postulate. And every homogeneous
system of measurable and continuous quantities (masses,
distances, durations, forces, temperatures, etc.) is con-
ceived by our exact science as also to illustrate this postu-
late. Yet the formation of series has application to
qualities as well as to quantities, in fact, to whatever
we can undertake to discriminate. Hence there is no
obvious limit to the variety of objects that we can under-
take to deal with in this way. We can compare colors
and shades as well as points and magnitudes. Europe
and America, compared geographically, or socially, or
politically, lead us to attempt the formation of series of
1 All these systems are so ordered that no term is conceived to have a
next neighbor. Yet the process whereby we reach the conception of each
is always a Well-Ordered Process, in which each of our own acts leads
to the next one.
90 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
objects. Feelings, deeds, persons, lives, stellar spectra,
chemical elements, processes of evolution, types of doc-
trine, modes of conduct, aBsthetic values, in brief, beings
of all grades, invite serial treatment as soon as they are
compared. Various series, already conceived, can be
combined in the most varied ways, so as to give us sys-
tems of objects that no longer can be arranged in any
single serial order. We thus get Systems whose series
are interwoven and interrelated in most manifold fashions.
Mr. Kempe's example of the classes in a single " Universe
of Discourse," while it by no means exhausts the com-
plexity of the relations that are definable through con-
ceiving various systems of series connected together, is
so complex that the space of the geometer, we have seen,
corresponds to one only of the special forms definable
within that system. 1
The conception of systems of facts such that any two
members of the system may be viewed as linked by series
of intermediaries, is thus indeed capable of application in
1 Mr. Kempe's system illustrates, amongst other things, very definitely
the fact that the generalized conception of a series of intermediaries,
linking two given objects, a and b, is an infinitely variable concept.
If two objects can be linked by one series, they can, in general, be
linked by an infinity of other series of intermediaries. Thus all the
classes in any Universe of Discourse are, by Mr. Kempe's definition, con-
tained between any class a and the negative of that class, not-a. Again
between any class a and a class i included within a, you can establish
an infinite number of different series of intermediate classes. It is thus
also in space, if you consider the various curves by which two points can
be connected. But the spatial relation of points on a line is inadequate
to express all the possibilities of the generalized relation of betioeen. In
Mr. Kempe's system the same object x can be defined as between a and
b, b and c, and c and a, and can yet be different from all three.
T
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 91
the most widely sundered regions of our experience. If
we disregard the empirical limitations that we constantly
meet with in our attempts to find the desired intermedi-
ary terms, and if we consider only the foregoing postu-
lates as defining for us how we are to conceive our world
of acknowledged facts, we hereupon get a view of this
world which may be summed up as follows : We may if""
omit, for the time, from our notice, the before-mentioned
possibility of a knowledge of the world that would reduce
it to a single serial order of the general type of the Well-
Ordered Series of whole numbers, where every term has
one coming next after it. If we abstract from that possi-
bility, we are left to the conception that Between any two
facts there are to be found various series of intermediaries
of the type now defined. The world thus regarded will
consist for us of all these interwo ven series, and will con-
stitute a single System. The work of our knowledge, if
we were to grow in knowledge indefinitely, on just these
lines, would consist in the Description of this system.
But this description would have the same general char-
acter that geometry illustrates in case of the space-world,
which is only a particular example of such a linked sys-
tem of interwoven series. Any such system would be
capable of description in terms of Laws. The laws would
express features common to various of the series present
in this world. And the method of discovering laws
would be, in its most general outlines, this :
The whole system of the world may be viewed as made***'
up of various different systems. For whole systems of
facts can be discriminated from one another, and then
linked by series of intermediate systems, precisely as a and
92 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
b have been in our discussion of series in general. If,
comparing two of these subordinate systems (let us say
A and B), we conceive also, in some comprehensive
fashion, a series of intermediary systems that link A and
B together, we conceive what the mathematicians would
call the " series of transformations," whereby we can, at
least in our conceptions, if not in our observations, pass
from one of these systems to the other. Thus, let A be,
no longer, as in one of our earlier illustrations, a point in
space, but a large solid body. And let B be this same
body viewed by us at another time in another place, or
else let it be another body of precisely the same shape
and size as A, occupying another place. Let us suppose
A and B compared together in one act of attention. Then
we can conceive of a system of movements (consisting of
translations from place to place, of rotations about one or
another axis, or of a single translation followed by a
single rotation), a system whereby A could be brought
to take precisely the place that B now occupies. Some-
times this serial system of movements can be actually
observed. Or again, let A be the system of the characters,
habits, and dispositions of the people of England just
before the colonization of America ; let B be the system
of characters and habits and dispositions of the people of
the North American Colonies at the middle of the Eigh-
teenth Century. Then we can follow (although, in this
case, only very inexactly) the series of transformations that
"x^English civilization early underwent in its passage to
American soil. Other instances without limit could be
named.
Between any two systems, A and B, there thus lie
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 93
intermediate systems of conceived, or, on occasion, of
observed transformations, whereby one passes, in idea or
in experience, from A to B. Now because of the gen-
eral character of the relation between, as defined in the
foregoing, all the intermediate transformations in any
one system will be capable of being viewed as stages in
a single definable process of passing from A to B. This ^
process tends to acquire the unity of a single volitional
act. And this process (if we abstract from certain
complications that we need not here consider) may
always be viewed as having one general direction, that
leads from A to B, through the intermediary stages.
But A and B will, as systems, resemble one another as
well as differ. That depends upon the very nature of
discrimination. And by virtue of the nature of the ]/*
between relationship (just in so far as the intermediate
process has one type and direction), all the intermedi-
ate stages will resemble each other in the very features
in which A and B resemble each other. For all the
stages between A and B are, by definition, facts that
would not be viewed as different from either A or B,
unless A and B were viewed as different each from the
other. Hence all the intermediate stages must have in u
common the features that A and B have in common.
These features then remain unvarying throughout the
series of transformations in question. Denote these
unvarying features (or, in the more technical way of
stating the case), the "invariant characters of this sys- v^
tem of transformations," by the letter I. Then the
whole process here in question, whether it is merely
conceived, or is observed, will be definable as "a series
94 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of transformations, beginning in A, ending (so far) in
B, and leaving invariant the characters I."
Now all that we mean by the laws governing a sys-
tem of facts is that within this system certain series of
observed or of validly conceived " transformations " can
be defined, such that throughout the whole series of
transformations some definable characters of the objects
that are undergoing the transformation do not vary.
Wherever I can say that, in passing from A to B, through
a series of stages which I have a right to view as real
\J facts in the world, I observe, or validly conceive, that
all the stages have certain uniform or "invariant" char-
acters, I then have discovered a law which, in this way
of interpreting the world, I conceive as expressing the
nature and structure of the facts that I acknowledge as
real.
Thus, moving a body from one part of space to an-
other leaves, of itself, the shape of the body unchanged.
Whoever discovers that, discovers the property of space
defined by the so-called " axiom " or law of " free mo-
bility." All physical and chemical changes, so far as
known, leave the mass of matter unaltered. This is
another example of law. All the transformations which
a gravitating system of bodies undergoes are such as to
leave invariant the precise system of relationships which
that law defines. And so one could continue indefinitely.
What laws our discriminating intelligence and our dis-
covery of the serial linkages shall lead us to define, this
view of our world leaves us unable to predict. But
that some laws will come to be acknowledged, this is as
certain as that the serial method of interpreting the
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 95
structure of our world has, within its own limits,
validity. 1
VI
But what are the limits of this way of viewing things ?
What is the precise nature and range of its validity?
We have followed the logical genesis of the categories
of what we may now call The World of Description,
from their simplest forms to the point where we must
abandon the attempt to develope here more fully their
detail. 2
The most fundamental of these categories is that of
Likeness and Difference. Upon the basis of a consid-
eration of the nature of this primal conception, we come
to view the Objective World as, in one aspect of its
Being, a realm of Objects of Possible Attention. The
Categories of Relation, which have to do with the con-
nections existing amongst these Objects, we could not
1 The first systematic attempt to classify the laws present in a sys-
tem by regarding these laws as the "invariants " of "systems of trans-
formations" was, so far as I know, stated in Klein's Erlanger
Programm of 1872 : Vergleichende Betrachtungen iiber Neuere Geomet-
rische Forschungen. Klein regarded the types of laws demonstrable in
the various different sorts of geometry (Projective Geometry, Analysis
Situs, etc.) as so many species, each definable in terms of the invariants
of a Group of Transformations. The conception has since been extended
to other fields of science. Owing to the irreversible character of many of
the serial processes present in our experience, the "Group" character,
in the narrower sense of that term, will be absent from many of the
systems of transformations with which science has to deal. But a law
will still be the expression of the "invariants" of a system of trans-
formations.
3 We shall return, in our Fourth Lecture, to the consideration of these
categories as they appear when applied to our actual study of nature.
4
96 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
exhaustively study. Only the fundamental relation Be-
tween, in the generalized sense, attracted our closer
attention, and has represented for us, in this discussion,
all the Categories of Relation, although, of course, the
very nature of serial order implies also the existence of
countless other relations. On the basis of this concep-
tion we reached the Category of Ordered Series, although
not in its only form. For the Category of Number, and
of the Self- Representative System, or Well-Ordered
Series, was fully discussed in our Supplementary Essay,
and is here presupposed. Nor have we attempted to
discuss the Category of Continuity, which would find
a place in a full treatment of the Ordered Series. On
the basis, however, of the Concept of Series, we indicated
the nature of the more complex Category of the Ordered
System, in which many series are interwoven. And thus
we were led to an indication of the scope of the Category
of Law as it appears in the World of Description.
So much for the mere list of concepts. Plainly these
are indeed fundamental notions regarding the realm of
the facts that we ought to acknowledge. But are they
exhaustive ? Has our world of fact no other aspect than
this?
I answer at once, the world of the objects of my pres-
ent possible Attention, where attention means simply
the discrimination of what is already assumed to be there,
is by no means the final or determinate world that the
Will seeks. For, first, it is on its face a world of
abstract aspects, and not of finality. It is a world of
Validity, and not explicitly a world of Individuals such
as our Fourth Conception demands. It is, moreover,
1/
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 97
defined in terms of a fundamental postulate that always
has an alternative over against it, the alternative ex-
pressed by saying that were the world concretely viewed
as a Self-Representative System, then, for one who
grasped the facts in the order of that system, the recur-
rent process of the interpolation of intermediate terms in
series already recognized would no longer express the
final truth. And finally, this conception of the World
of Description, although it is constantly suggested by
certain aspects of experience, meets constantly its empiri- i---"
cal limitations. We frequently make discriminations
that we have to accept as final, without being able to
comprehend them any further through discovering, in
our experience, new intermediate terms. So it is when
we find a limit to our power to observe finer distinctions
of shades lying between two shades of gray. So it is,
still more markedly, when we fail to find definite signs
that between two individuals whom we believe to be
real (as, for example, between two men), there are all
the possible intermediate grades of individual men. Our
empirical world appears to us often discrete. The prob-
lem of the " missing link " is not confined to the well-
known instances that the theory of evolution brings to
our notice. And it is, above all, individuality, wher-
ever experience suggests it to us, that seems associated
with a certain discreteness.
Now it is perfectly sure that, so long as we view the
world merely as the field of possible discriminations, of
consequent series, and of intended abstract descriptions,
we deal with all these empirical failures by noting that
to discriminate two objects and yet to be unable to find
98 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
an intermediary, is, so far, to be baffled as to the rela-
tion of the One and the Many. Hence, so long as we
are trying merely to describe what we find, and possess
no other clew, we postulate, where we do not observe,
the intermediaries. Our thinking, under the influence
of such postulates, moves in the direction of conceiving
every discrete series as a mere fragment of a continuum.
And to " understand " the world, in terms of ideal con-
tinuity, is often our provisional goal. But the deepest
i principle of our procedure, even in this case, is the
assurance that the One and the Many can be reconciled,
and that the real world is the expression of our Purpose.
In conceiving the World of Description, we view the
facts, however, as if the only purpose that they could
fulfil was the purpose of being discriminable. But per-
haps even .this purpose can be reached better in some
other way. Perhaps the real world forms in its whole-
ness a Well-Ordered Series of a discrete type. For such,
as we saw in the Supplementary Essay, is the charac-
| teristic form in which Selfhood is expressed.
\i Let us look, however, a little more closely at the
sense in which this World of Description is also a world
of abstraction. Here our attention is at once attracted
by a consideration that I have so far kept in the back-
ground. Our principle has so far been this, " The real
world is even now virtually present to my thought at
every moment, as that whole which I acknowledge. My
task in trying to come to clearer consciousness about
the world is to discriminate what it is that I acknowl-
edge." It is indifferent, from this point of view, where
sV I begin. Any a and b Avill do to start my investigation.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 99
Observe facts, and then look for th eir l inkages. That
is the one maxim of my procedure, the maxim of de-
scriptive science stated in its most abstract form. The
choice of a specialty is indeed a personal matter ; and
because of human narrowness any one man has to confine
himself to his own specialty. But all specialties have,
from this point of view, their place in the endless task
of describing the world. Was haben Sie neues gefunden ?
this is the question which they ask of the laboratory spe-
cialist in Germany. Anything will do, if only it belongs
to the range of one's specialty. The great world is there
in the background all the time, awaiting the discriminat-
ing attention, now of this and now of that specialist.
What you find must indeed be new, and, nevertheless,
capable of being linked to the old. For, after all, even
mere discrimination is an expression of the will, which
seeks novelty. But the plan of one's discriminating
procedure is indeed a self-surrendering plan. There is
a heroism of sacrifice about it. I will give myself up
to the facts so far as in me lies. I will find myself, only
by losing myself in attentive observation of what is
already there. My construction shall always be merely
an acknowledgment of what I find.
But now, for such a method of work, not only any fact
will do to begin with ; but any point of view from which ^
I set out will lead me to the same ideal result if only I
continue this process of description. This world of 1 Tacts,
arranged in these abstractly conceived series, is anybody's
world. All of us start from different points of view.
We all, if we find this sort of truth, shall come in the
end to define our results in terms of corresponding series.
100 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
And this variety of possible points of view is not merely
a chance accompaniment of description, but a necessary
consequence of the way in which this series-forming-
process of looking for what lies between any two objects
proceeds. For from this point of view there is nothing
about the objects, as thus discriminated, which makes it
necessary to take them up in your investigation in one order
rather than in another. Projective geometry deals with
the facts of space in one way. Metrical geometry deals
with them in another way. A higher development of
mathematical thought shows how, by the addition of cer-
tain conceptions, one can pass from the series of con-
ceived objects and relations of objects that projective
geometry finds in space, to the series of the metrical
geometer, and vice versa. And now there seem to be
two equally justified ways of portraying the metrical
properties of space. Or, in another field, in preparing
the way for the description of the process of evolution,
the historians and the geologists, the botanists, the
zoologists, the astronomers, all contribute their vari-
ous series of facts to be linked together in the larger
generalization ; and it is a mere historical accident in
what order, or by what specialty, the particular series
are brought to light. Hence, in general, since the
discriminations upon which the formation of series
depends might be made in any order, beginning with
any a and b, the World of Description is, even apart
from our human social conceptions, a world where the
V same results are valid for various methods of approaching
and so of expressing these results. It is a world, therefore,
1 where truth is never discovered in its complete and final
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 101
individual form. For the various possible ways of denning i^-
series of facts are all equally justified. But to say this is
to admit that they are all equally abstract and inadequate. l~-
When you count eggs, it " makes no difference " in
what order you count them. But when you are to enjoy
a Symphony, a great deal depends on the precise order
in which the notes are played. When the astronomer
makes a catalogue of stars, the stars appear indifferent
to the order in which their positions are set down. But
when you undertake to perform any rational task, such
as getting through your day's duties, or serving your
country, or growing in a sense of your relations to God,
everything turns upon the order in which you do your
work. Whatever expresses a single purpose has, as the
expression of that purpose, an irreversible succession.
One deed comes first, another next, and so on forever.
And now this holds true as to precisely the personal,
the truly volitional aspect, of even those very processes
of a descriptive sort (counting eggs, cataloguing stars,
discriminating facts in their series), such as I have
here used to exemplify the apparent indifference of the
serial systems of the world of description to the order
in which you, or other observers, take note of their
presence. The eggs and the stars appear unconcerned
about the order in which you chance to take up your
task of describing their serial variety. But in your life,
that is, or ought to be, as orderly as the symphony or as
serving God and your country, it makes a great differ-
ence to you, when you count the eggs, whether or no
you count " six " after having counted " five," or skip
in counting one or more of your well-ordered number-
102 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
names. And in the life of the astronomer, considered as
a man cooperating in a social task with other astronomers,
the order in which the catalogue is made may be as sacred
as any other moral task. Now the Reality is not the world
apart from the activity of knowing beings, it is the
*"^ world of the fact and the knowledge in one organic whole.
It follows that we simply do not tell the whole story
of our live relations to the world when we report the
results of our formation, through successive discrimina-
tions, of series of facts. The world is unquestionably
there to be known. Its facts are objects of possible
attention. They can be discriminated. They do form
series. But that is not the whole truth about them.
The world is also there to express a perfectly determinate
and absolute purpose. Its facts are incidents in a life,
/ yes, in a life of many lives, a rationally connected!
j social system of beings that embody purposes in deeds J
The facts can therefore not only be discriminated, but,
in so far as we ever come to be conscious of their true
sense, they are linked in a teleological unity. And this
unity determines not merely what is the same for many
points of view, but what is uniquely present, once for
all, from the divine point of view, as the one true Order
of things, f And the true Series is that of the Self, and
of its expression in life. \ The true variety is that of
^various individual Selves, who together constitute, in
their unity, the Individual of Individuals, the absolute.
Beyond our own circle of concretely known facts, there are
not merely series of data to be discriminated, but volition al
proces ses to be estimated, appreciated, and conceived in
their true serial order, as the stages of the world's life.
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 103
Now this conclusion is suggested, apart from our own
special Theory of Being, by any fair reflection upon
what happens when discriminations are made, when
series of facts are found and described, when various
observers, proceeding from different starting-points,
reach, like the projective and the metrical geometer,
or like two students of an experimental science, the
same abstract results. For, as a fact, one has only to
reflect in order to see, as we just saw in the case of
counting the eggs, or of cataloguing the stars, that the
process of discrimination, or of forming series, is itself
an incident in a life whose Internal Meaning lies not
merely in the acknowledgment of facts, but also in the
creation of novelties. Our interest in discriminating
is expressed in the joyous " I see " of the discoverer.
But this is the joy of living, of creating, as well as find-
ing, a world. For in merely acknowledging facts one
may indeed be said to find (in the sense that I here
have in mind) something that, as one conceives, another
might have found as well. But one is conscious of
creating, only in so far as one believes that the expres-
sion of one's purpose is an unique and individual fact,
that has nowhere else in the world of Being its likeness. 1
In consequence, the whole truth is that one discriminates,
indeed, at every step, and in doing so acknowledges what
one does not regard as one's present creation. But this
very act of discrimination is, in the life of one who sees,
a present, an individual, and in so far a creative expres-
sion of purpose. And the world, in permitting this ex-
1 See the discussion of the relations between freedom, activity, and
individuality in the First Series of these lectures, p. 466, sqq.
104 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
pression, reveals its true essence better than the mere
description of the serially arranged data reveals the
final truth of things. Whoever observes merely the
series of linked and discriminated facts, has therefore
but to reflect in order further to observe that one's dis-
V crimination and Unking of facts is itself _aJso a fact, yet
not a fa ct_jn_the series rh'serurnnflte d, but_ rather one
s tage in a life of ^eli^expression. __JThinking, also, is
living. Science is justified as a type of action. And
this is why we never can be content with discovering
that the world is describable, but must note that all
description is valuable as a process occurring in a life.
That is why, moreover, we must always hold that the
very facts themselves which we can at present interpret
only in terms of Description, are the incidents of an
orderly life of divine Self-Expression^
VII
All then that we said at the outset about the presence
of the world in the background, as the acknowledged
reality in which we are to discover all the facts that
ever we are to come to acknowledge in the concrete,
was, as far as it went, valid. And the conclusion that
we drew as to the way in which we, from our point of
view, must undertake to solve the problem of the One
and the Many by the serial discrimination and linkage
of facts, expresses a significant, although partial, aspect
of our search for truth. But the other aspect of the
truth returns of itself whenever we reflect. The world
is indeed there in the background. But it is there as
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 105
embodiment of Life, and not merely as the object of
discrimination. It is a world with which we stand in
Social Relations. Its life cooperates with ours.
And now, as to the true serial order of this world of
Life, we have, from the outset of our exposition of our
Fourth Concept, recognized that, whatever the world con-
tains, it contains in the form of a Self-Conscious Being.
In our Supplementary Essay we showed at length that
a Self, as a real being, has a certain form of expression,
which inevitably involves a serial structure, but that this
serial structure, in its main outline, is most truly repre-
sented by the form of the series of whole numbers, rather
than by the form of a series between any two of whose
terms, further terms without end are interpolated. A
series of the latter type is indeed describable. Nor is it in
the least objectionable by reason of the infinite complexity
of its conceived structure. For, as the Supplementary
Essay showed us, the real world is certainly infinitely
complex in structure, and there is no contradiction in con-
ceiving an infinitely complex object as real. But, from
our point of view, the world of a Self, whatever conti-
nuity of internal structure it may in some aspects possess,
is in its principal form of expression embodied in a discrete v
series of acts, of individual expressions, of stages of self-
representation and of self-revelation. We cannot here
repeat the argument by which this result was reached in
the Essay in question. But experience at any moment
shows how I am conscious of my own deeds, of my prog-
ress, of my acts of attention, and of my approaches to
selfhood in any waj r , in the form of a discrete series, in V
which one stage or act of life is folloived by the next. The
\
106 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
principle of my life, as I come to myself, and, knowing
what I want, proceed to do it, is a principle winning
H novelty through Recurrence. Again and again, I proceed,
from one act to the next, and so always to new acts. But
neither an interpolation of deeds between my own deeds,
nor yet a consciousness of unbroken continuity in my
own acts, would help me to understand myself. My
order, then, so far as I grasp it at all, is, like the order
of the number-series, discrete. That is shown in my very
process of discriminating something between any two
accepted facts, so far as it is my own process. For that
process, as we saw, is a recurrent one. I find that a is
not next to b, but has m between. Then I conceive m\
inserted, then m 2 , and so, on. But as I do this, my act of
conceiving the new intermediaries comes next after a
former act ; and another act of conceiving intermediaries
between a and b comes, in my life, next after this one.
Now if, with this fact in mind, I look back on the
world which I attempted thus to describe, I find that the
limitation which experience often seems to set to my pos-
tulates about the discrimination of facts, may well be
founded in the deepest nature of things. The true world,
the World of Values or of Appreciation, as rightly viewed
by an absolute insight, would be a world of Selves, form-
ing in the unity of their systems One Self. This world
would appear to such an insight as a Social Order. For
the categories of the World of Appreciation, as we shall
later more fully see, when we come to the study of our
human Social consciousness, are the categories of the Self
in Social form and expression. But as I discriminate the
world, taking account now of a and now of 5, my discrimi-
THE LINKAGE OF FACTS 107
nation, determined as it is by the interest of ray individ-
ual development, does not seize upon the facts in the
order in which they are actually determined by the Will
whose expression is the world. As I take the facts, they
come to me as incidents in my individual life. Since I I
fail to grasp the One in the Many in these cases, I postu- > '
late the intermediaries, and have a right to do so in so far^^ 5
as that can further my own purpose of comprehension, ^p
which itself is a part of the world-purpose, and which is
accordingly sure, within its limits, of representing one
aspect of the truth. The true world, however, is not the I
world of description, but the world of socially inter-J
related Selves. And the world as we describe it, is the
world viewed in the order of our own processes of de-
scription, which as incident in our human life, have their
value, but are expressions of the true world order, only in
so far as they reveal to us the life of things. Our con-
clusion is that the true series of facts in the world must
be a Well-Ordered Series, in which every fact has its
next-following fact. The series discoverable by us in the
World of Description are characterized by the prevalence,
for our view, of the relation Betiveen. Hence they do not
appear to us as Weil-Ordered Series. But just in so far
they are inadequate expressions of the truth.
We are now prepared to consider the more special form
which these general categories will take when we come to
study our human experience of Nature and of our fellows.
But before we make that transition, there is still some-
thing to be said regarding one further fundamental con-
ception, that of Time.
/I
LECTURE III
LECTURE III
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL
The world of the facts that we ought to acknowledge
is, in one of its aspects, present (so we have maintained)
as the Object of Possible Attention, in every act of finite
insight. Finitude means inattention to the wealth and
organization of the world's detail.
An obvious objection to this thesis is furnished by the
nature of Time. How can Past and Future, which " do not
exist," be in any sense " present," in the undistinguished
unity of the facts which any finite thinker at any instant
acknowledges ?
In the Ninth Lecture of the First Series, we briefly
considered the topic of temporal Being. 1 We have to
return to it here with more detail. There is an ancient
distinction of the philosophers between the Temporal and
the Eternal. It must be plain at this point, that we
ascribe to the true world a certain eternal type of Being.
Yet how shall we reconcile this with our equally obvious
treatment of the world as existing in time ? Plainly we
have here a question that is of great importance for any
understanding of the categories of experience. It
belongs, then, in the context of these earlier discussions
of our present series of lectures. Moreover, it is one that
will constantly meet us later. The relation of Time to
1 p. 407, sqq., pp. 420-421.
Ill
112 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Nature will be of central concern to us. When we come
to deal with the individual Self, we shall again have to
face the question : In what sense has the Self of the
individual a purely Temporal, and in what sense an
Eternal type of reality ? And before we can answer this
question we must be more precise than we have yet been
in denning the terms Time and Eternity. The issue
here involved has a significance not only theoretical, but
also intensely practical. It will need therefore a close and
deliberate scrutiny. Time, as we shall soon see, is a con-
cept of fundamentally practical meaning. The definition
of the Eternal, on the other hand, has very close relations
to the question as to the ultimate significance of all that
is practical. Any rational decision as between a pessi-
mistic and an optimistic view of the world, any account
of the relations between God and Man, any view of the
sense in which the evils and imperfections of the Uni-
verse can be comprehended or justified, any account of
our ethical consciousness in terms reconcilable with our
Idealism, in brief, any philosophical reconciliation with
religion and life, must turn in part upon a distinction
between the Temporal and the Eternal, and upon an
insight into their unity in the midst of their contrast.
The problem at issue is one of the most delicate and, at
the same time, one of the simplest of the great issues of
philosophy. I shall here have to deal with it at first in a
purely theoretical fashion, and shall then proceed to its
practical applications. For both aspects of the question
we are now fully prepared.
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 11 |
Time is known to us, both perceptually, as the psy-
chologists would say, and conceptually. That is, we have
a relatively direct experience of time at any moment, and
we acknowledge the truth of a relatively indirect con-
ception that we possess of the temporal order of the
world. But our conception of time far outstrips in its
development and in its organization anything that we are
able directly to find in the time that is known to our
perceptions. Much of the difficulty that appears in
our metaphysical views about time is, however, due to lack
of naivete and directness in viewing the temporal aspects
of reality. We first emphasize highly artificial aspects of
our conception of time. Then we wonder how these
various aspects can be brought into relation with the rest
of the real world. Our efforts to solve our problem lead
very easily to contradictions. We fail to observe how, in
case of our more direct experience of time and of its
meaning, various elements are woven into a certain
wholeness, the very elements which, when our artificial
conception of time has sundered them, we are prone to
view as irreconcilable with one another and with reality.
Our more direct perceptions of time form a complex
sort of consciousness, wherein it is not difficult to distin-
guish several aspects. For the first, some Change is
always occurring in our experience. This change may
belong to the facts of any sense, or to our emotions, or
to our ideas ; but for us to be conscious is to be aware of
change. Now this changing character of our experience
is never the whole story of any of our clearer and more
114 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
definite kinds of consciousness. The next aspect of the
matter lies in the fact that our consciousness of change,
wherever it is definite and wherever it accompanies defi-
nite successive acts of attention, goes along with the
consciousness that for us something comes first, and
something next, or that there is what we call a Succes-
sion of events. Of such successions, melodies, rhythms,
and series of words or of other simple acts form familiar
and typical examples. An elementary consciousness of
change without such definite successions we can indeed
have ; but where we observe clearly what a particular
change is, it is a change wherein one fact succeeds an-
other.
A succession, as thus more directly experienced by us,
involves a certain well-known relation amongst the events
that make up the succession. Together these events
form a temporal sequence or order. Each one of them
is over and past when the next one comes. And this
order of the experienced time-series has a determinate
direction. The succession passes from each event to its
successor, and not in the reverse direction ; so that herein
the observed time relations notoriously differ from what
we view as space relations. For if in space b is next to
a, we can read the relation equally well as a coexistence
of a with 5, and as a coexistence of b with a. But in case
b succeeds a, as one word succeeds another in a spoken
sentence, then the relation is experienced as a passing
from a to J, or as a passing over of a into b, in such wise
that a is past, as an event, before b comes. This direc-
tion of the stream of time forms one of its most notable
empirical characters. It is obviously related to that
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 115
direction of the acts of the will whose logical aspect
interested us in connection with the consideration of our
discriminating consciousness.
But side by side with this aspect of the temporal order,
as we experience this order, stands still another aspect,
whose relation to the former has been persistently pointed
out by many psychological writers, and as persistently
ignored by many of the metaphysical interpreters of the
temporal aspect of the universe. When we more directly
experience succession, as, for instance, when we listen
to a musical phrase or to a rhythmic series of drum-
beats, we not only observe that any antecedent member
of the series is over and past before the next number comes,
but also, and without the least contradiction between these
two aspects of our total experience, we observe that this
whole succession, with both its former and later mem-
bers, so far as with relative directness we apprehend
the series of drum-beats or of other simple events, is
present at once to our consciousness, in precisely the sense
in which the unity of our knowing mental life always
finds present at once many facts. It is, as I must insist,
true that for my consciousness b is experienced as follow-
ing a, and also that both a and b are together experienced
as in this relation of sequence. To say this is no more con-
tradictory than to say that while I experience two parts of
a surface as, by virtue of their spatial position, mutually
exclusive each of the other, I also may experience the fact
that both these mutually exclusive parts go together to
form one whole surface. The sense in which they form
one surface is, of course, not the sense in which, as parts,
they exclude each other, and form different surfaces.
116 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Well, just so, the sense in which b, as successor of , is
such, in the series of events in question, that a is over
and gone when b comes, is not the sense in which a and
b are together elements in the whole experienced succes-
sion. But that, in both of these senses, the relation of b
to its predecessor a is an experienced fact, is a truth that
any one can observe for himself.
If I utter a line of verse, such as
" The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,"
the sound of the word day succeeds the sound of the
word parting, and I unquestionably experience the fact
that, for me, every earlier word of the line is over and
past before the succeeding word or the last word, day,
comes to be uttered or to be heard. Yet this is unques-
tionably not my whole consciousness about the succes-
sion. For I am certainly also aware that the whole line
of poetry, as a succession of uttered sounds (or, at all
events, a considerable portion of the line), is present to
me at once, and as this one succession, when I speak the
line. For only by virtue of experiencing this wholeness
do I observe the rhythm, the music, and the jneanjrig of
the line. The sense in which the word parting is over
before the word day comes, is like the sense in which one
object in space is where any other object is not, so that
the spatial presence of one object excludes the presence of
another at that same part of space. Precisely so the pres-
ence of the word day excludes the presence of the word
parting from its own place in the temporal succession.
And, in our experience of succession, each element is pres-
ent in a particular point of the series, in so far as, with
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 117
reference to that point, other events of the series are
either past, that is, over and done with, or are future, that
is, are later in the series, or are not yet when this one point
of the series is in this sense present. Every word of the
uttered line of poetry, viewed in its reference to the
other words, or to previous and later experiences, is pres-
ent in its own place in the series, is over and done with
before later events can come, or when they are present,
and is not yet when the former events of the succession
are present. And that all this is true, certainly is a mat-
ter of our experience of succession.
But the sense in which, nevertheless, the whole series of
the uttered words of the line, or of some considerable
portion of the line, is presented to our consciousness at
once, is precisely the sense in which we apprehend this
line as one line, and this succession as one succession.
The whole series of words has for us its rhythmic unity,
and forms an instance of conscious experience, whose
unity we overlook at one glance. And unless we could
thus overlook a succession and view at once its serially
related and mutually exclusive events, we should never
know anything whatever about the existence of succession,
and should have no problem about time upon our hands.
This extremely simple and familiar character of our
consciousness of succession, this essentially double aspect
of every experience of a present series of events, this
inevitably twofold sense in which the term present can be
used in regard to our perception of temporal happenings,
this is a matter of the most fundamental importance
for our whole conception of Time, and, as I may at once
add, for our conception of Eternity. Yet this is also a
118 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
matter very frequently obscured, in discussion, by various
devices often used to express the nature of the facts here
^ in question. Sometimes, for the sake of a laudable attempt
to define the term present in a wholly unambiguous way,
those who are giving an account of our experience of time
are led to assert that, since every part or element of any
series of temporal events can be present only when all the
other elements of the series are temporally non-existent,
i.e. are either past or future, it must therefore be quite
impossible for us to be conscious, at once, of a present
succession involving a series of such elements. For how,
they say, can I be conscious of the presence of all the
successive words of the verse of poetry, when only one
word is actually and temporally present at any one time ?
To comprehend how I can become in any sense aware of
the series of successive words that constitutes the line of
verse, such students of our problem are accustomed to say
that when any one word as passing, or day, is present to my
/mind, the other words, even of the same line, can be pres-
ent to consciousness only as coexistent memories or images
of the former words, or as images of the expected coming
words. From this point of view, I never really observe
any sequence of conscious events as a sequence at all. I
merely apprehend each element by itself ; and I directly
conclude from the images which in my experience are
coexistent with this element, that there have been ante-
\ cedent, and will be subsequent events in the series.
This interpretation of our consciousness of time is, how-
ever, directly counter to our time-experience, as any one
may observe it for himself. For we do experience succes-
sion, and at once we do take note of facts that are in dif-
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 119
ferent times. For, I ask you, What word of mine is it
that, as this single present word, you just now hear me
speaking ? If I pause a little, you perhaps dwell upon
the last word that I utter before pausing, and call that the
one present word. Otherwise, however, as I speak to you,
you are conscious of series of successive words, of whole
phrases, of word groups, of clauses. Within each one of
these groups of words, you are indeed more or less clearly
aware that every element has its own temporal place ; and
that, in so far as each element is taken by itself as present,
the other elements either precede or succeed it, and in
this sense are not in one time with it. But this very fact
itself you know merely in so far as you actually experience
series, each of which contains several successive words.
These series come to you not merely by virtue of remem-
bered facts, but also as experienced fa cts.
And in truth, were this not so, you could indeed
have no experience of succession at all. You would
then experience, at any one moment, merely the single
word, or something less than any single word, together
with the supposed coexistent and contemporaneous images
of actually past or of coming words. But how, in that
case, would your experience of time-sequences come to
seem to you different from any experience whatever of
coexistence ? Nor is even this the only difficulty about
the doctrine which supposes you to be unable to view a
series of successive events as all at once presented to
your consciousness. A still deeper difficulty results from
such an effort to evade the double sense in which the
facts of succession are known in your experience. If you
can have present to you only one event at a time in a
120 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
series of successive events, how long, or rather how short,
must an event be to contain within itself no succession
at all, or no difference between former and latter con-
tents? In vain do you suppose that, at any time, you
have directly present to your consciousness only one of
the successive words that you hear me speak. Not
thus do you escape our difficulty. For a spoken word
is itself a series of temporally successive sounds. Can
you hear at once the whole spoken word, or can you
grasp at once this whole series ? If so, my own fore-
going account is in principle admitted. For then, in
this presence of the facts of succession to your con-
sciousness, there are our two former aspects, both of
them, involved. Each element of the succession (namely,
in this case, the elementary sounds that to your con-
sciousness make up the word) is temporally present
just when it occurs, but not before or afterwards, in so
far as it follows previous elements and succeeds later
elements ; and also all the elements are, in the other
sense of the term, present at once to consciousness, as
constituting this whole succession which you call the
word. If, however, you deny that you actually hear,
apart from memory or from imagery, any single whole
word at once, I shall only the more continue to ask
you, What is the least or the simplest element of suc-
cession that is such as to constitute a merely present
experience, with no former or latter contents within it?
What apart from any memory or any imagery, and
wholly apart from ideas of the past or the future of
your experience, is present to you, in an indivisible
time instant, just Now? The question is obviously un-
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 121
answerable, just because an absolutely indivisible instant
of mathematical time, with no former and latter con-
tained within it, neither constitutes nor contains any
temporal event, nor presents to you any fact of tem-
poral experience whatever, just as an indivisible point in
space could contain no matter, nor itself ever become,
in isolation, an object of spatial experience. On the
other hand, an event such that in it you were unable to
perceive any succession, would help you in no whit to
get the idea of time until you experienced it along
with other events. What is now before you is a suc-
cession, within which are parts ; and of these parts
each, when and in so far as once your attention fixes
it, and takes it in its time relations, is found as a
present that in time both precedes and succeeds other
facts, while these other facts are also just as truly
before you as the observed element called the tem-
porally present one is itself before you. And thus you
cannot escape from our twofold interpretation of thef
experience of temporal succession. You are conscious
of a series of successive states presented to you as a
whole. You are also aware that each element of the i
succession excludes the others from its own place in
time.
There is, to be sure, another frequent way of describ-
ing our consciousness of succession, and a way that
on the whole I find unsatisfactory. According to this
view, events come to us in succession in our experience,
let us say the words of a spoken verse, and then
something often called the synthetic activity of the
mind supervenes, and later binds together into unity,
122 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
these successive facts, so that when this binding has
taken place we then recognize the whole fagot of ex-
perience as a single succession. This account of the
temporal facts, in terms of an activity called a syn-
thesis, helps me, as I must confess, no whit. What I
find in consciousness is that a succession, such as a
rhythm of drum-beats, a musical phrase, a verse of poetry,
comes to me as one present whole, present in the sense
that I know it all at once. And I also find that this
i succession is such that it has within it a temporal dis-
tinction, or order, of earlier and later elements. While
these elements are at once known, they are also known
as such that at the briefer instant within the succession
when any one of them is to be temporally viewed as a
present fact, none of the others are contemporaneous
with that fact, but all are either no longer or not yet
when, and in so far as, that element is taken as the
present one. And I cannot make this datum of expe-
rience any more definite by calling it a synthesis, or
the mere result of a synthesis.
I have now characterized the more directly given
features in our consciousness of succession. You see,
as a result, that we men experience what Professor
James, and others, have called our "specious present,"
as a serial whole, within which there are observed tem-
poral differences of former and latter. And this our
" specious present " has, when measured by a reference
to time-keepers, a length which varies with circum-
stances, but which appears to be never any very small
fraction of a second, and never more than a very few
seconds in length. I have earlier referred to this
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 123
length of our present moments as our characteristic
" time-span " of consciousness, and have pointed out
how arbitrary a feature and limitation of our con-
sciousness it is. We shall return soon to the question
regarding the possible metaphysical significance of this
time-span of our own special kind of consciousness.
But it remains here to call closer attention to certain
other equally important features of our more direct expe-
rience of time-succession. So far, we have spoken, in
the main, as if succession were to us a mere matter of
given facts, as colors and sounds are given. But all our
experience also has relation to the interests whose play
and whose success or defeat constitute the life of our
will. Every serial succession of which we are conscious
therefore has for us some sort of meaning. In it we find
our success or our failure. In it our internal meanings
are expressed, or hindered, thwarted or furthered. We
are interested in life, even if it be, in idle moments,
only the dreary interest of wondering what will happen
next, or, in distressed moments, the interest in flying
from our present fortune, or, in despairing moments, of
wishing for the end ; still more then if, in strenuous
moments, our interest is in pursuing our ideal. And our
interest in life means our conscious concern in passing on
from any temporal present towards its richer fulfilment,
or away from its relative insignificance. Now that Direc-
tion of temporal succession of which I before made men-
tion, has the most intimate relations to this our interest in
our experience. What is earlier in a given succession is ,
related to what is later as being that from which we pass
towards a desired fulfilment, or in search of a more com-
124 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
plete expression of our purpose. We are never content
in the temporal present in so far as we view it as tem-
poral, that is, as an event in a series. For such a present
has its meaning as a transition from its predecessors
towards its successors.
Our temporal form of experience is thus peculiarly the
form of the Will as such. Space often seems to spread
out before us what we take to be the mere contents of our
world ; but time gives the form for the expression of all
our meanings. Facts, in so far as, with an abstractly
false Realism, we sunder them from their meanings, there-
fore tend to be viewed as merely in relations of coexist-
ence ; and the space-world is the favorite region of
Realism. But ideas, when conscious, assume the con-
sciously temporal form of inner existence, and appear to
us as constructive processes. The visible world, when
viewed as at rest, therefore interests us little in compari-
son with the same world when we take note of its move-
ments, changes, successions. As the kitten ignores the
dead leaves until the wind stirs them, but then chases
them so facts in general tend to appear to us all dead
and indifferent when we disregard their processes. But
in the movements of things lies for us, just as truly as in
her small way for the kitten, all the glory and the trag-
edy, all the life and the meaning of our observed universe.
This concern, this interest in the changing, binds us then
to the lower animals, as it doubtless also binds us to
beings of far higher than human grade. We watch the
moving and tend to neglect the apparently changeless
objects about us. And that is why narrative is so much
more easily effective than description in the poetic arts ;
THE TEMPORAL AXD THE ETERNAL 125
and why, if you want to win the attention of the child or
of the general public, you must tell the story rather than
portray coexistent truths, and must fill time with series
of events, rather than merely crowd the space of experi-
ence or of imagination with manifold but undramatic
details. For space furnishes indeed the stage and the
scenery of the universe, but the world's play occurs in
time.
Now all these familiar considerations remind us of cer-
tain of the most essential characters of our experience of
time. Time, whatever else it is, is given to us as that^
within whose successions, in so far as for us they have a
direct interest and meaning, every event, springing from,
yet forsaking, its predecessors, aims on, towards its own
fulfilment and extinction in the coming of its successors.
Our experience of time is thus for us essentially an expe-
rience of longing, of pursuit, of restlessness. ; And this is
the aspect which Schopenhauer and the B uddhi sts have
found so intolerable about the very nature of our finite
experience. Upon this dissatisfied aspect of finite con-
sciousness we ourselves dwelt when, in the former series
of lectures, we were first learning to view the world, for
the moment, from the mystic's point of view. As for the
higher justification of this aspect of our experience, that
indeed belongs elsewhere. But as to the facts, every part
of a succession is present in so far as when it is, that
which is no longer and that which is not yet both of them
stand in essentially significant, or, if you will, in essen-
tially practical relations to this present. It is true, of
course, that when we view relatively indifferent time-
series, such as the ticking of a watch or the dropping
126 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of rain upon the roof, we can disregard this more signifi-
cant aspect of succession ; and speak of the endless
flight of time as an incomprehensible brute fact of expe-
rience, and as in so far seemingly meaningless. But no
series of experiences upon which attention is fixed is
wholly indifferent to us ; and the temporal aspect of such
series always involves some element of expectancy and
some sense of something that no longer is ; and both
these conscious attitudes color our interest in the pre-
sented succession, and give the whole the meaning of life.
Time is thus indeed the form of practical activity ; and
its whole character, and especially that direction of its
succession of which we have spoken, are determined
accordingly.
II
I have dwelt long upon the time consciousness of our
relatively direct experience, because here lies the basis
for every deeper comprehension of the metaphysics both
of time and of eternity. Our ordinary conception of
time as an universal form of existence in the external
world, is altogether founded upon a generalization, whose
origin is in us men largely and obviously social, but )
whose materials are derived from our inner experience of
the succession of significant events." The conceived rela-
tions of Past, Present, and Future in the real world of
common-sense metaphysics, appear indeed, at first sight,
vastly to transcend anything that we ourselves have ever
observed in our inner experience. The infinite and ir-
revocable past that no longer is, the expected infinite future
that has as yet no existence, how remote these ideal con-
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 127
structions, supposed to be valid for all gods and men
and things, seem at first sight from the brief and sig-
nificant series of successive events that occur within
the brief span of our actual human consciousness. Yet,
as we saw in the ninth lecture of our former Series,
common sense, as soon as questioned about special cases,
actually conceives the Being of both the past and the^
future as so intimately related to the Being of the present
that every definite conception of the real processes of
the world, whether these processes are viewed as physi-/
cal or as historical or explicitly as ethical, depends
upon taking the past, the present, and the future as I
constituting a single whole, whose parts have no true
Being except in their linkage. As a fact, moreover, 1
the term present, when applied to characterize a moment
or an event in the time-stream of the real world, never
means, in any significant application, the indivisible
present of an ideal mathematical time. JThe present
time, in case of the world at large, has an unity altogether
similar to that of the present moment of our inner
consciousness. . We may speak of the present minute,
hour, day, year, century. If we use the term present
regarding any one of these divisions of time, but regard
this time not as the experienced form of the inner
succession of our own mental events, but as the time
of the real world in which we ourselves form a part,
then we indeed conceive that this present is world-
embracing, and that suns move, light radiates between
stars, the deeds of all men occur, and the minds of all
men are conscious, in this same present time of which
we thus make mention. Moreover, we usually view
128 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
the world-time in question in terms of the conceptions
of the World of Description, and so we conceive it as
infinitely divisible, as measurable by various mathemati-
cal and physical devices, and as a continuous stream
of occurrence. Yet in whatever sense we speak of
the real present time of the world, this present, whether
it is the present second, or the present century, or the
present geological period, it is, for our conception, as
truly a divisible and connected whole region of time,
within which a succession of events takes place, as it
is a world-embracing and connected time, within whose
span the whole universe of present events is com-
prised. A mathematically indivisible present time, pos-
sessing no length, is simply no time at all. Whoever
says, " In the universe at large only the present state
of things is real, only the present movement of the
stars, the present streamings of radiant light, the present
deeds and thoughts of men are real ; the whole past is
dead ; the whole future is not yet," any such reporter
of the temporal existence of the universe may be invited
to state how long his real present of the time-world is.
If he replies, " The present moment is the absolutely indi-
visible and ideal boundary between present and future,"
then one may rejoin at once that in a mathematically in-
divisible instant, having no length, no event happens,
nothing endures, no thought or deed takes place, in
brief, nothing whatever temporally exists, and that,
too, whatever conception you may have of Being. But
if the real present is a divisible portion of time, then
it contains within itself succession, precisely as the
" specious present " of psychological time contains such
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 129
internal succession. But in that case, within the real
present of the time-world, there are already contained
the distinctions that, in case of the time of experience,
we have heretofore observed. If, in what you choose
to call the present moment of the world's history, deeds
are accomplished, suns actually move from place to place,
light waves traverse the ether, and men's lives pass
from stage to stage, then j within what you thus call
the present there are distinguishable and more ele-
mentary events, arranged in series, such that when any
conceived element, or mere elementary portion of any
series is taken in relation to its predecessors and suc-
cessors, it is not yet when its antecedents are taken as
temporally present, and is past and gone when its
successors are viewed as present. The world's time is^-
; thus in all respects a generalized and extended image
and correspondent of the observed time of our inner
experience/] In the time of our more direct experience,
we find a twofold way in which we can significantly
call a portion of time a present moment. The present,
in our inner experience, means a whole series of events
grasped by somebody as having some unity for his
consciousness, and as having its own single internal
meaning. This was what we meant by the present
experience of this musical phrase, this spoken line of
verse, this series of rhythmic beats. But, in the other
sense of the word, an element within any such whole
is present in so far as this element has antecedents and
successors, so that they are no longer or not yet when
it is temporally viewed as present, while in turn, in so
far as any one of them is viewed as the present element,
K
130 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
/tins element itself is either not yet or no longer. But pre-
cisely so, in the conceptual time of our real world, the
Present means any section of the time-stream in so far as,
with reference to anybody's consciousness, it is viewed as
having relation to this unity of consciousness, and as in
a single whole of meaning with this unity. Usually
by " our time," or " the real time in which we now
live," we mean no very long period of the conceived
time-stream of the real world. But we never mean
the indivisible now of an ideal mathematical time,
because, in such an indivisible time-instant, nothing
could happen, or endure, or genuinely exist. But
within the present, if conceived as a section of the
time-stream, there are internal differences of present,
\ past, and future.
For, in a similar fashion, as the actual or supposed
length of the " specious present " of our perceptual
time is something arbitrary, determined by our peculiar
human type of consciousness, so the length of the por-
tion of conceptual time which we call the present, in
the first sense of that term, namely, in the sense in
which we speak of the "present age," is an arbitrary
length, determined in this case, however, ) by our more
freely chosen interest in some unity which gives rela-
tive wholeness and meaning to this present. } If usually
the " present age " is no very long time, still, at our
pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning
as the history of civilization, or the study of geology,
may suggest, we may conceive the present as extend-
ing over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand
years. On the other hand, within the unity of this
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 131
first present, any distinguishable event or element of
an event is present, in the second, and more strictly
temporal sense in so far as it has predecessors and suc-
cessors, whereof the first are no longer, and the latter
not yet, when this more elementary event is viewed as
happening. .
Nor does the parallelism between the perceptual and \
the conceptual time cease here. [.The perceptual time
was the form in which meaning, and the practically sig-
nificant aspects of consciousness, get their expression.
The same is true of the conceptual time, when viewed
in its relations to the real world. J Not only is the time
of human history, or of any explicitly teleological series
of events, obviously the form in which the facts win
their particular type of conceived meaning ; but even
the time of physical science gets its essential charac-
ters, as a conception, through considerations that can
only be interpreted in terms of the Will, or of our in-
terest in the meaning of the world's happenings.
For the conceived time-series, even when viewed in re-
lation to the World of Description, still differs in consti-
tution from the constitution of a line in space, or from
the characters belonging to a mathematically describable
physical movement of a body, in ways which can only be
expressed in terms of significance. Notoriously, concep-'.'
tual time has often been described as correspondent in
structure to the structure of a line, or as correspondent I
again, in character, to the character of an uniformly flow-
ing stream, or of some other uniform movement. But a
line can be traversed in either direction, while concep
tual time is supposed to permit but one way of pass
132 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
ing from one instant to another in its course. An
uniform flow, or other motion, has, like time, a fixed
direction, but might be conceived as returning into it-
self without detriment to its uniformity. Thus an
ideally regular watch " keeps time," as we say, by
virtue of the uniformity of its motion ; but its hands
return ever again to the same places on the face ; while
the years of conceptual time return not again. And
finally, if one supposed an ideally uniform physical flow
or streaming in one rectilinear direction only, and in
an infinite Euclidean space, the character of this move-
ment might so far be supposed to correspond to that
of an ideally conceived mathematical time ; except for
one thing. The uniformity and unchangeableness of
the conceived physical flow would be a merely given
character, dependent, perhaps, upon the fact that the
physical movement in question was conceived as meet-
ing with no obstacle or external hindrance ; but Hhe
(direction of the flow of time is a character essential to
the very conception of time. And this direction of the
flow of time can only be expressed in its true neces-
sity by saying that in case of the world's time, as in
the case of the time of our inner experience, we con-
ceive the past as leading towards, as aiming in the
1 direction of the future, in such wise that the future
depends for its meaning upon the past, and the past in
its turn has its meaning as a process expectant of the
/future. In brief, only in terms of Will, and only by
virtue of the significant relations of the stages of a
teleological process, has time, whether in our inner ex-
perience, or in the conceived world order as a whole,
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 133
any meaning. Time is the form of the Willjj and the
real world is a temporal world in so far as, in various
regions of that world, seeking differs from attainment,
pursuit is external to its own goal, the imperfect tends
towards its own perfection, or in brief, the internal
meanings of finite life gradually win, in successive stages,
their union with their own External Meaning. The
general justification for this whole view of the time
of the real world is furnished by our idealistic inter-
pretation of Being. The special grounds for regarding
the particular Being of time itself as in this special
way teleological, are furnished by the foregoing analy-
sis of our own experience of time, and by the fact that
the conceptual time in terms of which we interpret the
order of the world at large, is fashioned, so to speak,
after the model of the time of our own experience.
Ill
Having thus defined the way in which the conceptual
time of the real world of common sense corresponds in its
structure to the structure of the time known to our inner
perception, we are prepared to sketch our theory both of
the sense in which the world of our idealistic doctrine
appears to be capable of interpretation as a Temporal
order, and of the sense in which, for this same theor}',
this world is to be viewed as an Eternal order. For, as
a fact, in defining time we have already, and inevitably,
defined eternity ; and a temporal world must needs be,
when viewed in its wholeness, an eternal world. We
have only to review the structure of Reality in the light
134 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of the foregoing analysis in order to bring to our con-
sciousness this result.
And so, first, the real world of our Idealism has to be
viewed by us men as a temporal order. For it is a world
where purposes are fulfilled, or where finite internal mean-
ings reach their final expression, and attain unity with
' external meanings. Now in so far as any idea, as a finite
Internal Meaning, still seeks its own Other, and con-
sciously pursues that Other, in the way in which, as we
have all along seen, every finite idea does pursue its Other,
this Other is in part viewed as something beyond, towards
which the striving is directed. But our human experi-
ence of temporal succession is, as we have seen, just such
an experience of a pursuit directed towards a goal. And
such pursuit demands, as an essential part or aspect of the
striving in question, a consciousness that agrees in its
most essential respect with our own experience of time.
Hence, our only way of expressing the general structure
of our idealistic realm of Being is to say that wherever an
idea exists as a finite idea, still in pursuit of its goal, there
appears to be some essentially temporal aspect belonging
i to the consciousness in question. To my mind, therefore,
time, as the form of the will, is (in so far as we can under-
take to define at all the detailed structure of finite real-
ity) to be viewed as the most pervasive form of all finite
experience, whether human or extra-human. In pursuing
its goals, the Self lives in time. And, to our view, every
real being in the universe, in so far as it has not won
union with the ideal, is pursuing that ideal ; and, accord-
ingly, so far as we can see, is living in time. Whoever,
then, is finite, says, "not yet," and in part seeks his Other
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 135
as involving what, to the seeker, is still future. For the
finite world in general, then, as for us human beings, the
distinction of past and future appears to be coextensive
with life and meaning.
I have advisedly used, however, the phrase that the
time-consciousness is a " part " or " aspect " of the striv-
ing. For from our point of view, the Other, the comple-
tion that our finite being seeks, is not merely something
beyond the present, and is not merely a future experience,
but is also inclusive of the very process of the striving
itself. For the goal of every finite life is simply the
totality whereof this life, in its finitude, is a fragment.
When I seek my own goal, I am looking for the whole of
myself. In so far as my aim is the absolute completion
of my Selfhood, my goal is identical with the whole life
of God. But, in so far as, by my whole individual Self,
I mean my whole Self in contrast with the Selves of my
fellows, then the completion of my individual expres-
sion, in so far as I am this individual and no other, i.e.
my goal, as this Self, is still not any one point or experi-
ence in my life, nor any one stage of m}' life, but the
totality of my individual life viewed as in contrast with
the lives of other individuals. Consequently, while it is
quite true that every incomplete being, every finite striv-
ing, regards itself as aiming towards a future, because its
own goal is not yet attained ; we have, nevertheless, to
remember that the attainment of the goal involves more
than any future moment, taken by itself, could ever fur-
nish. For the Self in its entirety is the whole of a self-
representative or recurrent process, and not the mere last
moment or stage of that process. As we shall see, there is
136 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
in fact no last moment. A life seeking its goal is, there-
fore, indeed, essentially temporal, but is so just as music
is temporal, except indeed that music is not only tempo-
ral, but temporally finite. For every work of musical art
involves significant temporal series, wherein there is pro-
gression, and passage from chord to chord, from phrase to
phrase, and from movement to movement. But just as
any one musical composition has its value not only by vir-
tue of its attainment of its final chord, but also at every
stage of the process that leads towards this conclusion ;
and just as the whole musical composition is, as a whole,
an end in itself; so [every finite Internal Meaning wins
final expression, not merely through the last stage of its
life (if it has a last stage), but through its whole em-
bodiment] And, nevertheless, as the music attains whole-
ness only through succession ; so every idea that is to
win its complete expression, does so through temporal
sequences.
Since, at all events, no other than such a temporal
expression of meaning in life is in any wise definable for
our consciousness, our Idealism can only express its view
of the relation of finite and absolute life by viewing the
whole world, and in particular the whole existence of any
individual Self, as such a temporal process, wherein there
is expressed; by means of a Weil-Ordered Series of stages,/
a meaning that finally belongs to the whole life, but that
at every temporal stage of the process in question appears
to involve, in part, a beyond, a something not yet won,
and so a distinction both of the past and the future of
this Self from the content of any one stage of the process
when that stage is viewed as the present one.
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 137
In this sense, therefore, our doctrine is obliged to con-
ceive the entire world-life as including a temporal series
of events. When considered with reference to any one
of these events, the rest of the events that belong to the
series of which any one finite Self takes account, are past
and future, that is, they are no longer and not yet ; just
as, when viewed with reference to any one chord or
phrase in the musical composition, all the other successive
elements of the composition are either past or future.
The infinite divisibility of the time of our ordinary
scientific conceptions is indeed due to that tendency of
our own discriminating attention to an endless interpola-
tion of intermediary stages, a tendency which we studied
in connection with our general account of the World of
Description. We have, however, seen reasons, which, ap-
plied to time, would lead us to declare that an absolute
insight would view the temporal order as a discrete series
of facts ordered as any succession of facts expressing one
purpose would be ordered, viz. like the whole numbers.
On the other hand, we have no reason to suppose that our
human consciousness distinctly observes intervals of time
that in brevity anywhere nearly approach to the final truth
about the temporal order. Within what is for us the
least observable happening, a larger insight may indeed
discriminate multitudes of events. In dealing with the
concept of Nature, we shall see what significant use may
be made of the hypothesis that there exists or may exist,
finite consciousness for which the series of events that we
regard as no longer distinguishable from merely element-
ary and indivisible happenings, are distinguished so
minutely as to furnish content as rich as those which,
138 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
from our point of view, occupy ieons of the world's
history. Our right to such hypotheses is incontestable,
provided only that they help us to conceive the true
unity of experience. Nevertheless, in the last analysis,
A the Absolute Will must be viewed as expressed in a well-
ordered and discrete series of facts, which from our point
of view may indeed appear, as we shall still further see,
x capable of discrimination ad infinitum.
** But now secondly, and without the least conflict with
the foregoing theses, I declare that this same temporal
j world is, when regarded in its wholeness, an Eternal
order. And I mean by this assertion nothing whatever
but that the whole real content of this temporal order,
whether it is viewed from any one temporal instant as
| past or as present or as future, is at once known, i.e. is
\ consciously experienced as a whole, by the Absolute.?
And I use this expression at once in the very sense in
which we before used it when we pointed out that to
your own consciousness, the whole musical phrase
may be and often is known at once, despite the fact
that each element of the musical succession, when
taken as the temporally present one, excludes from its
own temporal instant the other members of the sequence,
so that they are either no longer or not yet, at the instant
when this element is temporally the present one. As we
saw before, it is true that, in one sense, each one of the
elements or partial events of a sequence excludes the
former and the latter elements from being at the time
when this particular element exists. But that, in another
and equally obvious and empirical sense, all the members
of an actually experienced succession are at once to any
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 139
consciousness which observes the whole succession as a
whole, is equally true. The term present, as we saw, is
naturally used both to name the temporally present when
it is opposed to whatever precedes or succeeds this
present, and also to name the observed facts of a succes-
sion in so far as they are experienced as constituting one
whole succession. In so far the term is indeed ambigu-
ous. But even this ambiguity itself is due to the before-
mentioned fact that, if you try to find an absolutely
simple present temporal fact of consciousness, and still to
view it as an event in time, you are still always led, in
the World of Description, to observe or to conceive that
this temporal fact is a complex event, having a true
succession within itself. So that the now of temporal
expression is never a mere now, unless indeed it be viewed
either as the ideal mathematical instant within which
nothing takes place, or else as one of the finally simple
stages of the discrete series of facts which the absolute
insight views as the expression of its Will.
As to the one hypothesis, an absolute instant in the
mathematical sense is like a point, an ideal limit, and
never appears as any isolated fact of temporal experience.
Every now within which something happens is therefore
also a succession ; so that every temporal fact, every
event, so far as we men can observe it, has to be viewed
as present to experience in both the senses of the term
present ; since this fact when present may be contrasted
with predecessors that are no longer and with successors
that are not yet, while this same fact, when taken as an
event occupying time, is viewed as a presented succession
with former and latter members contained within it.
140 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
As to the other hypothesis, it seems clear that we human
beings observe no such ultimate and indivisible facts of
experience just because, so far as we observe and discrimi-
nate facts, we are more or less under the bondage of the
categories of the World of Description.
But, in view of the correspondence between the uni-
versal time of the world-order, as we conceive it, and
the time of our internal experience, as we observe it,
the temporal sequences must be viewed as having in the
real world, and for the Absolute, the same twofold
character that our temporal experiences have for our-
selves. Present , in what we may call the inclusive
sense of the term, is any portion of real time with all
its included events, in so far as there is any reason to
view it as a whole, and as known in this wholeness
by a single experience. Present^ in what we may by
contrast call the exclusive sense, is any one temporal
event, in so far as it is contrasted with antecedent and
subsequent events, and in so far as it excludes them
from coexistence with itself in the same portion of any
succession. These two senses of the term present do not
contradict each other in case of the world-order any
more than they do in case of our own inner experience.
Both senses express inevitably distinct and yet insepara-
ble connected aspects of the significant life of the con-
scious will, whether in us, or in the universe at large.
Our view declares that all the life of the world, and
therefore all temporal sequences, are present at once to
the Absolute. Our view also maintains that, without
the least conflict with this sense in which the whole tem-
poral order is known at once to the Absolute, there is
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 141
another sense in which any portion of the temporal
sequence of the world may be taken as present, when
viewed with reference to the experience of any finite
Self whose present it is, and when contrasted with what
for this same point of view is the past and the future
of the world. Now the events of the temporal order,
when viewed in this latter way, are divided, with refer-
ence to the point of view of any finite Self, into what now
is, and what no longer is, and what is to be, but is not yet.
These same events, however, in so far as they are viewed \
at once by the Absolute, are for such view, all equally
present. And this their presence is the presence of
all time, as a totum simul, to the Absolute. And the y
*- in i in * s
presence in this sense, of all time at once to the Absolute,
constitutes the Eternal order of the world, eternal,
since it is inclusive of all distinctions of temporal past
and temporal future, eternal, since, for this very rea-
son, the totality of temporal events thus present at once
to the Absolute has no events that precede, or that
follow it, but contains all sequences within it, eternal,
finally, because this view of the world does not, like
our partial glimpses of this or of that relative whole
of sequence, pass away and give place to some other
view, but includes an observation of every passing away,
of every sequence, of every event and of whatever in
time succeeds and follows that event, and includes all
the views that are taken by the various finite Selves.
In order to conceive what, in general, such an eternal
view of the temporal order involves, or to conceive in
what sense the temporal order of the real world is also
an eternal order, we have, therefore, but to remember
142 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
the sense in which the melody, or other sequence, is
known at once to our own consciousness, despite the fact
that its elements when viewed merely in their temporal
succession are, in so far, not at once. As we saw before,
the brief span of our consciousness, the small range of
succession, that we can grasp at once, constitutes a per-
fectly arbitrary limitation of our own special type of
consciousness. But in principle a time-sequence, how-
ever brief, is already viewed in a way that is not
merely temporal, when, despite its sequence, it is grasped
at once, and is thus grasped not through mere memory,
but by virtue of actual experience. A consciousness
related to the whole of the world's events, and to
the whole of time, precisely as our human conscious-
ness is related to a single melody or rhythm, and
to the brief but still extended interval of time which
this melody or rhythm occupies, such a consciousness,
\ I say, is an Eternal Consciousness. In principle we
already possess and are acquainted with the nature of
such a consciousness, whenever we do experience any
succession as one whole. The only thing needed to
complete our idea of what an actually eternal conscious-
ness is, is the conceived removal of that arbitrary limi-
tation which permits us men to observe indeed at once
a succession, but forbids us to observe a succession at
once in case it occupies more than a very few seconds.
IV
This definition of the relations of the Temporal and
the Eternal accomplishes all the purposes that are us-
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 143
ually in mind when we speak of the divine knowledge
as eternal. That eternity is a totum simul, the scholas-
tics were well aware ; and St. Thomas developes our
present concept with a clearness that is only limited by
the consequences of his dualistic view of the relation of
God and the world. For after he has indeed well de-
fined and beautifully illustrated the inclusive eternity of
the divine knowledge, he afterwards conceives the tem-
poral existence of the created world as sundered from
the eternal life which belongs to God. And hereby the
advantages of an accurate definition of the eternal are
sacrificed for the sake of a special dogmatic interest.
Less subtle forms of speculation have led to uses of the
word eternal, whose meaning is often felt to be far deeper
than such usages can render explicit. But as these subtle
usages are often stated, they are indeed open to the
most obvious objections. An eternal knowledge is often
spoken of as if it were one for which there is no dis-
tinction whatever between past, and present, and future.
But such a definition is as absurd as if one should speak of
our knowledge of a whole musical phrase or rhythm, when
we grasped such a whole at once, as if the at once im-
plied that there were for us no temporal distinction
between the first and the last beat or note of the succes-
sion in question. To observe the succession at once is
to have present with perfect clearness all the time-ele-
ments of the rhythm or of the phrase just as they are,
the succession, the tempo, the intervals, the pauses,
and yet, without losing any of their variety, to view
them at once as one present musical idea. Now for our
theory, that is precisely the way in which the eternal
144 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
consciousness views the temporal order, not ignoring
one jot or tittle of its sharp distinctions of past or of
future, of succession or of duration, but still viewing
the whole time-process as the expression of a single In-
ternal Meaning. What we now call past and future are
not merely the same for God ; and, nevertheless, they
are viewed at once, precisely as the beginning and the
end of the rhythm are not the same for our experience,
but are yet at once seen as belonging to one and the
same whole succession.
Or again, an eternal knowledge is often supposed to
be one that abstracts from time, or that takes no account
of time ; so that, for an eternal point of view it is as
if time were not at all. But to say this is as if one were
to speak of observing at once the meaning or character
of the whole phrase or rhythm by simply failing to take
any note at all of the succession as such. The mean-
ing is the meaning of the succession ; and is grasped
only by observing this succession as something that in-
volves former and latter elements, while these elements
in time exclude one another, and therefore follow, each
one after its predecessor has temporally ceased, and
before its successor temporally appears. Just so, we
assert that the eternal insight observes the whole of
time, and all that happens therein, and is eternal only by
virtue of the fact that it does know the whole of time.
Or again, some doctrines often speak of an eternal
insight as something wholly and inexplicably different
from any temporal type of consciousness, so that hoiv
God views His truth as eternal truth, no man can say.
But our theory regards the essential relation of an eternal
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 145
to a temporal type of consciousness as one of the simplest
of the relations that are of primal importance for the
definition of the Absolute. Listen to any musical phrase
or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon
have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine
knowledge of the temporal order. To view all the course
of time just as you then and there view the whole of
that sequence, this is to be possessed of an eternal
type of insight.
"But," so many hereupon object, "it appears im-
possible to see how this sort of eternal insight is possible,
since just now, in time, the infinite past, including,
say, the geological periods and the Persian invasion of
Greece, is no longer, while the future is not yet. How
then for God shall this difference of past and future be
transcended, and all be seen at once ? ' : I reply, In
precisely the same sense all the notes of the melody
except this note are not ivhen this note sounds, but are
either no longer or not yet. Yet you may know a series of
these notes at once. Now precisely so God knows the
Avhole time-sequence of the world at once. The difference
is merely one of span. You now exemplify the eternal
type of knowledge, even as you listen to any briefest
sequence of my words. For you, too, know time even by
sharing the image of the Eternal.
Or again, a common wonder appears regarding how the
divine knowledge can be in such wise eternal as to suffer
no change to occur in it. How God should be unchange-
able, yet express His will in a changing world, is an
ancient problem. Our doctrine answers the question at
a stroke. The knowledge of all change is itself indeed
146 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
unchangeable, just because any change that occurs or that
can occur to any being is already included amongst the
objects known to the eternal point of view. The knowl-
edge of this melody as one whole does not itself consist
in an adding of other notes to the melody. The knowl-
edge of all sequences does not itself follow as another
sequence. Hence it is indeed not subject to the fate of
sequence.
And finally, a mystery is very generally made of the
fact that since time appears to us as inevitably infinite,
and as therefore not, like the melody or the rhythm, capa-
ble of completion, an eternal knowledge, if it involves a
knowledge of the whole of time, must be something that
has to appear to us self-contradictory and impossible.
Any complete answer to this objection involves, of course,
a theory of the infinite. Such a theory I have set forth
in the Supplementary Essay, published with the First
Series of these lectures. The issue involved, that of the
positive concept of an infinite whole, is indeed no simple
one, and is not capable of any brief presentation. I can
here only report that the considerations set forth in that
Supplementary Essay have led me to the thesis that a
Well-Ordered Infinite Series, under the sole condition
that it ^embodies a^jsingle plan, may be rightly viewed as
forming a totality, and as an individual whole, precisely
as a musical theme or a rhythm is viewed by our expe-
\rience as such a whole. That the universe itself is such
an infinite series, I have endeavored, in that paper, to
show in great detail. If you view the temporal order of
the world as also forming such an endless whole, express-
ing a single plan and Will (as I think you have a right
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 147
to do), then the argument of the Supplementary Essay-
in question will apply to our present problem. The whole
of time will contain a single expression of the divine Will,
and therefore, despite its endlessness, the time-world will
be present as such a single whole to the Absolute whose
Will this is, and whose life all this sequence embodies.
In order to refer, as I close, to the practical interest
which has guided me through all the abstract considera-
tions even of this present lecture, I may be permitted to
anticipate some of our later results about the Self, and,
for the sake of illustration, to point out that from our
point of view, as we shall later explain it more fully, your
life, your Self, your will, your individuality, your deeds,
can be and are present at once to the eternal insight of
God ; while, nevertheless, it is equally true that not only
for you, but for God, your life is a genuine temporal
sequence of deeds and strivings, whereof, when you view
this life at the present temporal instant, the past is just
now no longer, while the future is not yet. This twofold
view of your nature, as a temporal process and as an
eternal system of fact, is precisely as valid and as obvious
as the twofold view of the melody or of the rhythm.
Your temporal present looks back, as Will, upon your now
irrevocable past. That past is irrevocable because it is
the basis of your seeking for the future, and is the so far
finished expression of your unique individual Will. Your
future is the not yet temporalby expressed region wherein
you, as finite being, seek your own further expression.
148 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
That future is still, in one aspect, as we shall see, causally
undetermined, precisely in so far as therein something
unique, that is yours and yours only, is to appear in the
form of various individually designed expressions of your
life-purpose, various individual deeds. Therefore, as
we shall be able to maintain, despite all your unquestion-
able causal and moral determinations, there will be an
aspect of your future life that will be free, and yours,
and such as no causation can predetermine, and such as
even God possesses only in so far as your unique indi-
viduality furnishes it as a fact in His world.
And nevertheless, your future and your past, your
aspect of individuality, and of freedom, and the various
aspects wherein you are dependent upon the rest of the
world, your whole life of deeds, and your attainment
of your individual goal through your deeds, all these
manifold facts that are yours and that constitute you,
are present at once to the Absolute, as facts in the
world, as temporal contents eternally viewed, as a
process eternally finished, but eternally finished pre-
cisely by virtue of the temporal sequence of your deeds.
And when you wonder how these aspects can be at
once the aspects of your one life, remember what is
implied in the consciousness at once of the melody or
the rhythm as a sequence, and you will be in posses-
sion of the essential principle whereby the whole mys-
tery is explained.
It is this view, once grasped in its various aspects,
that will enable us to define in what sense man is one
with God, and in what sense he is to be viewed as at
present out of harmony with his own relation to God,
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 149
and in that sense alienated from his true place in the
eternal world. And so, in discussing this most element-
ary category, we are preparing the way for a most sig-
nificant result as to the whole life of any man.
The temporal man, viewed just now in time, appears,
at first, to be sundered even from his own past and
future, and still more from God. He is a seeker even
for to-morrow's bread, still more for his salvation.
He knows not just at this instant even his own indi-
viduality ; still less should he immediately observe his
relation to the Absolute in his present deed and in his
fleeting experience. Only when he laboriously reflects
upon his inmost meaning, or by faith anticipates the
result of such reflection, does he become aware of how
intimately his life is bound up with an Absolute life.
This our finite isolation is, however, especially and char-
acteristically a temporal isolation. That inattention of
which we spoke in the last lecture, is especially an in-
attention to all but this act, as it now appears to me.
I am not one with my own eternal individuality, espe-
cially and peculiarly because this passing temporal in-
stant is not the whole of time, and because the rest of
time is no longer or else not yet when this instant passes.
Herein lies my peculiarly insurmountable human limita-
tion. This is my present form of consciousness. To be
sure, I am not wholly thus bound in the chains of my
finitude. Within my present form and span of con-
sciousness there is already exemplified an eternal type
of insight, whereby the totum simul is in many cases and
in brief span won. But beyond this my span of pres-
entation, time escapes me as a past and future that is
150 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
at once real and still either no longer or else not yet.
From the eternal point of view, however, just this my
life is at once present, in its Individuality and its whole-
ness. And because of this fact, just in so far as I am
the eternal or true Individual, I stand in the presence
of God, with all my life open before Him, and its mean-
ing revealed to Him and to me. Yet this my whole
meaning, while one with His meaning, remains, in the
eternal world, still this unique and individual meaning,
which the life of no other individual Self possesses. So
that in my eternal expression I lose not my individuality,
but rather win my only genuine individual expression,
even while I find my oneness with God.
Now, in time, I seek, as if it were far beyond me,
that goal of my Selfhood, that complete expression of
my will, which in God, and for God, my whole life at
once possesses. I seek this goal as a far-off divine
event, as my future fortune and success. I do well
to seek. Seek and ye shall find. Yet the finding, it
does not occur merely as an event in time. It occurs
as an eternal experience of this my whole striving.
Every struggle, every tear, every misery, every failure,
and repentance, and every rising again, every strenuous
pursuit, every glimpse of God's truth, all these are not
mere incidents of the search for that which is beyond.
They are all events in the life ; they too are part of the
fulfilment. In eternity all this is seen, and hereby,
even in and through these temporal failures, I win, in
God's presence and by virtue of His fulfilment, the goal
of life, which is the whole of life. What no temporal
instant ever brings, what all temporal efforts fail to
THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 151
win, that my true Self in its eternity, and in its oneness
with the divine, possesses.
So much it has seemed that I might here venture to
anticipate of later results, in order that the true sig-
nificance of our elementary categories might be, how-
ever imperfectly, defined for us from the outset. For
all the questions as to our deeper relations to the uni-
verse are bound up with this problem of Time and
Eternity.
LECTUEE IV
LECTURE IV
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY
We have now learned something concerning the general
Forms in which we conceive the facts that we acknowl-
edge as real. No psychological account of the genesis of
these forms in the history of the individual mind has been
attempted. We have considered only the logical signifi-
cance of certain fundamental motives that guide us, from
moment to moment, and from stage to stage of our intel-
lectual development, in the interpretation of our world
and of our relations to this world.
These motives are twofold : (1) The motives that lead
us to the concepts of one type of Serial Order, of Law,
and of the World of Description ; (2) The motives
that lead us to conceive Reality as a Well-Ordered
Series, and as a realm of Appreciation, that is of
values, of Selfhood, of life other than the life that is
directly revealed to us, by our present conscious purposes,
and so as a realm of various Selves. These twofold
motives correspond to our own twofold limitations as
finite beings. For we know, just now, neither the whole
of what this will of ours, in its present dissatisfaction,
really intends and means, nor do we know how this will is
expressed in the facts of universal experience. The World
of Description, as a conceived objective order, is the result of
our attempting, through a process of serial discrimination,
155
156 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
to make good the second of these aspects of our ignorance.
The World of Appreciation we learn to recognize by
coming to a better definition of what it is that our will
even now seeks. For then we learn that our present will
demands for its full expression, not merely contents or
facts that are yet to be discriminated, but other wills than
this present conscious will of ours, other purposes than we
as yet observe within the limits of this instant's conscious-
ness. Our reaction in presence of the world can become
definite and rational, and in accordance with the Ought,
only when we acknowledge, not merely data other than
those now consciously present, but lives, selves, other than
our own finite selfhood. Hence the World of Description,
taken by itself, is never the whole truth. It needs to be
interpreted in terms of the World of Appreciation.
What the criticism of fundamental categories has en-
abled us to see in general, is concretely exemplified by our
knowledge of the Physical World and of Human Society.
We proceed accordingly to apply our general theory to
these special cases. We shall find motives that lead us to
interpret the physical world as a World of Description,
where, as we then conceive, series of phenomena are linked
according to rigidly invariable laws. These laws enable
us indeed to see how the One and the Many are in certain
ways related, but do not appear as expressions of Purpose.
On the contrary, the Social World, the realm of our human
fellow-beings, is for us all primarily a World of Apprecia-
tion, that is, a world where other wills than our own pres-
ent conscious will seem to be expressing themselves, in
accordance with their own choices. Hence our customary
interpretation of the world as known to men is profoundly
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 157
dualistic. On the one hand we find in experience motives
that seem to lead to Materialism. For Materialism is due
simply to a one-sided emphasis laid upon certain aspects of
the World of Description. On the other hand we are
driven, by equally obvious empirical considerations, to
interpret the social world as a realm of conscious volun-
tary processes, which occur because somebody finds it worth
while that they should occur. Our ordinary common-
sense view of things sets these two doctrines about the
knowable world side by side, and in general despairs of
seeing any comprehensible link between the two orders,
viz. between the mental and the material, the social and
the physical, the necessary and the free, the describable
and the spiritual. Our own general criticism of the cate-
gories has prepared us, however, to understand, in terms
of our Idealism, both the contrast and the unity of these
two realms. In the present and in the subsequent lecture,
I propose therefore to undertake a discussion of the con-
cept of Nature, and to show its relation to our concept of
Mind. We shall have to explain, in the first place, what
are the main motives for our acknowledgment of the
existence of the physical world ; and secondly, we shall
have to set forth in some detail the relations between our
idealistic Theory of Being on the one hand and the em-
pirical facts that men acknowledge on the other hand,
in dealing with one another and with Nature.
No precise definition of the scope covered by the term
Nature can be given in advance of a Theory of Nature.
158 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
It is easy to say that, by Nature, we mean the portion
of the universe that our senses make known to us and
that our special empirical sciences study. But the
region of Being marked out by such a definition is no
very precise one. What our senses make known to us
means little enough until the data of sense have been
organized through our conduct, and interpreted in the
light of theory. Nature has therefore always been con-
ceived by men very largely in supersensuous terms, from
the days of magic lore down to the latest geological or
physical or biological theories. And what our empirical
sciences actually study is, according to all our beliefs
about Nature, the mere fringe of a world that exists,
but that we have not yet learned how to study with
success. Nature is also often contrasted with Mind ;
but for the psychologist mental processes are a portion
of the natural processes ; while, for our own idealistic
view, all Nature is an expression of Mind. In our own
phraseology as used in these lectures, Nature has so far
been contrasted several times with Man. But we of
course all recognize a sense in which Man is to be
conceived as a part of Nature ; while on the other hand,
nothing is clearer than that, for us, all our beliefs about
Nature are determined by conditions which belong, in
one aspect, to the mind of Man. A confessedly vague
way of stating the definition of the term is to say that
by Nature we mean a realm external to our own private
experience, and yet this side, so to speak, of the ultimate
Reality, a realm, as it were, between the divine,
viewed as the Absolute, and the knowing finite human
Subject. But all of these expressions, while they are
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 159
indeed in their various ways valid, indicate a problem
rather than define its precise limits.
More to the point, at this stage of our inquiry, than
a formally precise definition of Nature, is a consideration
of the motives which lead us to acknowledge as real the
facts that we all call physical, viz. to acknowledge the
existence of matter, the laws of natural processes, and
the dependence of our own mental life upon these pro-
cesses. To this aspect of the problem of Nature we
accordingly at once proceed.
After all that we have now seen regarding the nature
of human knowledge, it would be vain to assert that
we perceive directly, through our senses, the existence
of that which we call matter. The senses never show
us, by themselves, the true Being of anything whatever.
All truth is the object of acknowledgment, and not
merely of immediate experience. Moreover, what has
Being is, in itself, something Individual. And the
senses never show us individuality, but only the pres-
ence of sense-qualities, colors, sounds, odors, touch,
impressions, and the like. On the other hand it is per-
fectly indubitable that the senses show, now to one and
now to another of us men, all the data that, after com-
paring our various human experiences, we interpret as the
signs of the existence of matter. The question is, however,
this : In what way do we come by this interpretation ?
We cannot say, at this point, that some innate con-
viction, some first and fundamental axiom, or some
opaque " law " of the intellect mysteriously requires
us to believe that matter is real. This we cannot now
assert, just because our Idealism knows nothing what-
160 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
ever about a collection of principles called fundamental
or innate assurances. Nor yet can we here, appealing
to our more thoughtful and scientifically organized expe-
rience, assert that even the success of science, by itself,
sufficiently warrants us in attributing to matter a valid
Being, which, just because it is independent of our
caprices, must remain valid in a realm wholly beyond
that of the minds of men. For we know, from our
former criticisms of Critical Rationalism, that a merely
valid Being, taken by itself, is not yet a real Being.
And the philosophical inquiry into the reality that lies
at the basis of our experience of Nature, is only begun
when we point out that, for our experience, the laws of
Nature are valid. For the question at once arises, in
what form of life, in what expression of the Absolute,
in what Being of our own fourth or idealistic type, are
our valid laws of Nature founded?
It follows that for us, at this stage, when once we
raise the question regarding the Reality of Nature, the
most ordinary conventional answers will in no sense serve.
We must undertake the whole problem afresh.
As we do so, we next meet an account of the founda-
tions of our belief in the external and natural world
which is so frequently defended, and so familiar, that
we cannot here pass it over in silence. It involves look-
ing deeper into the nature of our idea of Being, than
those look who simply say that we directly perceive by
our senses the external existence of natural objects.
And while it indeed appeals to a certain axiom, namely,
to the supposed axiom of causality, it is usually more
critical in its statement than are most of the views that
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 161
make the whole issue depend upon irreducible innate
convictions. And, furthermore, it has been urged by-
many noted thinkers who otherwise are of the most
various philosophical tendency.
According to this view, we come by our belief in the
physical world simply upon the ground of the Resistance
which the solid material objects offer to our touch, to
our movement, and especially to our muscular sense, and
upon the basis of the various other ways in which Nature
sets limits to our activity. And we reason from such
experiences of resistance and of limitation to the ex-
ternal existence of things, upon the ground that there
must indeed be a cause for every effect, and therefore,
in this case, a cause which resists and sets limits to our
will. As this cause is not found within ourselves, we
assume it as external.
No theory of our belief in an external world seems to
have had better fortune than this one in popular phi-
losophy, or even in more serious metaphysical inquiry.
And yet I regard it as precisely such a mingling of true
and of false analysis as is especially adapted hopelessly
to confuse our whole view of nature.
This view, as I hold, is indeed sound in laying stress
upon a deep connection between our observation of the
significant inner life of our own will, and our assurance
that the universe in which we live has true Being. But,
as I have maintained in developing our Fourth Concep-
tion of Being, while our finitude always shows us that
we have not won the whole of Being, it is the fulfil-
ment, the always relative and imperfect fulfilment,
but still the fulfilment of our internal meanings, and not
M
162 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
the opaque resistance which the world offers to these
meaning's, which both defines our warrant for finding
that the universe has Being, and gives us, in the form
of the Internal Meaning of our Ideas, our only and our
valid means for defining wherein that Being consists.
Our limitations do, indeed, send us beyond themselves
for the truth. But the proof that a real world is here
about us, is never the mere opaqueness of fact, the
blind presence of something which besets and hinders
us ; but rather it is the relative transparency of our
inner life, the observed manifestation of meaning in
our experience, which constantly tells us that we are in
an universe where, in view of our present incomplete-
ness, rational truth beyond us is to be found. What is,
is the completion of our incompleteness, and not any fate
that merely overcomes us. This we have fully illus-
trated in the foregoing discussion of the Categories.
Furthermore, the view that we here criticise makes
the whole case depend upon an appeal to the principle of
causation. The resistance that my will meets, needs
explanation. It is explained by the hypothesis of a
material cause which resists us. But hereupon I re-
spond to the defender of this theory, What is, then,
your principle of causation ? Is it not this, namely :
that whatever happens needs, from your point of view,
to be explained, and finds, as a fact, its explanation in
its relation to other facts ? And if this be your belief,
as it doubtless is, is not your principle of causation for
you a principle somehow first known to govern the real
world which your experience of resistance is said to make
manifest to your senses, before you can use the principle to
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 163
prove the existence of matter ? But if this be true, is not
your principle of causation, your assurance that the
real world is one where facts stand in rational relations,
and where what happens is explicable, already presup-
posed not only as valid, but as valid for a real world
beyond you, from the very outset of your whole inquiry ?
Is there not here, then, a belief deeper than your mere
experience that your will is at any time resisted ? For
unless you had this principle of causation in your pos-
session, and unless you first believed the principle to be
applicable to a realm beyond your private experience,
your will would be resisted in vain, so far as your power
to learn about a real world would then go. For you
would then learn nothing thereby but the blind fact
that you felt limitations, as an infant feels them when
he hungers. But if you already possess your principle,
and believe it applicable to Reality in general, then in-
deed you can apply it to explain, after a fashion, any
fact that you please. Already, however, in assuming
that you are somehow able to know that the principle
of causation applies to a realm beyond your own present
will, you have found out, apart from all experience of
resistance, that there is the real external world within
which the principle of causation is valid. And, in that
case, you have not discovered the reality of the physical
world through the fact that it resists your will, but
have presumed, in advance of all feeling of resistance,
that there is a real world, beyond yourself, whose facts,
whatever they are, are linked by a law of causation to
your own experience. For surely you do not mean
that the principle of causation itself, by resisting your
164 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
will, forces you to believe in its reality as the cause of
such resistance.
If you look closer you soon see, however, as to our
belief in causation, that somehow or other it helps us
more clearly to grasp the internal sense, the observed
inner significance, of some of our conscious states, to
observe what we call their causal connections. In
observing these connections, so far as they fall within
our own range of experience, we there find somehow our
own rational Will better expressed, or embodied, than
it would be without this idea, and thereby we better
win our own inner clearness. In assuming, now, that
some such connection as this has validity beyond us,
in a realm external to ourselves, we have begun by
defining this outer realm, not as a realm that pri-
marily resists or thwarts our Will, but as a realm that
first of all embodies one of our own deepest and most
rational purposes. If the external world, said to be
material, is, as this view holds, above all causal, and is
such as to explain the particular facts which are found
in our experience, then, that world is above all a real
embodiment of the very purpose which, in us, appears
as our purpose of explanation.
Properly examined, then, the view here in question
becomes only a form of Idealism, a sort of primary
assurance that the nature of things is rational, and fulfils
our purposes. And so the problem about our belief in
the existence of Nature must be solved in explicit rela-
tion to our Fourth Conception of Being. If we are to
understand what we mean by Material Nature, and why
we believe it to be real, we must ask, What internal
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 165
meaning of ours seeks and demands an embodiment such
that, to our minds, only outer Nature can furnish this
embodiment ? But so far, indeed, we have not seen what
grounds distinguish our belief in matter from our belief
in any other sort of Reality. What we are seeking, how-
ever, is an account of how our belief in the material world,
as distinct from any other realm of acknowledged facts, is
to be explained and defended.
Moreover, as has occasionally been pointed out, in the
course of various recent discussions of this view, the natu-
ral truths which are of the most theoretical importance to
us, are often truths that result from an indirect interpre-
tation of facts with which the sense of resistance in any
direct muscular sense has very little to do. Do the geo-
metrical laws force themselves upon us by resisting our
will (except, to be sure, our will exhaustively to know
them) ? The heavens have long been a type of the appar-
ently everlasting character of Nature. When did the
stars show themselves to be real by resisting our will,
except indeed by arousing questions that we cannot
at present answer?
II
In proceeding to suggest what I regard as a more ade-
quate account of the warrant for our belief in the physical
world, I must call attention to a plain fact which, as I
conceive, has far too often been wholly neglected in the
discussion of this subject. Our belief in the reality of
Nature, when Nature is taken to mean the realm of physi-
cal phenomena known to common sense and to science, is,
inseparably bound up ivith our belief in the existence of our
106 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
fellow -men. The one belief cannot be understood apart
from the other. Whatever the deeper reality behind
Nature may turn out to be, our Nature, the realm of
matter and of laws with which our science and our popu-
lar opinions have to do, is a realm which we conceive as
known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same
general sense in which we regard it as known or as know-
able to our private selves. Take away the social factor
in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the
most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that
physical realm in which we all believe.
How significant this aspect of our belief in Nature is,
you may see if you will look a little more closely at the
facts. There is much, indeed, in the realm of Reality in
general, apart from Nature, which a man need not view
as accessible to all men, in so far as they are men. As a
matter of religious faith, one might well believe, for in-
stance, that upon a given occasion God had revealed his
will to a single prophet, or other inspired person, and that
this revelation not only remained, but had to remain, by
God's will, a secret quite inaccessible to all other men.
In the reality of the revelation in question one might
nevertheless believe, simply because, by hypothesis, God
would be conceived, by a believer in such a revelation, as
a real person, and the prophet as also a real person.
And whatever occurs to one person, as a fact of his inner
life, and whatever passes between two persons, may re-
main a secret inaccessible to all other persons, in so far as
these persons are finite individuals. Or again, I now
believe in your mind as a reality, external to mine ; yet I
also view your mental life as, in its own direct presence
PHYSICAL AXD SOCIAL REALITY 167
to you, something inaccessible to all human beings besides
yourself. But while Reality as such does not imply that
what is real is directly accessible, in its details, to the pri-
vate and finite experience of any or of all men, it is differ-
ent with the sort of reality which we ascribe to what we
usually regard as the material world.
Suppose that I told you that I was well acquainted with
the existence and the properties of a material object which
I had now and here before me. Suppose that I assured
you that I could see, touch, weigh, and otherwise test the
reality of this material object, but that I was quite sure
that neither you nor any other man could conceivably see
it or touch it, or otherwise get the least experience of its
presence. Suppose, as a fact, that nobody else ever did
verify my report ; but that I continued to insist upon the
reality, observable for me, of my material object. What
would you say of that object of mine ? The answer is
plain. You would say that my object might indeed be
real, but was real solely as a physical phenomenon, to wit,
as a collection of states in my mind, in other words, as a
certain fixed hallucination of mine. And now I, myself,
if indeed I remained sane while I asserted all this, should
not hesitate to agree with you, just as surely as I retained
my present definition of my material world. For by my
material world, I certainly mean a collection of actual and
possible experiences of mine such that you too can agree
with me about the presence and the describable charac-
ters of these experiences, precisely in so far as you have
equal opportunities with me to verify their presence and
to test with me their peculiar type of Being. The fact
that we men find Nature here, implies for us, then, that we
168 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
are so constituted as to find the same sort of natural phe-
nomena. The realm of the physical phenomena, whatever
inner Being may be behind it, is, for us, primarily this
common realm of human experience. Upon this considera-
tion the very definition of what we call Nature depends.
It is, of course, true that any one of us, when alone,
supposes himself to be still in the presence of Nature. It
is also true that this supposition would lose its present
meaning just as soon as we supposed not only that we were
alone with Nature, but that, even if our fellows had the
same opportunities as ourselves, they would still be wholly
unable to verify our observations. A nature that is not
only by accident observable just now to me alone, but
that also is such that nobody else amongst all men be-
sides myself can observe it, becomes, at once, to my mind,
either one of two things, viz. either something that is
explicitly my own dream, or fancy, or hallucination, or
other mental state, or else something that I should view,
if I continued to believe in it, as a reality belonging to
a realm of spirits, whom I might then suppose to exist
apart from men. In either case, such fact, observable by
me alone, is no longer to be conceived as belonging to
the well-known material world of common sense and of
science.
Ill
Our belief in Man, then, is logically prior to our inter-
pretation of Nature. And any theory of Nature must
undertake to explain, not merely how these data of sense
appear to any one of us in this order, and subject to
these valid laws, but how all men come to possess this
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 169
connectedness and interrelated unity of their common
experience, despite the apparent separateness of their in-
dividual states of mind.
Bat what then is the source of our belief in the reality
of our fellow-men ? To this question the customary an-
swer is quite the reverse of the answer which I mentioned
a few moments since, when I began to speak about the
physical world. If it is common to say that we believe
in external Nature as something that thwarts or hinders
or resists our will, it is usual, on the other hand, to assert
that we believe in our fellow-men because we detect in
their conduct expressive fashions of behavior, which are
analogous to those whereby we express and accomplish
our own will. I do various things, and know what they
mean. The present theory supposes that I observe in
my fellow-men deeds similar to those whose meaning is
already known to me. By analogy, one continues, I
attribute to these deeds an inner meaning of their own,
analogous to my own inner meaning. Here, as you see,
it is no longer the thwarting of my will, which is said to
prove the reality of external things, but the positive ex-
pression of something analogous to my will in the deeds
of my fellows, it is this, I say, which is believed to be
an evidence that, beyond my life, there is another life ful-
filling ends analogous to my own.
This view of the reason why we believe our fellow-men
to be real is, therefore, more in harmony with our own
Fourth Conception of Being than is the ordinary account
of our belief in material Nature. For what I learn to
view as real is here defined rather as what is in harmony
with my Internal Meaning than as what thwarts my mean-
170 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
ings. Yet even this customary way of explaining our
belief that our fellow-men exist is still, to my mind, in-
adequate. It is not the analogy with ourselves which is
our principal guide to our belief in our fellows. The
view that analogy mainly guides us is defective as an
account of the psychology of our social consciousness, and
is inadequate as a statement of the reasons why our social
consciousness is well founded in the truth of things. Here
too, then, we shall have to alter the conventional theory.
As a matter of psychology, i.e. of the natural history of
our beliefs, a vague belief in the existence of our fellows
seems to antedate, to a considerable extent, the definite
formation of any consciousness of ourselves. This thesis,
which will later prove important for our whole theory of
the individual human Self, will be again illustrated in
connection with that theory. We are social beings first
of all by virtue of our inherited instincts, and we love,
fear, and closely watch our fellows, in advance of any
definite ideas about what our fellows really are. Our
more explicit consciousness that our fellows exist is due
to a gradual interpretation of these our deepest social
instincts. Our belief in the existence of our fellows,
therefore, does not come to our consciousness, through
a mere argument from analogy, whereby we use the
previously developed observation of our own nature and
powers as a basis for the estimate of the inner life of other
men. Our assurance about our fellows arises by means
of those very interests whereby we gradually come to our
own self-consciousness. It is nearer to the truth to say
that we first learn about ourselves from and through our
fellows, than that we learn about our fellows by using the
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 171
analogy of ourselves. Not even now do we mainly trust
to analogy to guide us in interpreting what we most want
at any instant to know about the inner life of our fellows.
In an excited crowd, or in any assembly of the type of a
mob, even the mature man is often much more aware of
the feelings of other people than he is of his own. He
often, in such cases, loses sight of himself in a certain
passion of sympathy. And again, when at present we
converse with people, we become conscious of their inner
life rather in terms of their contrast with ourselves, than
by means of their analogy with us. A man who expresses
himself in a way that is new to me, seems to me often all
the more a real person, with an inner life of his own, just
because I fail to trace any close analogy between his
meanings or his expressions and my own. His difference
from me makes him seem more real to me. Thus the
truly original poet, the Shakespeare or the Goethe, seems
to us, as we study him, to possess his own wondrous inner
life, just because, while we read him, we meet novelty.
Wonder arouses the social sense more vigorously than
does recognition. The child's period of liveliest growth
in social insight is his questioning age, when every new
mind is a mysterious realm to be explored by inquiries.
And now as to the logic of our social consciousness, the
simplest way to express the whole sense of the evidence
that impresses upon us, at every moment, the reality of
our fellows, is to say, Our fellows are known to be real,
and to have their own inner life, because they are for
each of us the endless treasury of more ideas. They
answer our questions ; they tell us news ; they make com-
ments ; they pass judgments ; they express novel com-
172 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
binations of feelings ; they relate to us stories ; they argue
with us, and take counsel with us. Or, to put the matter
in a form still nearer to that demanded by our Fourth
Conception of Being : Our fellows furnish us the con-
stantly needed supplement to our own fragmentary mean-
ings. That is, they help us to find out what our own
true meaning is. Hence, since Reality is through and
through what completes our incompleteness, our fellows
are indeed real. Wondering, in a doubtful case, what to
do, we wait to see what other people do. Here we use no
analogy with our own deeds as the basis of our inter-
pretation of their inner life. While we wait for the
social verdict, we stand halting, our ideas fragmentary,
our meanings in search of their own wholeness, our fini-
tucle desiring its own Other. Our fellows act, and we
perhaps follow suit. Now our doubts are all set at rest.
We have won the desired decision. But where did we
look for that decision ? The answer is, We looked to our
fellows. Now, in general, the Real, as our Fourth Con-
ception has asserted, is precisely our own whole meaning,
which we seek as beyond ourselves, even because we know
it in advance as ours, but have not yet won it in fulness
as a present conscious fact. This our fuller meaning,
however, our hidden Reality, the object sought when we
turn to our fellows for help, we find as something im-
parted to us by their deeds. We therefore afterwards
view this meaning as having been real beyond us, namely,
in the minds of our fellows, before it became present in
us, namely, as our own conscious meaning. And this is
why we ought to acknowledge our fellows to be real.
This is the way in which the general category of the
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 173
Ought gets, in the World of Appreciation, the special
motives that warrant us in acknowledging particular
facts that embody will.
Just so it is, too, when we ask a question, and get an
answer, or inquire the way in the street, or look in the
paper for the news, or read a book, or listen to another
man's arguments, or in any way learn our fellows' ideas.
All these ideas, just in so far as they interest us, are
sought as some meaning not yet consciously our own, but
needed as a supplement to what so far is consciously our
own. As a needed supplement to our own meaning, these
meanings which we seek have their place in Reality before
we consciously find them. That they have such a place
is a consequence of that whole conception of Reality
which our own former series of lectures so fully ana-
lyzed. The only question is, What place have they ?
Our whole social experience, in case of our ideas of our
fellows, tends to give such ideas their more precise locali-
zation in our finite world, as the ideas which our fellows
express, by voice, by gesture, by writing, and by count-
less other significant deeds. Our fellow-man, when he is
genuinely alive to us at all, is therefore precisely such a
storehouse of meanings, such a thesaurus of needed
ideas. The Internal Meaning of which his Being is the
outward embodiment, is, in general, our own conscious aim
to have our questions answered, and to win novelty by in-
sight into our world. That he exists at all we can there-
fore logically know only upon the basis of an essentially
idealistic interpretation of the universe. In a world
where all true meaning is eternally embodied, the only
question that arises about a particular finite meaning
174 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
which I just now seek, but do not consciously possess,
is the question, Where and how is it embodied ? To this
question my social experience answers whenever my fel-
low speaks to me, or acts expressively.
That my fellow is also far more than a mere storehouse
of opinions and plans, that he is, as a human Individual,
the proper object of countless unique interests, such as
win our love, or move our hostility or our rivalry, all
this is indeed true. But all this too is secondary to our
empirical ground for believing that, whatever as Individual
or as Self he further may prove to be, he is in any case
something real, and something other than any conscious
life of our own. This ground is found in the fact that he
is a local centre for the imparting to us of meanings, a
dynamo of ideas. That all his ideas have their fulfilment
in the Reality, our general Idealism assures us. What our
fellow empirically shows us is the way in which certain
more or less imperfect expressions of meaning find their
place in Being. This, then, is the particular shape which
the World of Appreciation, discussed in its general form
in a previous lecture, takes when interpreted in the light
of our special human experiences.
But now, with the life of this my fellow, when he is
viewed in his relations to me, there is bound up the fact
that, as our social intercourse constantly shows, we can
treat certain facts which each of us for himself expe-
riences, as if they were facts common to both of us. And
herewith we are prepared to return to the conception of
material Nature.
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 175
IV
The organism of my fellow-man is directly known to
me as a phenomenal object, moving about in what my ex-
perience presents to me as space, and in time. But side
by side with my experience of my fellow, I experience the
presence of countless other objects, which also interest me,
but which I do not primarily interpret as expressions
either of his life, or of the life of any other comrade.
Now the notable feature of all these objects, in so far as
they are normally to be found in the realm of sight and of
touch, is, that my whole social intercourse with other men
confirms me in my belief that these objects somehow exist
for my fellows as well as for myself. My fellow points
out to me these objects, and I find them in company with
him ; he expresses in these objects interests similar to
those which I too share. Our discriminating intelligence
also wins in all of us the same success in dealing with
them. That is, my fellow describes these objects as I do ;
our science makes them topics of investigations in which
we all share ; and our civilization depends upon using
these objects together, and upon finding the same laws
present in those series of them which interest us. In the
same realm in which I see my fellow expressing his mean-
ings, I observe many of these objects passed from hand to
hand, or otherwise made the instruments of our common
human tasks, enjoyments, inquiries, and contests. These
objects then, and above all, the objects of my combined senses
of sight and touch, become for me through and through
saturated with a meaning that I also can never completely
find embodied in my private experience, and that only my
176 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
fellow's experience of these objects can aid me to interpret
in harmony with my own socially colored ideas. These
objects then, as from infancy I learn to hold, are in their
true meaning common to my fellow and to myself.
As my experience of the problems of life grows, I learn
to view my fellow's inner life more and more as a realm
remote from my direct observation. Under the influence
of the tendency to discriminate facts more and more
sharply I become increasingly individualistic in my inter-
pretation of my own social presuppositions. I learn to con-
ceive of my fellow and myself as falsely sundered, or even
as Independent Beings, whose isolation from one another
becomes emphasized by well-known social motives, for
example, by the conflicts of social rivalry, by the class
distinctions and estrangements of a complex social order,
in brief, by all that makes man forget that he and his
fellow together are empirically known as fragmentary
hints of the real unity in variety of the life of the Abso-
lute. Childhood, whenever the capricious fears of its
bashfulness are not in question, easily accepts all minds in
whose expressions of meaning it chances to be interested,
as akin to itself. Adult life, under civilized conditions,
exaggerates the mystery of our apparent sundering from
one another, and forgets that only the community of our
meanings, and the fact that we are local centres wherein
the ideal unity of the world gets various and contrasted
expressions, enables us to communicate with each other at
all.
But, however far we seem to grow remote from one
another, and to be independent centres of life and of
meaning, there remains a realm that, in the sense discussed
PHYSICAL AXD SOCIAL REALITY 177
in our Second Lecture, appears as between us ; that is, it
is such that our sharp distinction from one another de-
pends upon our distinguishing it from every Self.
The realm of the objects that each of us experiences for
himself, but believes to be also objects for the other men,
remains thus as a link which seems to bind our actual lives,
in a relatively external way, together. Our individual
minds come to seem sundered ; but all of us together seem
to be in relation to matter. But in order that this our
common relation to the physical phenomena should remain
conceivable, in spite of our apparent isolation from one
another, common sense has to learn to regard matter as
something outside of all our minds, and as therefore capa-
ble of coming into an equally close, and also equally
remote, relation to all of us. Here then, is a special in-
stance of the application of the category of the between.
It leads to the triad : My fellow and Myself, with Nature
between us. 1
I see the sun shining. My fellow, as I learn, sees the
sun shining also. This I first learn as a part of my inter-
pretation, not of external nature, but of my fellow's inner
life. Now the shining of the sun is hereby shown to be
not a fact for me alone, but for other minds. Other men,
however, see the sun, as I learn, when I do not see it.
Hence its existence goes wholly beyond that of my private
1 Only from the special point of view here in question is this relation-
ship especially characteristic of Nature. In the further growth of dualism
Nature very generally loses this character, and is regarded not as between
two minds, but as foreign to all minds, in a way that we shall later follow.
But in ordinary social dealings of various men with the same material
objects, the conception of the material object commonly involves the triad
here noted.
N
178 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
consciousness, and persists in my absence. While I sleep
in darkness, men in other lands, as social communications
teach me, observe the sun. Various men die ; yet the sun
is still seen by the survivors. I learn, by common report,
that it shone for men long before I was born. I come to
believe that it will shine for future generations after we are
all dead. Such knowledge, all of it socially derived, goes to
show that the sun shines apart from the experience of an}^
particular man, while the shining of the sun is still some-
thing which every man can verify. It is in a sense common
to all of us. It is in a sense relatively independent of
each of us. It is a part of a vast realm of phenomena
all of which have this same general character, that of
needing no particular human experience to verify their
presence, while all men alike can under suitable condi-
tions agree in such a verification.
A confirmation of this theory of the reason why we
regard certain of our experiences as indications of the
existence of material objects, is furnished by the well-
known fact that not all our sensory perceptions, but
especially those of sight and touch, are regarded by us
as showing to us the presence of the external physical
world. We may well ask, then, why it is that, as I
observed a moment since, the sight-touch world of
extended objects seems to be most of all the world where
material reality is at home. Why do we so readily
reject as not revealing the true nature of material things,
the tastes and odors, although these latter, in the mind
of many an animal, and even in our own childhood,
would seem to have been the most interesting characters
of nature ? At the age of six months, the child is
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 179
frequently fond of investigating the taste of things.
Yet taste, despite its importance as a possibility of
experience, goes far into the background of our inter-
pretation of nature, and does so very early. If one asks
as to the real reason of all this, I should point out that
precisely all those socially significant experiences of our
common dealings with natural objects occur most defi-
nitely when we deal with the world of the visible and
tangible things. Hearing is indeed the most important
sense of social communication in all the more abstract
regions of our intercourse. But, on the other hand, in
case you and I are together dealing with natural
objects, the field which is common to the senses of
sight and touch has the very important character that
in this field one observes one's fellows' dealings with
objects. I can see you touching an object. I can even,
in the ordinary social sense, be said, by virtue of familiar
interpretations, to see you looking at an object. And,
just so, if we grasp a pole or a rope together, or lift a
weight together, I feel your grasp of the object, just as
truly as I feel the object. But in no corresponding sense
can I be said to hear that you hear an object, nor can I
taste your tasting of an object, nor can I smell your smell-
ing of an object ; while I can both see and touch pro-
cesses which I interpret as your seeing and touching
of the object. Hence it is that the objects with which
you and I at once deal, as well as the objects which on
occasion can exist independently for either of us, come
to be viewed as the objects of the field of sight and touch.
The later developments of our describing consciousness
confirm this tendenc}^. What is seen and touched can
180 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
be described more exactly than can the objects of other
senses. And Nature, as we shall still further see very-
soon, comes to be viewed as, above all, a World of
Description.
V
Our assurance that outer nature exists apart from any
man's private experience, is thus inseparably bound up
with our social consciousness. But now, what shall we
say of our ordinary modern interpretation of the principal
characters that are to belong to this material world, when
once the existence of Nature has been admitted? This
interpretation is in general, to the effect that the material
world is, indeed, the classic instance of the application of
the categories of Description. Whatever its inmost
essence may be, it is regarded by us as something wholly
unlike our own minds. Nature we no longer ordinarily
view as sentient, or as conscious, or as a direct result or
expression of purpose. It appears to us as something
very like a mechanism. Its laws are describable, but are
not such as seem to embody will, or any moral or aes-
thetic meaning. We, therefore, often call it lifeless ;
and the generalizations of the doctrine of Evolution,
which show us that, despite this apparent lifelessness of
Nature, our own lives have come into Being, as an out-
growth from Nature, seem to us only the more to show
the impenetrable mystery of our place in the Universe.
"Dead matter" seems to us the extreme opposite of
mind. " Nature's mechanism " appears to be hopelessly
opposed in its essence to the interests of our will and of
our emotion. And now whence this idea of a vast sepa-
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL KEALITY 181
ration between material nature and the significant inner
life of our fellows ?
I answer, here too, it is first the way in which mate-
rial nature enters into our common social life together
which fixes our attention upon this contrast between per-
sons and things, and which, when certain dualistic motives
grow more prominent, makes the contrast seem ultimate.
The difference between minds and material objects is
for the civilized man so vast, not by virtue of any
experience which gives him a right to assert, positively,
that Nature is utterly opposed in its essence to Mind,
but by virtue of the fact that our practical and hu-
man relations to the material world have a social sig-
nificance which becomes more and more contrasted with
our practical relations with living men, the more our
ethical consciousness becomes organized, and the more our
power to mould natural phenomena to our human pur-
poses becomes prominent in our minds. Man becomes, as
we grow wiser in practical affairs, more and more our live
fellow-being. By contrast, Nature grows more and more
our socially significant tool. We appreciate Man more
and more sensitively as we grow more civilized ; but we
describe certain of the more important phenomena of
Nature more and more carefully as we grow more skilful.
Our interest in both aspects of this process is pro-
foundly human and social. The nature that our indus-
trial art controls is just Man's Nature ; and our science is
an extension into the realms of theory of precisely the
control over Nature that we seek when we use tools. And
the very interests that make our science and our art grow
are interests in Man, in his life, in his wisdom, and in his
182 NATURE, MAX, AND THE MORAL ORDER
power. But because the Nature that we describe and control
permits our science and our art to succeed by virtue of
whatever is rigid, uniform, predictable, explicable, and in a
measure, mechanical, about our experience of Nature, we
come to lay exclusive stress upon just these aspects of the
material world, and to conceive them as the deepest and
most essential aspects of that world. And because our
science and our art in their turn humanize our life, and
enrich our civilization, they lead to a constant increase of
our sense that all men are live and sentient beings, whose
will and whose interests are related to our own, despite
all our social estrangements. In consequence, our civ-
ilization leads to a contrast of the mental and the
material worlds in a fashion which is distinctly due
to a perspective effect. The narrow clearness of our
civilized consciousness tends to make us materialists when
we view the world apart from man, and sensitive appre-
ciators of life whenever we consider our fellows. And
that is why, in our own age, theoretical Materialism has
flourished side by side with the growth of a wide Human-
ity of sentiment. Both are expressions of social motives.
Neither is sufficiently broad in its view to express to us
the whole of our true relations to Being.
As to the social aspect of the process of growth in
civilization which we have thus summarized, there can
be, of course, no doubt. It is for us a growth of our
concrete World of Appreciation. The civilized man lives
in spiritual relations to his fellow-men, relations, many
of which are wholly unintelligible to the savage. It is
not merely that the civilized man has sympathy with
more men, but that his conduct involves an organized
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 183
system of responses to a human environment that he
acknowledges as mental, conceives in terms of its values
and purposes, and views as a more or less clearly con-
nected whole, a social order, such as is one's own coun-
try, or humanity. Such an environment is conceived, so
far as one gives the notion of it any clearness at all, in
idealistic terms. For the social order itself is no indepen-
dent realistic entity, since it is the very breath of life for
me, the social being. Nor does it consist of mutually
independent selves. It is an organism. Nor is it a mys-
tical entity, since it has articulation and differentiation of
structure within it. It is no merely Valid Being, since
in the social consciousness of us men it is consciously alive.
It can be adequately conceived only in terms such as our
Fourth Conception has defined, although it is indeed not
the Absolute, but itself only a fragment of a larger whole.
On the other hand, the natural world, as the civilized
man comes to conceive it, bears the same general rela-
tion to the social world which, in our second lecture,
we found the World of Description bearing to the
World of Appreciation. Men have always been trying to
find out how to cooperate with one another. Their only
way of finding out has been to seek to unify the One
and the Many in their experience, by discriminating, in
their common realm of physical phenomena, what objects,
what series of objects, and what unvarying laws of these
series of objects they could agree upon as the common
basis of definite acts of cooperation. For only by means
of their common relations to the natural phenomena
are the men able to give, one to another, definite signals
as to what their intentions are, or to define extensive
184 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
plans of action in socially intelligible terms. Taken by
themselves, however, and apart from their relations to
the men, the natural phenomena fail to furnish a basis
for any definite interpretation of their order as the expres-
sion of a Will such as men can concretely understand.
And this proves to be more and more the case as men
grow critical, and define their own social purposes and
plans in more definite and rational ways. For the ani-
mistic savage all nature was vaguely alive. The civilized
man has too definite a life of his own to tolerate this
vagueness. In consequence our civilized view of Nature
has tended, in many ways, towards Dualism. Nature is
no longer conceived as between the various socially related
pairs of conscious beings, in the sense discussed above. It
is viewed, more and more, as foreign to them all. There
remains, in case of the natural phenomena, then, the one
rational resource of undertaking to describe them, by the
use of precisely the categories which, in their most general
form, we discussed in our second lecture. Discrimina-
tion, an effort towards a comprehension of the One and
the Many in Nature through a discovery of the between,
a watchful search for Series of phenomena, a socially
critical comparison of the experience of many men in
order to find out what series of natural phenomena are
verifiable in our common human experience, a constant
disposition to the hypothetical construction of conceptual
series, whereby what Ave cannot yet observe is defined
as ideally observable if men only possessed sufficiently
keen sense- discrimination : such are the familiar devices
by which the special sciences constantly undertake to
extend our descriptive knowledge of Nature.
PHYSICAL AIS T D SOCIAL REALITY 185
All these processes are indeed kept under rigid con-
trol by means of a conception whose origin is social,
but whose application to natural phenomena gives us
a definite critical standard for distinguishing between
the natural facts that we acknowledge, and the fables or
errors that we reject. This conception is the one already
discussed at the outset of the present series of lectures,
the conception of Human Experience as an organized
totality. As we saw, no one of us ever verifies the
fact that there exists any such totality. Yet, upon an
obviously social basis, we tend to make a constantly
sharper distinction between what ought to be recognized
as confirmed by this common experience of humanity,
and what cannot be thus confirmed. Now what this
ideal totality called Human Experience is conceived to
have discriminated, to have recognized as the orderly
series of phenomena, to have reduced to definable
laws by the discovery of the "invariants" of a given
order-system of phenomena, this we are accustomed
to view as the one accessible revelation of what
Nature is. The " necessity " which is often said to
" force " upon us the recognition of particular facts
and series, and laws as belonging to this realm of
human experience, unquestionably exists; but it is to
but a small extent, in the case of any one of us, even
if he be the most earnest empirical investigator, a
necessity of present sense-experience. It is a necessity
expressible in terms of the Ought ; and the most deeply
rational warrant for this necessity is social rather than
sensuous. Not to accept the "verdict of human expe-
rience " would be to cut ourselves off from definite
186 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
social relations. To accept this verdict, not blindly,
but with constantly renewed criticism, and with a fre-
quent addition of personal verification, so far as that
is possible, this is to keep ourselves in touch with
the civilized social consciousness.
VI
But now we come to the point where it is necessary
to deal with the precise sense in which the physical
world, when conceived as the object of such common
description and verification, is also conceived as subject
to rigid and unchangeable Laws of Causation. This
conception, as I hold, is one of only a relative validity.
Human experience, as we shall see in the next lecture,
cannot be said actually to have verified it, even when
we take the term human experience to mean the totality
of the verifications that all the various men have ever
made. What we verify, are more or less permanent
rules relating to the routine of nature phenomena. In
other words, our common experience discovers states,
more or less persistent, of what our American philosopher
Chauncey Wright used to call " cosmic weather," habits,
more or less enduring, of the behavior of phenomena.
Yet we are indeed accustomed to conceive that our
common human experience ought to show us, were it
broad enough and discriminating enough, rigidly uni-
form natural laws, whose general character may be
summed up in the well-known thesis that, "The same
antecedents (when the truly causal antecedents are taken
into account) are invariably followed by the same conse-
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 187
quents." Now, why do we conceive nature as subject
to such invariable laws, when our common experience,
however wide you conceive its range to be, can only
show us particular instances of persistent behavior on
the part of Nature ?
If one answers by generalizing the foregoing thesis
into the axiom that " Whatever is must have a cause which
determines, of necessity, what it is," then, at this stage
of our inquiry, we have no difficulty in saying that this
principle, unless made more specific, is so hopelessly am-
biguous, as to be merely trivial. From our own point
of view, the realm of Being is indeed such an unity that
the Many, whatever they are, must in some sense be the
resultant and expression of the One. But the true ra-
tional link between the One and the Many, between the
universal and the particular, or between the World and
the Individual, may be very different from a link of rigid
necessity. We shall hereafter expound more fully that
doctrine of the freedom of the Individual which we
briefly stated in the closing lecture of the former series,
and shall show that our unity in God actually demands
our individual freedom in a limited, but perfectly defi-
nite sense. Or again, from our own point of view, the
Internal Meaning of every idea demands as its com-
plete expression the whole universe, containing infinitely
numerous other Internal Meanings. But here the link
between this instant's passing meaning and the universe is
a causal one, only in the most trivially abstract sense of
the term cause. And in fact, when one merely asserts
in general that whatever is must have a cause, one may
mean only that nothing finite can be understood by itself
188 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
alone, or that some kind of explanation, relation or tie,
binds every particular in the world to every other. But
since the explanations and ties which may interest a
given inquirer may be of any sort, teleological or mathe-
matical, aesthetic or mechanical, according to the sort
of conception that happens to be in question, and since,
in the most general logical sense, even what at first
appeared as the absence of ties or of relations between two
objects would be itself only a new kind of tie and re-
lation, the general principle, " Whatever is, is somehow
linked to others," so far amounts to the assertion that
whatever is, is in the world with others. Over such an
axiom one need not dispute ; but it needs specification
before it can give light as to the linkage of facts.
A Cause, in the narrower sense of physical cause,
means, however, a certain group of antecedents linked
in a certain way, with a consequent. The term, as
thus defined, applies to series of events. The question
about the validity of the principle is the question why
we conceive every natural event as preceded by a group of
events such that whenever that group as a whole recurs,
that same consequent must follow.
The answer to this question depends, as I conceive,
upon two considerations. The first I discussed briefly
in our second lecture. Conceive any ordered series of
describable systems of events, such as, in the passage
referred to, 1 we exemplified. Such a series, if once
clearly discriminated by an observer, and then carefully
considered in its whole sequence, would possess some
features that would remain unvarying throughout the
1 See above, p. 89, sqq.
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 189
set of "transformations" of which just that ordered
series consists. This, so far, is due to the very condi-
tions of the discrimination of serial order. The more
careful the discriminations, the more minute the exami-
nation of the series in question, the more certain it is
that a rational observer of any such connected series of
events could, if he chose a sufficiently large range of
phenomena for his observation, find some " invariant "
of the " system of transformations " in question. So far
the result is that : Any series of events which you can
exactly describe, exemplifies a laic of succession which re-
mains invariant at least throughout this series. This is a
consequence merely of the conditions of description. For
I do not define any series of events as connected unless
I find all the members of this series between a chosen
beginning and a chosen end of the series, and can dis-
criminate the precise order of succession of the events
thus between. But so to find the facts is to find certain
relations persistent throughout the series. For upon
such persistence the recognition of the serial order de-
pends. The persistent relations, as we earlier saw, are
those involved in the very definition of between. For
the whole process of discovering these relations is a
finding of the One in the Many. Moreover, if I con-
ceive the series (as, in the World of Description one
does conceive it) as in its nature either altogether con-
tinuous, or at least composed of stages between stages
that I discover by continuing to interpolate indefinitely,
then all the more my conception of the continuous,
or at all events " compact " whole of the series, gives
me grounds which enable me to define the series as
190 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
possessing throughout " invariant " characters. So far,
then, wherever there is an exactly described series of
natural events there is a law of that series.
But the assertion of the existence of causal connections
does indeed go much further than this. If one says,
" Whenever certain given antecedents recur, certain con-
sequents follow," one declares that, at various times, or
in various parts of the universe, which may themselves
be as disconnected with one another as is possible, there
are, or may be found, series of natural phenomena which
follow the same describable laws, or possess the same
" invariants.'''' But thus one indeed goes beyond the
mere observation that every describable series inevitably
illustrates its own law, within its own limits. One goes
far beyond the individual series to assert that if you
conceived it transported to other regions of space or
of time, it would still retain the same "invariants." As
has often been noted, this assertion amounts simply to
saying that the true laws of nature are independent of
particular places and times. The independence here
in question is of course not the independence that
Realism ascribed to its Independent Beings, but is
merely the relative independence of an " invariant."
For we are here dealing with what one might call an
" invariant " character of the second degree. The
assertion is that in any series of natural events you
can find not merely something " invariant " within that
individual series, but also some character such that
if you passed to other places and times, this charac-
ter would remain unchanged in the series that were
there to be found. Our principle, as thus inter-
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 191
preted, while applicable to the various parts of the
world in space, refers especially to the temporal invari-
ance of natural law, and we may confine our attention
to that aspect. There are then, so one asserts, laws of
nature, or "invariants" of any given series of changes
of natural phenomena, which do not change with time.
These, then, are not only the " invariants " of the series
of phenomena originally considered. They are also the
" invariants " of any such conceived series of substitutions
or of transformations as enables you in mind to transfer
the original series into some other part of time, and to
study its behavior there. This is the meaning of the
principle now in question. This principle is consistent,
as everybody knows, with very vast changes in the aspect
of nature, and is rather ill defined as the principle of
the mere "uniformity" of nature. For, as one con-
ceives the case, if the sun collided with another large
cosmic body, the aspect of nature, so far as our senses
now take account of it, would hereabouts be unrecog-
nizably altered in an instant of time ; yet the conceived
" invariants " of thermodynamics would, as we suppose,
find application to the transformed system after the
collision as well as before.
After these further definitions of our principle, the
inquiry reduces to this : Why should we conceive
that, The lapse of time, or a transfer to another part of
time, makes no difference to what we call the " true " laws of
nature ? We are aided in answering this question by the
perfectly obvious consideration that, in a World of Appre-
ciation, in the life of a Self, in a realm where what is
done at any time is founded upon what has been done
192 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
before, in brief, in any Weil-Ordered Series of events,
the thesis just stated, far from being an axiom, is simply
not universally true at all. Countless aspects of a Weil-
Ordered Series of voluntary acts, due to some Self, may,
and in all sufficiently complex and important instances of
the sort must, indeed remain "invariant" either through-
out the whole life of this Self, or else from some one point
onwards ; but these "invariants" are never all the " true "
laws of the series ; for the essence of a Well-Ordered
Series (such as the number-series, or any more concrete
instance of a self-representative process), is that, just by
means of recurrence (that is, of the reapplication of unvary-
ing principles in new cases), new events, new objects, are
constantly produced ; and these new objects are in some
respects such as to exemplify new laws. A Self is always
passing to new tasks even by virtue of the recurrent
nature of its activities. For while it carries out the
" same plan," it continually applies this " same plan " in
new ways, because its new creations are founded upon its
former deeds, and take up what went before in order to
give it new significance.
It occurs to us, however, to remember that, just because
our social life belongs to the World of Appreciation, its
endless novelties in life and activity can only he organized
in definite ivays, in case many people agree to cooperate by
adopting the same plans. If they adopt these same plans,
and persist in them, a basis of customs, of social habits, is
found. But these habits, applied in recurrent fashion in
the lives of rational beings, will lead to constantly novel
results, just because, in the conscious life of social beings,
each new act will be founded upon the results of former
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 193
acts, and each new social agent will join his act to what
has been done by others. The mason's habits in laying
down each brick, and in applying the mortar, are, for
instance, relatively unvarying. But just thereby, since
he lays each brick upon the former one, each of his deeds
has an individual value, and he passes constantly to new
stages of constructions. And even so, just in order that
any Well-Ordered Series of socially planned deeds should
involve, at every stage, significant novelties, and still retain
definite relations to what has gone before, there must
indeed be unvarying aspects belonging to all the social
customs that lead to such rationally planned results.
These unvarying aspects are the more permanent laws,
customs, habits, of the social order.
^y But, if you look closer, you see that such definite social
habits, or plans of action as can be communicated by one
man to another or passed down, like the industrial arts of
early peoples, from generation to generation, depend upon
discovering, and fixing by our attention, such uniformities
of natural law as enable men to conceive, and to describe to
one another, definite plans of action.
, Hence, in the history of mankind, the discovery of
seemingly unvarying laws of Nature, has been the condi-
tion for the organization of definite customs. And just
because Nature has thus come to be conceived as the
socially significant tool, that aspect of Nature which sug-
gests such unvarying laics has come to be looked upon
as the most characteristic of the aspects of the objective
physical world.
Irregularities in our experience of Nature either have
no interest for the social order, and remain neglected, or
o .
194 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
else, like the irregularities of the weather, or of our
own bodily health, they are practically so important as to
fix in our minds the thought that only by finding, through
further experience, laws which shall remain invariant
through successive periods of time, can we hope to organ-
ize our conduct in definite ways in response to these phe-
nomena. We make the effort to find such regularities,
our ideal. We conceive it as the goal that our common
human experience may be able to reach. But, observe,
whenever we reach that goal, then one man can describe
a given uniformity to his fellow, or can make exact
predictions (as the astronomers predict the eclipses);
and many men together can verify the prediction.
In such cases then, the social test of what constitutes
an externally real physical fact can be applied with
a peculiarly impressive exactness ; and the natural uni-
formity can be verified as belonging to our common
objects. On the other hand, where natural phenomena
remain baffling and irregular, our descriptions of series of
events remain either less definite, or else less widely veri-
fiable by the social test. We are accordingly able, in such
cases, to assume that it is our individual ignorance, or our
subjective bias, or the lack of socially verifiable definition
of facts, which so far hinders us from finding out what the
natural order really is. Hence we form the general con-
ception that in so far as laws that remain temporally
"invariant," have not yet been found, our subjective igno-
rance may be responsible for the result, while in so far as
definite laws that do not vary ivith time have been discovered,
exactly described, and repeatedly verified, we are dealing
with the objective constitution of Nature. Our reason for
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 195
this view is then simply the principle, that the more we
know of unvarying natural laws, the more widely can
our social tests be applied, and the better can the physical
phenomena bear the scrutiny which depends upon think-
ing that they must be the same for all of us.
Hence the so-called axiom o f the unv arying character
.of the l aws of nature is no self-evident truth, is not _even
at once an em pirically establishe d and an universal gen-
eralization, and possesses its present authority because
of the emphasis that our social interests give to the dis-
covery of uniform laws where we can discover them. 1
That we do discover and verify them over a very wide
range of our experience of Nature, is an unquestionable
fact, and one of which every Philosophy of Nature must
take account. But it is much to know that this dis-
covery is not due to any innate idea, or to any first
principle of the reason, but is an empirical, although
by no means an universal generalization, which we have
been led by social motives_^ emphasize and to extend
as far as possible, and so to conceive as if it were
universally characteristic of Objective Nature.
In the history of human thought about Nature it is
easy to follow the influence of the social motives here
in question. The savage certainly had no innate idea
of absolutely uniform natural laws. Industrial art, com-
merce, and social custom, were the three early sources
of interest in the uniformities of natural phenomena.
1 Cf. the admirable paper of Mr. Charles Peirce on "The Doctrine
of Necessity," in the Monist, Vol. II, p. 321. Mr. Peirce's doctrine
as to natural law is not the one here discussed ; but I owe much to his
keen criticism of the "dogma of Necessity."
196 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
The arts needed uniform and persistently plastic mate-
rials to work upon, clay, stone, metals. Otherwise
the arts themselves could not be definitely taught and
traditionally handed down ; and no sufficiently definite
social activities could be founded upon the use of the
products of these arts. Men sought, at first uncon-
sciously, then deliberately, for materials whose behavior,
while plastic for the purposes of their arts, still remained
unchanging through time. Men found such materials,
although never with perfect success. For the pottery
and the stones broke or wore out, and the tools and
the weapons lost their edges, or were in time shattered.
But the discovery of such relatively unvarying, socially
common, objects and natural laws, first made the uni-
formity of nature something consciously recognized as an
objective fact, a fact for all. Commerce, for its part,
led to disputes which the processes of weighing and
measuring could either prevent or decide. Human inge-
nuity was thus led to observe the unvarying laws of
measurable objects, and so, out of the search for such
social community of conduct as commerce made men
anxious to win, there grew a new idea about Nature.
And thus the bases for all Quantitative Science were
laid. Moreover, various social customs of a complex
social type, relating to recurrent religious ceremonies,
or to seed-time and harvest, led men to search for com-
mon natural phenomena whereby to organize such activi-
ties, and to fix their times ; and from such motives men
were led to a recognition of natural law in the heavens.
The special sciences later sprang as much from the indus-
trial and commercial arts, as from early philosophical
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 197
speculations. The concept of the unvarying character
of the laws of Nature, freed at length from its practical
motives, became universal, and has inflicted itself as a
dogma upon more recent thought. Yet its origin was
social.
VII
The value of this dogma, as of all the concepts of
the World of Description, is relative. It reveals no
absolute truth. From our own point of view, there can
indeed be no doubt that our experience of the objects
of Nature does prove to us that there exists, in the uni-
verse, a vast realm of fact other than what human minds
consciously find present within their own circles of indi-
vidual or private apprehension. And so, for us, Nature
is indeed a part of Reality, and the social tests do indeed
prove that this is true. But when we ask what reality
Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social
interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive
the World of Description, blind us to the true princi-
ples upon which an interpretation of experience should
be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and
Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Descrip-
tion and the World of Appreciation, we have seen
from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts
result. We shall no longer take this dualism too
seriously. We have seen its relative justification, and
its limitations.
In any case, in viewing Nature as a realm of law, we
must distinguish between what our common experience
permits us to verify, in the way of our own conceptual
198 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
constructions of Nature, and what our experience of
Nature warrants us in asserting as the truth regard-
ing a realm external to man's consciousness. It is
with our more modern sciences as it was with early
industrial arts. If an industrial art succeeds, that is
because Nature actually furnishes us with empirical
materials that are plastic for the purposes of this art.
We have, however, no right to assert, upon that
account, that all natural phenomena, viewed in them-
selves, and apart from man, already must be so con-
stituted a priori as to be adaptable to the purposes of
our human art. The primitive artists who produced
the pottery of our American Pueblo Indians, were
skilful in finding out just the right sort of clay for
their purposes. But had they formed a theory that
Nature is in itself essentially a storehouse of good potter's
clay, they would have generalized quite as ill as did
primitive Animism when it conceived all Nature as
alive in the same sense in which our capricious wills
are alive, and are in us subject to our moods and to our
senses.
Now, as I have said, our science is a sort of theoretical
extension of our industrial art. What the arts do with
their tools, the student of science does with his concep-
tions. That is, he wins over the phenomena of our
experience to the service of our human purposes. He
does this by processes of selection, of construction, and
of an endless process of trial and error. A conception
used by any empirical science is an ideal tool, or a sort
of mechanical contrivance. Using it, we work over
the data of our common experience until these data
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 199
become subject to our purposes of prediction and of
description. With the successful conception in the mind,
we can pass from fact to fact, from prediction to exe-
cution, from expectation to observation, with ease, ex-
actness, and socially verifiable success. Precisely so,
however, with the good material tool, or with any other
mechanical contrivance, we can adjust our material
objects to our common ends. Just as the railway may
carry me from an experience of London to your presence
in Aberdeen, so a good scientific conception enables the
worker in any science to pass from the experience of
one set of facts, through definite processes of prediction,
of experiment, and of observation, to the presence of
certain other facts, which he calculates in advance of
finding them, precisely as the traveller purchases in
advance his railway ticket for a certain destination.
And now, not only are the conceptual constructions
of science thus similar to the contrivances of an indus-
trial art; but the processes involved in the one case
are actually continuous with those which are used in
the other. Amongst the contrivances of any industrial
art, none are successful except when guided by minds
whose ideas are adjusted to their tools. Amongst the
constructions of empirical science, the internal processes
of scientific theory are inseparable from the diagrams,
laboratories, and other contrivances, in which scientific
plans of action get expressed. All industrial art, upon
its intelligent side, implies scientific conceptions of cer-
tain objects in material nature. All science, in so far
as it is concerned with natural objects, expresses its
conceptions in the form of certain processes of classifi-
200 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
cation, of description, of experiment, and of prediction,
which are as material in their embodiment as the works
of an industrial art. While science deals with natural
facts in a far more universal way than does any indus-
trial art, its purposes are no less human than are those
of its fellow. Both cooperate to the end of mans mas-
tery over Nature. Both succeed by selection from the
mass of materials offered, by rearrangement of what is
found, and by skill in adjustment.
And, therefore, both give us much the same sort of
right to speculate as to Nature's inner constitution.
Both involve the same sort of relatively narrow clear-
ness as to just our human place in the mists of finite
experience. Both indicate a truth that is in some sense
valid bej^ond ourselves. Both have essentially the same
kind of limitation when we undertake to view them as
revelations of what that truth in itself is and implies.
But we have long since given up assuming that
the success of our industrial art is, by itself, any suffi-
cient revelation of the innermost nature of things. It
does not now occur to us to say that Nature exists,
apart from man, as a mere storehouse of materials for
the contrivances of our industrial art, for example, as
a collection of banks of good clay for the potters, or (to
use the example that Hegel cited) as a storehouse
of good corks for our bottles. A certain simple-minded
teleology used indeed often to view Nature in very much
this trivial way. The coal measures were especially
prepared for man's use. The metals were preordained
for his forges and furnaces, for his machines, and for
his ornaments and his money. The animals grew to
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 201
provide him with food and with furs and with feathers.
Even the heavens moved regularly in order to equip
him with time-pieces. We have abandoned such simple
views. We observe that Nature indeed is such as to
permit man not only to live, but to give his life con-
stantly richer meaning through his arts. But we also
know that man wins his arts by his own struggle and
skill, and that it is as nearly right to speak of his
ceaseless conflict with hostile Nature as it is to lay
stress upon Nature's kindness in furnishing him the
instruments for his success in the conflict. Not thus,
however, is our deeper insight into man's unity with
Nature to be won or expressed.
And yet, despite this our emancipation from the trivi-
alities of a simple teleology, there are those who even
now would laugh at regarding Nature as predestined to
be man's storehouse of clay and coal and corks and furs
and metals, and who, nevertheless, view Nature, because
of the actual success of our empirical science, as in it-
self, and by its inmost constitution, a treasure-house of
purely mechanical laws, as a thesaurus of concepts, of
calculable relations, of rigid necessities, or as a realm
of mathematical formulas.
Now the one of these two views of nature the
ancient view of a trivial teleolog} r , and the other, the so-
called mechanical conception of nature is as crudely an-
thropomorphic as the other. Man's insight into the known
laws of Nature is precisely as much due to a struggle
with the complexities and irregularities of his experi-
ence of Nature, as his industrial arts are due to a con-
flict with Nature's seeming chaos of climates and of
202 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
materials. A rigid selection, a long search, and a delib-
erate rearrangement of the facts offered to us by raw
experience, wins, in the one case as in the other, not
with any a priori certainty, but at times, and to a lim-
ited extent, and by virtue of our skill and patience.
Nature, as we empirically know it, just as truly seems
to resist our efforts to explain the phenomena, as in
certain regions it permits us to win. When we win,
when we explain and predict, doubtless that is indeed
because external Nature is in itself such as to permit
us to do so. But the same Nature permits us to find
the clay and the coals and the metals.
Neither by our empirical science nor by our art do we
then directly discover anything but this : Namely, that
our human Internal Meanings do indeed possess some refer-
ence to a vast finite realm beyond ourselves, within which we
men find our place. Out of this realm we ourselves have
proceeded through the processes of evolution. Into this
realm, at death, we seem to return. This realm is called
Nature. It doubtless has its own meaning. This mean-
ing is doubtless in itself deeply linked to ours. And this
meaning is such as to permit us with varying, but on the
whole, with vastly increasing success, both to develope
our human arts, and to work out the relatively successful,
but also distinctly human and social, descriptions and
predictions of our science. Both our art and our sci-
ences are due, however, quite as much to our conflict
with the facts that our experience directly furnishes, as
to any essential plasticity of these facts, either to the
practical purposes of our art, or to the ideal purposes of
our science. Nature permits us to mine metals and to
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY 203
construct our railways. Just so Nature permits us to
form our mechanical conceptions, to make our computa-
tions, and, upon occasion, to predict thereby future facts.
Nature could permit our success in neither case unless,
indeed, Nature had some actual and inner relation to the
existence of our own life and meaning. But what this
relation is, is not directly to be read from a mere enu-
meration of these our successes. For we also fail as well
as succeed ; and Nature is sometimes as stubborn to our
art and to our science as, at other times, Nature seems
plastic to both.
Where we, indeed, succeed, the success is at least as
much due to our skill in selection and in conception as to
the essential plasticity of Nature. As a great work of in-
dustrial art remains a monument rather to the engineer's
skill than to Nature's kindliness, so, as Auguste Comte well
said, the heavens declare the glory of Newton and of
Kepler, whenever successful prediction shows how skilful
were the astronomical tools that these thinkers invented,
and the theoretical structures that they built upon the
basis of these conceptions. That Kepler was thinking
God's thoughts after him, is, indeed, also true ; but the
divine thoughts in question were at least quite as much
God's thoughts regarding man's skill, as any divine plan
present in outer nature.
My conclusion, then, is this : It is especially through
the success of certain of our scientific conceptions that
we have been led to a mechanical view of Nature, and to
the consequent doctrine that Mind and Matter are utterly
contrasted entities. Therefore, this very contrast is one
whose origin lies in our human way of viewing the facts
204 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of our experience. It is our interest in social organiza-
tion that has given us both industrial art and empirical
science. As industrial art regards its facts as mere con-
trivances that have no life of their own, but that merely
express their human artificer's intents, so a philosophy of
Nature, founded solely upon our special sciences, tends
to treat the facts of Nature (regarded in the light of
our cunningly contrived conceptions) as having no inner
meaning, and as being mere embodiments of our formu-
las. Both doctrines are perfectly justified as expressions
of the perspective view of Nature which we men natu-
rally take. Neither view can stand against any deeper
reason that we may have for interpreting our experiences
of Nature as a hint of a vaster realm of life and of mean-
ing of which Ave men form a part, and of which the final
unity is in God's life.
LECTURE Y
LECTURE V
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE
We reach at length, after perhaps too lengthy a
study of the problem of man's knowledge of Nature,
our own attempt to bring our theory of Nature into
explicit harmony with our Fourth Conception of Being.
In the foregoing lecture we have seen how man comes
by his belief in the material world, and how he has
come to set that world in sharp contrast with the realm
of Mind. We have seen how this contrast is made to
seem especially hopeless by reason of the mechanical
view of Nature upon which our more developed con-
sciousness of natural law has led many thinkers to
insist. At the last lecture, we also saw that this very
view of Nature is a product of distinctly human and
social motives. These motives have great value as bases
for the conceptual constructions of our science. They
have no right to pretend to reveal to us essential truth
about the ultimate nature of things. Perhaps, then (so
we reasoned), at bottom, the contrast between Mind
and Matter is not as ultimate as it seems. Perhaps a
deeper view may annul the apparent contrast, and may
show how closely linked to Nature this life of ours is,
and how akin to our own inner consciousness is much
that we take to be most remote and foreign in the
life of Nature.
207
208 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Now what at the last time we approached from the
side of the social origin and the human motives that
have determined our conceptions of Nature, we now
need to approach from another side. Whatever the
origin of our ideas about Nature, these ideas unques-
tionably have a basis in extra-human truth. This is
what all our previous analysis has shown us. More-
over, these ideas, however they have grown up in us,
are very certainly a combination of two factors. In
part they are due to an observation of the facts of our
common experience. These facts many men have veri-
fied, both separately and together, until we can be
reasonably sure that such facts are not matters of any
man's private experience, but that they have a basis
in what is beyond the inner life of any or of all men.
These facts form what we might call our relatively
literal knowledge of Nature. Examples of such facts are :
the existence of a world that now appears to us as material,
and the occurrence in this world of the more or less regu-
lar routine of Nature's phenomena, such as the tides, the
weather, and the moon's phases. In part, however, our
ideas about Nature take the form of more recondite
and ideal theoretical constructions, such as experience
only indirectly verifies. All our more mechanical theo-
ries of Nature as a whole belong to this class of ideas.
These ideas are of such sort that Nature, whatever it
really is, permits us to use them successfully, within
certain limits, as the tools of our science. So much,
then, we may here premise. We now propose to lay
aside inquiry as to how all these ideas came to grow
up in our minds. We accept them, for the moment,
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 209
as they come to us, and with them in hand, and with
the mere memory that the two sorts of ideas in ques-
tion are not of equal value as evidences of the ultimate
truth of things, we turn back to Nature itself, and try
once more the task of interpreting, more in detail, the
problem set us by what we have already called the
greatest apparent contrast in Nature, namely, the con-
trast between Consciousness and what seems to us to be
unconscious Matter.
At one extreme of Nature, we find a world which we
are accustomed to conceive as a world of inwardly
changeless substances, of material particles, whose chang-
ing external relations are determined by rigid and
relatively mechanical laws. These laws the sciences of
physics and of chemistry define. At the other extreme
we find a world with whose inner character we are
well acquainted, little as we know many of its laws.
In that world, the world of our consciousness, all the
stream of fact flows, and nothing abides but the mean-
ings. This world is indeed not lawless, but its facts
seem to bear no resemblance to those of inorganic
matter. I need not further dwell on the apparent con-
trast of these two worlds. It has now been enough
discussed.
What I here wish first to bring to notice is the fact
that the doctrine of Evolution, in its modern form,
is our largest generalization of all our human view of
Nature, and that this doctrine seems to show, that, if
the extremes are in seeming here endlessly far apart,
210 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
yet somehow, in Nature, the gulf is bridged. Between
what seems to us, from our ordinary social point of view,
the highest of accessible mental life, and what we take to
be the manifestation of lifeless matter, there is, in the
process of mental evolution apparently no breach of
continuity anywhere. And upon numerous recent think-
ers the question has therefore been forced constantly
afresh, What, then, is the real link that thus unites these
uttermost extremes ? What we call the manifestation of '
dead matter can certainly pass over into states where
Nature, as embodied in the organisms of our fellow-men,
shows to us all the signs of mind. The transition can be
and constantly is made in the reverse order. Nor is the
transition such as any longer to suggest to us miraculous
extranatural interferences. Its manifold exemplification,
through ages of natural evolution, seems to make clear that
in this transition we have simply a normal indication of
the true nature of things. And I must repeat, it is
precisely this apparent continuity which is the most
impressive of all the inductions that the study of evo-
lution has lately forced upon the attention of all who
have taken Nature at all seriously. Now, if man's expe-
rience of Nature has any sound basis at all, the modern
doctrine of Evolution seems to be an account of a
process that has a real basis in the essence of things.
I shall here assume as known the general outlines of
this doctrine, and the general sort of evidence upon
which it rests. I shall ask, What light does this
doctrine tend to throw upon our problem ?
When two objects A and B, say a mass of inorganic
matter and an organism with a rational mind, seem to
1
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 211
differ as widely as possible, and when, nevertheless,
things of the type of A seem pretty obviously to pass
by a nearly continuous series of changes into objects of
the type of B, that is, when from inorganic matter beings
with minds evolve, and when B seems with even greater
ease to pass back into A, the first presumption very
naturally is that you are dealing with somewhat decep-
tive appearances. And, if you are sure, as the students of
evolution are now for their own purposes rightfully sure,
that the approximate continuity itself is not the deceptive
appearance, and that A does really pass by nearly continu-
ous gradations into B and vice versa, then the next natu-
ral presumption about A and B is that it is their wide
difference which actually constitutes the deceptive ap-
pearance, and that A and B are really at heart very
much alike. Now this is what a great many thinkers
have supposed about the appearances called Mind and
Matter. The continuous transition from the one of
these appearances to the other is precisely what con-
stitutes the most fascinating part of the seeming his-
tory called evolution. One may say that this approximate
continuity is nowadays, at least, as sure as anything that
we know about Matter itself, the more distant and
really the more mysterious of the appearances.
Yet, singularly enough, when thinkers have proceeded
to define the way in which these two apparent extremes
could be identified, or could be regarded as mere appear-
ances of some truth which lay deeper than at least one of
the extremes, many such thinkers have undertaken the task
of regarding Mind as a mere appearance of Matter, rather
than that of conceiving material nature as a mere appear-
212 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
ance behind which lies Mind. That is, they have said :
Matter is very probably, in the main, what we take it to be,
viz. permanent, rigid in its laws, naturally unconscious,
mechanical in its processes. But it is Mind that we
fail to know. Of the extremes A and B, Matter and
Mind, such thinkers, regarding matter as fairly well
known, have chosen to conceive B, namely Mind, as a
curiously confused phenomenon, a mere resultant or
show of certain of the properties of A, which we call
Matter. Yet the result of such efforts to interpret
evolution efforts which have been very frequent is,
as any student of evolution knows, rather unpromising.
Meanwhile it is easy to see why such efforts should
often have been preferred. Matter is actually the more
mysterious of the two extremes. But it does not always
seem so ; for Mind, as we know it in men, is an unstable
process, which all sorts of physical conditions appear to
derange. But Matter, as a physical science conceives it, is,
for the reasons mentioned at the last time, viewed by us
as subject to stable laws and to definite predictions.
Minds pass away from our ken. Material phenomena
persist. Minds, capable of intelligibly communicating
with us, are rare exceptions in the natural order. But
the natural world seems full of the physical appearances
called masses of matter. It is natural then for men to
try to explain the unusual by the usual, to regard the
unstable as the mere appearance of the stable, and to
view the stable itself as the really better known of the
two. Yet the persistent hopelessness of the whole
undertaking, the absolute impossibility of explaining
how mental life, whose appearance at least we know
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 213
so well in its fleeting beauties, should be a mere show
of the properties of that which, when we take its
mere appearance as true, seems to be the permanent
substance now conceived as Matter, the persistent hope-
lessness, I say, of this whole undertaking, has led many
to reflect afresh, and to ask, Do we so well know the
mere appearance called by us Matter as to be sure that
its apparent properties, its stability, its mechanical rigid-
ity of lawful behavior, are its ultimately real charac-
ters? Suppose, after all, that this stable appearance
were a delusion. Suppose that even material nature
were internally full of the live and fleeting processes
that we know as those of conscious mental life. Sup-
pose that these processes constituted the inmost essence
and foundation of what seems to us to be Matter.
Would that be wholly inconsistent with what we know
of the natural world? In that case, however, what we
call matter would be a mere external appearance of the
very sort of fact that we ourselves better know as Mind.
And then the true secret of the evolution of mind would
get an entirely different reading.
In order to judge what may be the true worth of
such speculations, it is well to go still a little deeper
than we have yet done into special problems of the
Philosophy of Nature. Yet, as I do so, I shall, for
the time, keep my Idealistic Theory of Being in reserve.
That theory furnishes a deep warrant for the speculations
here in question. But let us next give these speculations
a merely empirical basis. Then, when our Idealism
returns upon the scene, it will find the facts ready to
accept its authority.
214 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
II
And first, let us for the moment merely assume as true
the ordinary presuppositions of science. Let us ask our-
selves how much, in that case, we can really pretend to
know of the inner nature of things when they are judged
upon a purely empirical basis, as science judges them. We
are by this time well aware that no empirical science pre-
tends really to know what the inner nature of things is at
all, and least of all, to know the ultimate nature of
Matter. What empirical science can try to tell you
is not what things are in themselves, but how they
behave, and to what laws they are apparently subject.
The question as to how deep into the truth of Nature
our empirical science goes is then the question : How
far do the laws of Nature that science makes out agree
with any natural truth that is valid wholly beyond the
range of the human point of view, and that can be
said to hold more or less apart from our mere human
appearances? And when, with this inquiry in mind,
we pass in review our natural sciences, we have already
had 20od reason to assert that the most exactly stated
of the laws of the World of Description, explicitly repre-
sent not directly observed facts, or any immediately veri-
fiable and literally true statement about things as we men
can experience them, but rather only extremely ideal ways
in which science finds it convenient to conceive facts
for the purposes of a brief theoretical description of
vast ranges of experience.
In order to adapt this, our former general result, to
the present inquiry, let us, for instance, consider our
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 215
very valuable scientific theories of atomic and of ethereal
processes. Nobody has observed atoms, or ether waves.
These are interpolated series of ideal objects conceived
as between the systems of facts that we can observe.
The laws of atomic and of ethereal processes are very
ideal constructions, whereby we are able to summarize,
after a fashion, vast numbers of facts, or to construct
in an abstract way the relation of One and Many. Even
the law of gravitation, one of the most exact of material
laws, is an extremely ideal statement of a formula whose
direct truth nobody precisely verifies at any time. What
we observe, and what, by the aid of the formula of
gravitation, we can predict and verify, are planets mov-
ing, stones falling, and the rest of gravitative phenomena.
Nobody ever directly observes any force, such as the
ideal force called gravitation. A very ideal statement
about the conceived mutual attractions of particles of
matter enables us to summarize all the observed facts
of the realm of gravitation in one formula. The truth
of the formula lies in its summary application to vast
ranges of phenomena. Nobody can pretend that this
formula is known to express directly the observed inner
nature, or even the directly observed genuine behavior
of anything. The science of the future may come to
observe phenomena which will explain gravitation as
a mere appearance of some much more genuine natural
process. Many of our most exact laws of Nature are
thus, as it were, explicitly ideal constructions, products,
so to speak, of the present methods of bookkeeping
used by science in keeping our accounts of facts. Such
laws are true enough as convenient conceptions whereby
216 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
we summarize observed facts. They are true as ledger
entries and balances are true summaries of business
transactions. But they are not laws which are known to
express anything final even about the observed behavior
of things. Nobody can doubt the value of such summary
theories of physical things. Nobody can doubt that they
are ideal constructions. The science of the future may
enter its accounts by other methods of bookkeeping.
In strong contrast, however, with such more ideal laws
of Nature stand certain other generalizations of science
and even of common sense. These other generalizations
are often perfectly literal statements of how the facts of
Nature are known to beha ve. For instance, there is the
law that an organism grows old, but never grows young.
But the Nature that we all acknowledge is full of just
such irreversible processes as is the process of growing
old. Science knows many more of such processes than
does common sense. When in winter the heat of your
chimney radiates into space and comes not back, when
the spilt milk is wept over in vain, when china once
broken refuses to mend, common sense observes a set of
processes which science, in great measure, generalizes in
the principles (1) of the tendency of energy to pass from
available to unavailable forms, and (2) of the tendency
of matter to pass through similarly irreversible series of
changing configurations. In all such irreversible pro-
cesses of nature, you are dealing with profoundly instruc-
tive ways of behavior of the natural world. These ways
of the world's b ehavior are certainly just as real as is
Nature herself. Here surely you touch " hard fact,"
that is, fact that you ought to acknowledge in case you
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 217
accept the verdict of our social experience at all. Here
then we get not, perchance, at the inmost nature, but
certainly at the real behavior of things. The most
widely generalizing science recognizes such processes and
dwells long over them. They constitute one of the most
interesting problems of the general theory of energy.
The most simple-minded common sense also feels them.
These, as far as they go, are thus literally true laws of
Nature's behavior.
But now observe that, for this very reason, the laws of
these processes differ in a very marked way from those
ideal laws such as science states in the theory of ethereal
or of atomic processes. The latter laws, the exactly ideal
laws, are convenient lrypothetical summaries of vast
ranges of experience, but in a highly conceptual, in a
mathematically artificial form. They are laws that explic-
itly stand for the way in which it is just now convenient
to keep the books of science. They are typical examples
of formulas of the World of Description. They are true,
but they are verifiably true only from a certain point of
view. Thejr conceive the physical world as if it were so,
or so observable when it is not so observable. The science
of the future may, therefore, substitute other theories for
them. But the laws of the other sort, the laws about
the irreversible processes, tell you, in a much more literal
fashion, how Nature actually behaves.
And now, closely connected with this contrast is
another. The ideal laws, of the type of the laws about
the ethereal processes, are laws which are valid, so far as
they are valid at all, only for Matter as such. They
serve by their very exactness to make Matter seem very
218 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
remote from Mind. But the other laws, the laws of the
irreversible processes, are in their most general type, com-
mon to Matter and to Mind, to the physical and to the moral
world. They tend to be, in some measure, applicable
everywhere, to conscious as to apparently unconscious
processes, to the dissipation of energy as to the facts of
the moral world. Your beloved dreams, that slip away
while you wake, are shattered like china, are dissipated
like radiant energy, in brief, are cases of the law of the
irreversibility of certain natural processes. The poets, too,
sing of precisely the principle that the students of energy
report to us, namely, of this very irreversibility of certain
processes of nature. " When the lamp is shattered,"
sings Shelley ; and Tennyson tells of the " tender grace
of a day that is dead." Both poets reporting not mere
feelings, but laws of nature. They are telling of the
tendency of natural energy to pass from available to
unavailable forms, as heat passes according to the second
law of thermodynamics ; and the poets are observing
that certain inner conscious processes have a tendency,
just because these processes are in connection with all
Nature, to follow a precisely similar, but often extremely
inconvenient course, often, namely, a course from the
irrevocable to the mere memory thereof. So, then, it is
precisely the more literally actual, the more directly
observable of our two sorts of natural processes, that is,
apparently, a sort of process common to material and to
mental phenomena. But these more ideal laws of nature,
like the laws of the conceived ethereal processes, are at
once peculiar to what science conceives as Matter, and
are also laws which need not, in literal fact, represent
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 219
any ultimately actual or directly observable behavior of
Matter at all. One sees thus that, if we are not deceived
by the mere book-keeping of science, if we distinguish
between the ideal constructions of scientific theory, and
the directly verifiable behavior of natural facts, we begin
to see less contrast between Matter and Mind.
Ill
Taking a very broad view of the laws of Nature, in the
rough, we can as a fact say that conscious Nature shares
with what we regard as apparently unconscious and
material Nature four great and characteristic types of
processes. (1) Both regions of Nature are subject, as
we have just seen, to some condition that demands the
irreversibility of great numbers of their processes. In
both realms, namely, there are numberless sorts of facts
that return not again, so that an irrevocable passing away
of states once reached, pervades the stream of experience
in both realms alike. This is a very deep principle of
universal Nature. It is certainly as genuinely real as is
Nature herself. The irreversibility of many of Nature's
processes, so far as it exists, suggests, therefore, some very
genuine, if hidden, inner fluency about material Nature
itself ; and the hypothesis at once occurs that very pos-
sibly material Nature is a show of a process that is
inwardly fluent, just as the mental process in us is fluent,
only at some very different rate.
Here, then, is our first very instructive relation be-
tween the most remote and the nearest regions of Nature.
It is an analogy that has attracted considerable attention.
220 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
I do not think that it has received, however, enough
attention. But it is not the only pervasive analogy.
For (2) : Both regions of Nature, the apparently mental
and the apparently material region, are subject to pro-
cesses which involve in general a tendency of one part
of Nature to communicate, as it were, with another part,
influencing what occurs at one place through what has
already occurred at another place. Ideas in the same
consciousness tend to assimilate other ideas, to communi-
cate their own nature to these other ideas, to win the
latter over to agreement with the first. Minds tend,
in social intercourse, to be influenced by other minds.
Now these vast and pervasive processes of conscious
communication possess both a close similarity to, and a
continuity with, certain still more vast and pervasive
series of natural processes which, described indeed as
so-called wave -movements, are amongst the phenomena
best known to science. In both cases the tendency is
one towards the mutual assimilation of the regions of Na-
ture involved in the process. In both cases, the process
of communication has, in general, an at least partially
irreversible character. This second sort of analogy
between the material and the mental worlds is again not
exceptional, but of universal type. I cannot dwell upon
it at length here. It has attracted some attention. It
has been noticed by M. Tarde, and has been especially
insisted upon by Mr. Charles Peirce as a basis for a
remarkable hypothesis regarding evolution.
But (3) : Both the material and the mental worlds show
a tendency, under favorable conditions, to the appear-
ances of processes resembling those which, in the life
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 221
of a mind, we call Habits. Here again both Mr. Charles
Peirce and Mr. Cope, as well as other students of evolu-
tion, have pointed out the analogy of Matter and Mind
thus involved. The tendency can of course be stated
in terms of descriptive concepts. Fechner, a generation
ago, developed the principle of the "tendency to stabil-
ity " in material systems. Let a complex material sys-
tem, subject to certain general restrictions, once begin
a series of movements. Then, in the long run, as Fech-
ner showed, this system, if let alone, will tend to assume
a somewhat stable series of rhythmically repeated
movements, the more irregular movements being elimi-
nated by a sort of natural selection. Spencer attracted
attention to a somewhat similar character of Nature in
his famous chapters on the " Rhythm of Motion " and
" Equilibration." But whether or no one undertakes
to conceive such phenomena as results of absolutely
unvarying laws, certain it is that physical Nature is
full of approximate rhythms. Now an approximate
rhythm is a temporary law of Nature. It is a law to
the effect that a given observable process tench to repeat
itself over and over, as, for example, the rhythm of day
and night or of the seasons is repeated. Such laws, I
say, may be amongst the literally true accounts of what
actually happens in the world. But laws of this sort
may be, and often are, mere empirical generalizations
whose validity is indeed temporary. For at all events
most of Nature's apparent rhythms are mingled with
processes of irreversible change, and of such change as
runs in one direction, and as accordingly tends, in the
long run, to disturb and destroy the rhythm.
222 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
The interest of science in ideally complete theories
leads, indeed, to an effort to conceive the literally true,
but usually only imperfect rhythms of Nature as special
cases of those more ideal laws which we mentioned be-
fore. But the more ideal laws remain, as we said,
matters of the book-keeping methods of our present
science. Nature, as actually observed, shows us rhythms
that tend, within limits, to he pretty constant. Take them
in long periods, and these rhythms tend to pass away and
to be lost in irrevocable decay. The rhythm of a man's
heart-beat is a typical case. It has its normal varia-
tions, its normal regularity, and its long-continued
but still limited persistence. Just so the rhythm of
the earth's rotation on its axis, or of the now relatively
stable movement of the planets, is a genuine, but not
an everlasting process of Nature. The tides retard the
one rhythm. The meteors, not to mention other dis-
turbances, will, in the long run, ruin the planetary
rhythm. Such observable and approximate routine in
Nature is closely analogous to what constitutes a great
deal of the life of habit in the internal processes of a
mind. Habits are just such tendencies to routine,
to rhythm, in conscious life. They are only approxi-
mate rhythms. They are mixed up with all sorts of irre-
versible tendencies, which in the end tend to overwhelm
them one and all. But while they last they are in-
stances of natural law. Like the rhythms of external
Nature, they arise, last awhile, and seem to pass away ;
but so far as they go they are certainly genuine fashions
of the behavior of Nature.
Our interest here lies in the fact that while those
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 223
ideally constant laws of Matter, which scientific book-
keeping demands, but which are not literally and directly
verifiable, seem to establish an ultimate contrast between
Mind and Matter, these literally verifiable but not lit-
erally constant laws of observable Nature, these approxi-
mate rhythms, are common to conscious and to unconscious
Nature, and when taken together, form a graded series
of truths about the routine of Nature. The graded
series suggests that the inner nature of things is not
so much ideally constant, as merely relatively stable, so
that in the fluent life of our consciousness, we directly
know a process of which the apparently absolute stability
of the conceived material processes is really only another
instance, whose inner fluency is concealed from us by
the longer intervals of time demanded for important
changes to take place.
The fourth class of processes apparently common to
unconscious and to conscious Nature are the very pro-
cesses of evolution themselves. And we now see that
these evolutionary processes, which seem so continuous
from inorganic to organic and finally to conscious Nature,
do not stand alone, but are only one instance, amongst
many, of the processes whose type is common to conscious
and to apparently unconscious Nature.
Taking all four of these types of processes together,
what general impression of Nature do they give to us ?
I confess that, wholly apart from any more meta-
physical consideration of the deeper nature of Reality,
they suggest to me, as they have more or less suggested
to others, who have considered one or other of them,
an impression which I may as well briefly summarize
221 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
for what, as a mere result of a rough induction, and as a
mere hypothesis for further testing, it may so far be worth.
IV
My impression and my hypothesis are as follows : (1) The
vast contrast which we have been taught to make between
material and conscious processes really depends merely
upon the accidents of the human point of view, and in
particular upon an exaggeration of the literal accuracy
of those admirable theories of atomic and ethereal pro-
cesses which, as I have said, belong to the mere book-
keeping of the sciences. Many of the processes of
Nature can be conceptually described by very exact
formulas whose value as conceptions nobody can ques-
tion, but whose literal accuracy nobody verifies. Take
those formulas as literally true, and then, indeed, the
material world seems to become one of absolutely rigid
substances, of absolutely permanent mathematical formu-
las, and of a type such that a transition from material to
conscious Nature looks perfectly unintelligible. The
only resort would then be that, if one still accepted the
continuity of evolution, one would conceive conscious-
ness as a chance resultant, as a show, as an illusory affair,
whose true essence is not known to us ; or as a sort of
delirium to which the world of the atoms is occasionally
subject, a delirium wherein the world forgets that it
is nothing but an embodied system of differential equa-
tions, and takes itself to be well, let us say :
" An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry."
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 225
For just some such incorporated system of differential
equations gone mad would be, according to such a theory,
any conscious being, even if, for instance, he chanced to
be that dignified and considerate speculative and mathe-
matical physicist who, by hypothesis, is to be aware that
all this account of Nature is true. But then this account
is not true ; nor does science, rightly viewed, in the least
demand or desire that it shall be true. The mathemati-
cal formulas are conceptions. They constitute admirable
and, for their purpose, invaluable ledger entries in our
accounts with Nature. For they help us to compute, to
predict, to describe, and to classify phenomena. But they
do not as literally express the directly observable behav-
ior of any independent facts of Nature as does many a
much humbler empirical observation, such as a man makes
when he observes himself growing old, or as an evolution-
ist makes when he observes the growth and division of a
cell. We know that Nature, as it were, tolerates our
mathematical formulas. We do not know that she would
not equally well tolerate many other such formulas in-
stead of these. But we do know, meanwhile, that the
processes called by us growth and decay are facts as gen-
uinely real as any natural facts whatever. For one does
grow old ; and the cells do grow and divide.
Abandoning, then, the ideal contrast of Mind and Mat-
ter, and coming to their continuity and analogy, my pres-
ent hypothesis runs : (2) That we have no right whatever
to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncom-
municative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes
go on at such different time-rates from ours that we can-
not adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward
Q
226 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware
of their presence. And (3) : My hypothesis is that, in
case of Nature in general, as in case of the particular por-
tions of Nature known as our fellow-men, we are dealing
with phenomenal signs of a vast conscious process, whose
relation to Time varies vastly, but whose general charac-
ters are throughout the same. From this point of view,
evolution would be a series of processes suggesting to us
various degrees and types of conscious processes. These
processes, in case of so-called inorganic matter, are very
remote from us ; while, in case of the processes which
appear to us as the expressive movements of the bodies of
our human fellows, they are so near to our own inner
processes that we understand what they mean. I sup-
pose, then, that when you deal with Nature, you deal with
a vast realm of finite consciousness of which your own is
at once a part and an example. All this finite conscious-
ness shares with yours the character of being full of fluent
processes whose tendency is twofold, in one direction
towards the formation of relatively stable habits of repeti-
tion, in the other direction towards the irrevocable leav-
ing of certain events, situations, and types of experience
behind. I suppose that this play between the irrevocable
and the repeated, between habit and novelty, between
rhythm and the destruction of rhythm, is everywhere in
Nature, as it is in us, something significant, something of
interest, something that means a struggle for ideals. I
suppose that this something constitutes a process wherein
goals, ideals, are sought in a seemingly endless pursuit,
and where new realms of sentient experience are con-
stantly coming into view and into relation to former
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 227
experiences. I suppose that the field of Nature's experi-
ence is everywhere leading slowly or rapidly to the differ-
entiation of new types of conscious unity. I suppose that
this process goes on with very vast slowness in inorganic
Nature, as for instance in the nebulas, but with great
speed in you and me. But, meanwhile, I do not suppose
that slowness means a lower type of consciousness.
For next, to complete my hypothesis in this direction,
I observe that the relation of our own consciousness to
Time is something very arbitrary. Our consciousness, for
its special characters, is dependent upon a certain fact
which we might well call our particular Time-Span. If
we are to be inwardly conscious of anything, there must
occur some change in the contents of our feelings, but
this change must not be too fast or too slow. What hap-
pens within what we describe as the millionth or the
thousandth of a second necessarily escapes us. We can
note, at best, only the mere enduring after-effects of such
a happening. So it is when an electric spark or a
dynamite explosion occurs. For us the event itself is
then no separate matter of experience. We confuse
the event with its after-effects. On the other hand,
whatever lasts longer than a very few moments no
longer can form part of one conscious moment for us.
But suppose that our consciousness had to a thousand
millionth of a second, or to a million years of time,
the same relation that it now has to the arbitrary length
in seconds of a typical present moment. Then, in the
one case, we might say : " What a slow affair this dyna-
mite explosion is." In the other case, events, such as the
wearing of the Niagara gorge, would be to us what a
228 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
single musical phrase now is, namely, something instan-
taneously present, and grasped within the arbitrary present
moment. Such relations to time would be no more arbi-
trary, no less conscious, no more or less fluent, and no
more or less full of possible meaning, than is now our
conscious life. In our lecture on Time and Eternity we
considered such relations in their more general forms.
Here we simply apply the general considerations to
special cases.
Well, applying this simple consideration to our
hypothesis, we should at once suppose that the actually
fluent inner experience, which our hypothesis attributes
to inorganic Nature, would be a finite experience
of an extremely august temporal span, so that a mate-
rial region of the inorganic world would be to us the
phenomenal sign of the presence of at least one fellow-
creature who took, perhaps, a billion years to complete
a moment of his consciousness, so that where we saw, in
the signs given us of his presence, only monotonous per-
manence of fact, he, in his inner life, faced momentarily
significant change. Nature would be thus the sign of the
presence of other finite consciousness than our own,
whose time-span was in general very different from ours,
but whose rationality, whose dignity, whose significance,
whose power to will, whose aptness to pursue ideals, might
be equal to or far above our own without any relation to
whether the appearance of this consciousness, in the facts
of outer Nature, seemed to us like an inorganic process or
not. Common to all these conscious processes would be
their fluency, their inner significance, and their constant
intercommunication, whereby more or less novel facts were
THE INTERPRETATION OE NATURE 229
transferred all the time from one to another region of this
conscious world. How this world was individuated, in
what sense its minds, so intimately linked by universal
intercommunication, were still in a sense sundered into
the lives of relatively separate Selves, our hypothesis
would leave for a deeper consideration elsewhere. But
we should thus already be prepared for a general, if
extremely hypothetical, view of evolution.
Evolution, we should now say, is due to the constant
intercommunication of a vast number of relatively sepa-
rate regions of this world of conscious life. 1 This inter-
communication takes place as a simply universal process
of finite experience. As it takes place, new and signifi-
cant realms of conscious experience arise within the
already existing temporal world of finite consciousness.
If you wish to see how this can be, turn to the world of
your social intercourse, where the communications of one
being, or of a group of fellow-beings, can so enter into
another's preexistent, but still undeveloped consciousness,
as to awaken there new ideals, a new selfhood, a rela-
tively novel individuality. If, as I myself suppose, per-
sonal individuality is an essentially ethical category, then
a new person exists whenever, within a conscious process
of a given time-span, intercommunication with the rest
of Nature results in the appearance of processes signifi-
cant enough to express themselves in new ideals, and in a
new unification of experience in terms of these ideals.
1 In a later lecture, after our study of the problem of the Self, we shall
be able to interpret this "intercommunication" as a process occurring
not wholly between various beings, but rather in one aspect, within the
life of an inclusive Self.
230 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Meanwhile the evolutionary changes of the whole con-
scious world would be based upon processes whose basis
would be viewed as threefold. First, they would be flu-
ent processes, full of significant change, more or less obvi-
ously governed by the pursuit of ideal goals. Secondly,
they would be processes determined, as our own are, by a
constant communication with processes going on in other
regions. Thirdly, they would be processes that, amidst
all the changes, tended, as far as the novelty and the
irrevocable passing of life's facts permitted, to the acqui-
sition of definite habits. As these definite habits, so far
as acquired at all, would be established under the influ-
ence of intercommunication from the whole of the finite
world, and as the habits, whenever they appeared, would
tend to take the form of repeated rhythms, which, if once,
more observed from without, would communicate their
own nature in the form of an appearance of rhythmic
monotony, we should expect to get, in a summary search
through Nature, precisely that superficial impression of an
endless repetition of the same types which inorganic
Nature, in the uniformity of its Matter, seems to show us.
The conceived atoms, all of the same size, the vibrations
of the molecules of incandescent hydrogen, all of the
same pitch, these would be appearances of what, in
their inner essence, are only extreme cases of habits ren-
dered uniform by intercommunication, like the customs
of a nation, or like the sounds of a given language ap-
pearing in many men's speech. The apparently absolute
monotony in such cases would, of course, be itself, in
great part, illusory, just as it is illusion when foreigners
say that we who speak English merely hiss monotonously,
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 231
like snakes or like geese. Just so, our spectroscopes find
the hydrogen vibrations monotonous. But our time-span
is very short, and our spectroscopes do not interpret to
us the foreign tongues of Nature. 1
Meanwhile, in one respect, evolution would indeed be
in part what we before called a perspective effect, due
to the limitations of human experience. It would
not be true that Nature sometimes, in an exceptional
way, pursues ideal goals. On the contrary, every natu-
ral process, if rightly viewed from within, would be the
pursuit of an ideal. There would be no dead Nature
at all, nothing really inorganic or unconscious, only
life, striving, onflow, ideality, significance, rationality.
Only for us Nature appears to be growing from death
to life as the processes grow more like our own, and so
more intelligible. But we should have to unlearn that
atrocious Philistinism of our whole race which supposes
that Nature has no worthier goal than producing a man.
Perhaps experiences of longer time-span are far higher
in rational type than ours. The evolution of Man
would be but the appearance of a type of individuality
whose time-span is short, and whose grade of rationality
is doubtful, but presumably at least a little lower than
that of the angels, and whose degree of significance
depends partly, of course, upon our fatally determined
place in Nature, but partly upon the use that we make
of the countless communications that we receive from
1 The relations of the formation and the persistence of habits to the
two conceptions of the Well-Ordered Series and the series formed by the
interpolation of new intermediaries between former terms, we shall con-
sider later, in the lecture on the Place of the Self in Being.
232 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
our brethren of all grades, and of all time-spans. For
my hypothesis would leave ample room for supposing
that, whatever part of the total field of finite conscious-
ness you choose, what happens there depends not merely
upon the communications sent in, or upon the fatal on-
flow of experience, but upon the significant choices there
made. For every region of this universally conscious
world may be, in some sense, a centre whence issues new
conscious life, for communication to all the worlds.
Meanwhile, our hypothesis supposes that, in case of
the animals, we may well be dealing not with beings
who are rational in our own time-span, nor yet with
beings who are irrational. The rational being with
whom you deal when you observe an animal's dimmer
hints of rationality, may be phenomenally represented
rather by the race as a whole than by any one indi-
vidual. In that case, this individual animal is no
rational person, but he may well be, so to speak, a tem-
porally brief section of a person, whose time-span of
consciousness is far longer than ours. Just as one word
of a sentence represents a part of a meaning but not
the whole, so an animal may represent phenomenally
real conscious life, that in a longer time-span has a
definite, an ideal, yes, in its own way, an ethical ration-
ality, however noxious or unethical or irrational the
animal, who is not himself a person, but a fragment of
a person, may seem to us to be. Hence our theory at
once justifies, but does not exaggerate, the meaning
of our human companionship with animals. In general,
our hypothesis holds that we can never know how much
of Nature constitutes the life of a finite conscious indi-
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 238
vidual, unless we are in intelligent communication with
that individual's inner life. Hence, I do not suppose
that any individual thing, sa}^ this house, or yonder
table, is a conscious being, but only that it is part of
a conscious process.
Finally, as to the origin and as to the end of human
individuals, our theory suggests that we are differentia-
tions from a finite conscious experience of presumably
a much longer time-span than our present one. This
finite consciousness of longer time-span, indicated to us
in the phenomena of memory and of race-instinct, is
individuated, is rational, is a live being, and is con-
tinuous in some sense with our own individuality. The
birth and death of an individual man, from the point of
view of the longer span, mean changes of time-span,
or the occurrence of something interesting in a shorter
or longer time-span. We might, if we chose, speak of
death in those terms, not as a relapse into unconscious
Nature, but as merely a change in time-span of the life
here involved. In what sense such a change could still
preserve in fact our individuality, is a problem that
this lecture still leaves open for later consideration. 1
V
The hypothesis now roughly put before you belongs
to a type nowadays not infrequent. As it stands, it
pretends to be nothing but an hypothesis that takes
account of a considerable range of real and verifiable
1 Compare the further considerations in the lecture on the Place of the
Self in Being.
234 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
natural facts, but that does not pretend to exclusive
possession of the field. It is related, partly by deriva-
tion, partly by resemblance, to several other cosmical
hypotheses, amongst which that of Mr. Charles Peirce 1 is,
in my own mind, rather prominent. Yet this hypothesis
is not identical with any of these others. Why I prefer
it, I have not had time in any complete way to tell
you. I have preferred so far to let the hypothesis stand
as such. What we most of us need, in this field, is a
breaking up of our traditional sundering of Mind and
Matter, and a certain freedom from conventional phrases.
Meanwhile, as I must remind you, the real reasons why
I hold that some such hypothesis must be near the
truth are general philosophical reasons. For here at
length you have a first statement of the way in which
the Nature empirically known to us can be so in general
conceived as to reconcile its principal features with our
Fourth Conception of Being.
This hypothesis may naturally be contrasted, as we
close, with two or three somewhat related hypotheses.
In the first place, as you see, our hypothesis differs
strongly from the view of Nature which is due to
Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley was, with regard to the
material world, an idealist, although he viewed the
existence and the relations of individual minds in a
fashion which seems to me to be essentially realistic,
since the Spirits of his world are entities apparently
conceived as, in their essence, logically independent of
1 See his series of papers in the Monist for 1891 and the immediately
subsequent years. The marked differences between the two hypotheses
I have here no space to point out.
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 235
one another, and as linked merely through laws of causa-
tion, and through Over-ruling Providence. But Berkeley
agrees with the general view of Idealism in asserting
that Material substance exists not independently of
minds. In particular, however, Berkeley holds that
Matter appears to Minds only in and through the order
of their ideas, as God ordains this order. And, as a
consequence, Berkeley's hypothesis reduces Matter to an
appearance having no basis except (1) the experiences
and ideas of men ; and (2) the direct influence of the
power and providence of God upon these human experi-
ences and ideas. Were men otherwise organized, and
were the direct influence of God's Will upon men's
minds other than it is, what we now call the material
world would simply cease to be. As it is, according to
Berkeley, you can say that Matter has a valid reality of
the type of our own Third Conception of Being, and
hao, in addition, a more concrete foundation merely in
what men experience and what God intends to have
them experience. There is, then, for Berkeley, first
the valid fact that the experience of approaching too
near the seen fire, is inevitably followed by the experi-
ence of a burn. But, in the second place, the basis of
this validity is Divine Providence, as evidenced in the
actual occurrence which men observe.
Now our hypothesis agrees with Berkeley's view in
asserting that no substance, and especially no material
jSubstance, exists independently of all Mind. But just
as we ascribe some sort of Being beyond our own indi-
vidual minds, to the minds of our fellow-men, so the
hypothesis here in question ascribes an existence, beyond
236 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
that of man's mind, to the finite mental life which we
here suppose to be indicated to us by our experience of
Nature. And we do not suppose with Berkeley that
Nature has existence solely in our human experience,
in the valid laws of succession which govern our
experiences, and in the purpose of a Providence which
is directly producing in us the experience in question.
We suppose that there is a vast range of extra-human
life, limited in its nature, like the life of man, and
identical with the Absolute Life only in that universal
sense in which, according to our theory, every life,
however minute or however vast, is in relation to the
whole organism of the Absolute. To this life, whose
presence is hinted to us by our experience of Nature,
our theory assigns an existence as concrete and essentially
conscious as that of man himself. And we suppose that
our human life is itself a differentiation from this larger
life of Nature. Our deeper relations with the Nature-
life we suppose to be, despite all the vast differences,
essentially similar to the relations upon which our human
social life is founded. They are relations of communi-
cation, and of an intimate linkage between the hap-
penings that occur in various realms and provinces of
the whole life of Nature. Hence, unlike Berkeley, we
do not reduce our experience of Nature to anything
that could plausibly be called illusory, or unfounded,
or founded only in an arbitrary divine intervention.
I Nature for us is real in precisely the sense in which our
fellow-men are real. Only we, of course, maintain that
our present experience gives us very imperfect hints as
to what the inner life of Nature contains ; just as, even
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 237
in case of men, our social experience of the doings of
people whose language is not ours, and whose customs
are very remote, leaves us long in ignorance of what
they mean.
In the second place, our hypothesis stands in a strong
contrast to the one associated with the name of Leibniz.
Leibniz conceived the natural world as an infinite multi-
tude of mutually independent Monads. While, even in
case of Leibniz, many genuinely idealistic motives enter
into his conception of the organism of this realm of the
Monads, the primary character ascribed by him to this
realm depends upon an essentially realistic conception of
Being. The Monads are souls. Each one of them, to be
sure, is in a preestablished harmony with all the others.
But they do not communicate. Their relations are wholly
ideal. Each, in idea, mirrors the reality of all the other
Monads, but this ideal link is not a genuine tie. For
what happens within each Monad is determined solely by
its own nature, and by nothing external. The creation
of the Monads is indeed asserted to have been a fact.
But it is a fact wholly inexpressible in terms of any links
or ties such as now bind the various states of each Monad
to the inner nature of that individual soul itself. Taken
in itself, a Monad is an ultimate fact of Being, whose
nature needs not the real nature of any other Monad to
explain it, and whose essential independence of all that
is external to itself is the first and the central fact about
its form of Being. In strong contrast to this view of the
Monads as real beings, stands, indeed, the assumed and
preestablished harmony of all the Monads. And when
Leibniz emphasizes this aspect, his theory tends to lose
238 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
its realistic hardness of outlines, and to lapse into a view
I for which the ideal relationships of the Monads, their sig-
nificant unity as members of the one City of God, becomes
the innermost truth of the universe. If Leibniz had
given this aspect of his doctrine due emphasis, he would
have recognized his own latent Idealism. As a fact, how-
ever, he remains on the whole a realist, whose Monads are
in essence sundered and self-centred, and whose world is
in fact shattered into a spray of infinitely numerous Inde-
pendent Beings, while their asserted unity, as merely
ideal, remains an appearance, manifest only to an external
observer.
Our theory, I say, is in strong contrast to this Monad-
ology of Leibniz. In Nature, as in man, we find
individuality linked in the closest fashion with inter-
communication, with the mutual interdependence of
individuals, and with a genuine identity of meaning
and of Being in various individuals. For us, as we
shall later more fully see, it is perfectly possible that an
ethical individual should have, in time, a natural origin,
should result from processes that have previously taken
place in other individuals, and should exist subject to a
constant support received from other individuals. For
us, a soul is no Monad, but a life individuated solely by
its purpose, i.e. by the significant and unique meaning
which its experience may embody. Our whole theory
presupposes that individuals may be included within
other individuals ; that one life, despite its unique ethical
significance, may form part of a larger life ; and that the
ties which bind various finite individuals together are
but hints of the unity of all individuals in the Absolute
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 239
Individual. Hence we do not assume the variety of
individuals within the natural world to be a wholly orig-
inal fact, temporally predetermined by a single creative
act. Nor do we suppose that, from its creation, Nature is
thenceforth to be regarded as a realm whose harmony is
preestablished. For us no natural fact is more obvious
than that every individual life is temporally dependent
for its every act and state upon relations of direct com-
munication with other individuals. And individuals are
not kept asunder by chasms, but are made distinct
through their various meanings, i.e. through the variety
of the purposes of which their lives are the expression.
In another direction, our theory differs very deeply
from all hypotheses of the type of Clifford's " Mind
Stuff " doctrine. It is customary, in recent thought, for
many who appreciate the importance of the natural pro-
cesses summed up in the word Evolution, to attempt to
conceive that inorganic Nature consists of a vast collec-
tion of elements of the type of our own sensations, or of
our simplest feelings. The process of Evolution itself is
regarded by such views as a gradual coming together and
organization of such originally atomic elements of feeling
into complex unities, which, viewed externally, appear
as more and more organized bodies, while the same
masses of content, internally viewed, come to take on,
more and more, the character of conscious and, in the
end, of rational lives. Our hypothesis, by virtue of its
idealistic basis, rejects altogether the possibility of any
such separate elements of Mind-Stuff. Nor do we admit
that such elements, through any process of Evolution,
could come to be interrelated after they had once sepa-
240 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
rately existed. An element of physical life, a simple
sensation of feeling, can neither be nor be conceived in
isolation. Our very definition of Being forces upon us
this result. And, if an isolated physical element could
i once exist, it would be like any other realistic entity.
As an Independent Being, it could never come to be
linked to any other Being. It would remain forever in
the darkness of its atomic separation from all real life.
For us, however, if all Nature is an expression of mental
life, all mental life has Internal Meaning, and therefore
conscious unity of purpose in every pulse of its existence.
And for the same reason, we reject every form of doc-
trine that regards Nature as in any sense a realm of the
genuinely Unconscious, or that supposes the Absolute to
come to self-consciousness first in man, or that conceives
the process of Evolution as one wherein the life of the
natural world, as a whole, grows from the darkness of
I obscure and unconscious purpose to the daylight of self-
possessed Reason. Our general Theory of Being simply
forbids every such interpretation of Nature. All life,
everywhere, in so far as it is life, has conscious meaning,
and accomplishes a rational end. This is the necessary
consequence of our Idealism. Where we see inorganic
Nature seemingly dead, there is, in fact, conscious life,
just as surely as there is any Being present in Nature at
all. And I insist, meanwhile, that no empirical warrant
\ can be found for affirming the existence of dead material
j substance anywhere. What we find, in inorganic Nature,
are processes whose time-rate is slower or faster than
those which our consciousness is adapted to read or to
appreciate. And we have no empirical evidence of the
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE 241
existence of any, relatively whole, conscious process,
which is less intelligent or less rational than our own
human processes are. For the psychical life which we
refer to the lower animals is, according to my interpreta-
tion, merely a fragment and a hint of a larger rationality
which gets its fuller individual expression in the evolu-
tion of a species or genus or order, or other relative
whole of animal existence. And of this whole life, what
we chance to view as the individual animal constitutes a
mere fragment, brought within our observation by con-
ditions whose relation to the innermost facts of Nature
is doubtless very arbitrary.
As all these comments and comparisons indicate, the
general character of our hypothesis about Nature is de-
termined for us by our Fourth Conception of Being, and
stands or falls therewith. It is the detail of our hypothe-
sis, and its special adaptation to our experience of Nature,
which we regard as tentative, and so as subject to correc-
tion. But in rejecting the Mind-Stuff theory of Clifford,
our grounds are general and positive. That theory im-
plies an essentially realistic conception of Being, and falls
with Realism. The same is true of Leibniz's Monadol-
ogy. The Unconscious we reject, because our Fourth
Conception of Being forbids all recognition of uncon-
scious realities. It follows that any hypothesis about
Nature, which is just to the demands of a sound Meta-
physic, must, like ours, conceive the natural world as
directly bound up with the experiences of actually con-
scious beings. That, in addition to all these considera-
tions, we should be led to reject Berkeley's cosmological
hypothesis, is due, in part, to our own special form of
242 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Idealism ; but, in part, also to the fact that our theory
about Nature ought to be just to the empirical inductions
which have now been summed up in the modern Doctrine
'of Evolution. The essence of this Doctrine of Evolution
'lies in the fact that it recognizes the continuity of man's
life with that of an extra-human realm, whose existence
is hinted to us by our experience of Nature. Accepting,
as we are obliged to do, the objective significance of this
modern doctrine, we find ourselves forced to interpret
Nature, not as an arbitrarily determined realm of valid
experiences founded only in God's creative will and
man's sensory life, but as an orderly realm of genuine
conscious life, one of whose products, expressions, and
examples we find in the mind of Man.
'yye^T. .
I
t
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LECTURE VI
I
LECTURE VI
THE HUMAN SELF
The contrast between Matter and Mind is usually-
regarded as a serious obstacle in the way of any inter-
pretation of the world of experience in terms of a
philosophical Idealism. In the last two lectures we
have seen that this contrast is not empirically known
to be as absolute as our customary fashions of concep-
tion often make it seem. The hypothesis concerning
Nature which we suggested was partly intended to illus-
trate precisely this possibility of reconciling Idealism
with the generalizations of our ordinary study of Nature.
The hypothesis itself, like any other effort towards a
Cosmology, is, in its details, provisional and tentative.
Only its general type, as an idealistic hypothesis about
Nature, seems to me to be a sure representative of the
truth. In its special features it is to be subject to the
control of further experience. But it provides in its
very terms for such further control. The hypothesis
asserts, in fact, that all the theories of the special
sciences, together with the general theory of Nature
suggested by this very hypothesis itself, must be viewed
as incidents in the history of man's effort gradually
to comprehend the organization of a realm of Mind,
of which man himself is a member. Now every idealist
holds that there is no dead matter anywhere in the
245
246 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
world, and that all that is is the expression of the
Spirit. But in what way this thesis is to be applied
to the detailed interpretation of Nature, cannot be de-
cided in advance of a careful scrutiny of the facts.
And the special way suggested at the last time is the
one which to me personally seems to promise most. I
am sure that in its most general outlines, this hypothesis
is sound. But all its details are subject to correction.
Herewith, however, we are led to the threshold of a new
enterprise. We have so far stated a general hypothesis
regarding Nature. But in forming this hypothesis, I
myself have been especially interested in its bearing
upon the conception of the place in Nature that is
occupied by Man. Now as we know Man, he first of
all appears to us as a being whose inner life is that
of an individual Self. The Self of each man apparently
has had an origin in time, and a development such as
makes it dependent, for its contents and its character,
upon natural conditions. In its turn, our self-conscious-
ness, when once it has developed, furnishes to us the
sort of insight by means of which we may hope for a
comprehension of some of the mysteries of Nature. Any
deeper criticism of our hypothesis about Nature must
therefore depend upon a more exact account of what
we mean by the human Self. We must know how we
are able, both to conceive this Self as in any sense the
outcome of the processes of Nature, and to apply our
view of the Self to an explanation of Nature.
THE HUMAN SELF 247
My next task must therefore be to state, in outline,
a theory of the human Self.
What a man means by himself is notoriously a ques-
tion to which common sense gives various and ambigu-
ous answers. That by the Self one means a real being,
common sense indeed insists. But the nature of this
real being forms the topic of the greatest vacillation
in all popular metaphysics. The most frequently men-
tioned doubt is that as to whether the Self is, or at!
least essentially includes, the bodily organism, or whether^
the Self is essentially an incorporeal entity. But this
is but a single instance of the doubts and hesitancies
of the popular doctrine concerning the Ego. And this
indefmiteness of customary opinion regarding our prob-
lem most of all appears in the practical aspect of the
current notions of the Self. If we ask, What is the
value of the Self, and what do we gain by cultivating,
by knowing, by observing, and by satisfying the Self?
common sense gives contradictory answers which at
once show that the very idea of what the Self is, is
subject to the most momentous changes as we alter
our point of view. Ask the teacher of the people
about the value and dignity of the Self at a moment
when he is insisting upon the significance and the
rights of individuality, and upon the duty of conscious
reasonableness, and of moral independence. He will
reply, perhaps, in the terms that Burns has made so
familiar. "The man of independent mind" knows,
asserts, expresses, preserves, glorifies the true Self, the
moral individual. And the Self which he thus makes
central in his moral world is an essentially honorable
248 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Self, the determiner of all true values, the despiser of
mere externals, the freeman to whom fortune is nothing
compared with inner dignity. When one views the
moral Self thus, one conceives that the root of all evil
and of all baseness must always lie without and beyond
the Self. The Self sins not through self-assertion but
through self-abandonment. The lost soul is the man
who is the slave of fortune. Pleasure, worldly honor,
external good, these may harm the Self, just because
they are foreign to its true independence. The ideal
lies where the Stoics sought it, in casting off the external
bondage. For such a view, every man's Self, if you
could only get at the heart of it, and get it to express
itself, would appear as essentially good. What corrupts
and enchains men is not their innermost selfhood, but the
power of an external world of temptations. To assert
the true Self, is to be saved.
But even more familiar than this ethical individualism,
which so often thrills the hearts of noble youth, and
which inspires so many to heroism, is another ancient
and, as its history shows, profoundly religious doctrine.
This latter doctrine equally appeals to the moral common
sense of mankind ; it is crystallized, so to speak, in
some of the most familiar of our customary phrases ;
it inspires numerous effective moral appeals ; it comes
to us with all the weight of the authority of the faith of
the fathers. This view is that the Self of man is pre-
cisely that which in its original nature is evil, so that
it is just our salvation which must to us come from
without, and be won through self-abnegation. "By
grace ye are saved, and that not of yourselves." Self-
THE HUMAN SELF 249
denial is, for this view, the cardinal virtue. Self-con-
sciousness is even a vice. A man ought to think little
of himself, and much of God, of the world, and of his
own external business. The central evil of our life is
selfishness. Virtue is definable as altruism, i.e. as
forgetting ourselves in the thought of others. The
best eulogy that one can make over the grave of the
departed saint is : "He had no thought of Self ; he
served ; he sacrificed himself ; he gave himself as an
offering for the good of mankind ; he lived for others ;
he never even observed his own virtues ; he forsook
himself ; he asked for nothing but bondage to his
duty." And George Eliot sings in praise of the "scorn
for miserable aims that end in Self."
Now the opposition just suggested between two views
of the value of Self, is so familiar that common sense
not only uses these apparently conflicting phrases, but
has its own lore regarding various devices by which
they are to be reconciled. A man has, as we some-
times learn, two Selves, the inner and the outer, the
nobler and the baser. There is the natural man, who
is by his very essence evil ; and the spiritual man, who is
by nature good. It is to the natural man that the advice
about self-abnegation is given ; it is to the spiritual
Self that the well-known words of Burns make their
stirring appeal. The fleshly Self is the root of all evil.
The spiritual Self belongs, by origin and by destiny, to
a higher realm.
This dualistic way of stating the case, and of attempt-
ing to solve the practical problem here at issue, would be
more nearly final were it not that in the very effort to carry
250 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
it out to its consequences, the former ambiguity only
arises afresh, in a slightly altered form. The higher
Self, the deeper spiritual nature, the individuality which
ought to be, to whom does it originally belong ? To
the man who finally wins a consciousness that this has
become to him his true Self? Or does this higher
Self come, as Aristotle said of the Nous, OvpaOev, from
without, into the natural man? Does it create for him
or in him a new selfhood, so that before the higher
selfhood appears in this man, it exists perhaps merely
as the intent of God to save this man, or as a selfhood em-
bodied in other men, the teachers, inspirers, guides, of the
man who is to be thus brought to the possession of the
higher Self in his own person ? This question may
indeed at first appear an idle subtlety. But as a fact,
both common sense and religion, both the teacher's art
and the inner consciousness of those who have in any
sense passed from death unto life, give this question a
very living and practical significance. Our models and
our inspirations, the mysterious grace that saves us and
the visible social order that moulds us, these lie at
first without the Self. Yet they in such wise determine
whatever is best about us that we are all accustomed
to nourish the higher selfhood by means of what we find
as no creation of the original Self, but as the free gift of
the world. And the two doctrines which, in European
history, have most insisted upon the duality of our
higher and our lower selfhood, viz. the ethical teaching of
Plato and the Gospel of the Christian Church, have agreed
in insisting that the higher Self is a resultant of influences
which belong to the eternal world, and which the indi-
THE HUMAN SELF 251
vidual man himself is powerless to initiate. In Plato's
account of the process of the soul's release from its own
lower nature, the eternal Ideas appear as the super-
natural source of truth and of goodness. In the myth-
ical state of preexistence, the Ideas guided the soul by
their visible presence ; and the soul's higher nature
meant nothing but the contemplation of their uncreated
perfection. In this foreign authority the soul found all
that was good. And in the present life our higher nature
means only our memory of the former presence of the
all-powerful truth. This memory guides our awaken-
ing reason, controls our irrational passions, binds the
lower Self with the might of the eternal, and conducts
us back towards that renewed and direct intercourse with
the ideal world wherein consists our only higher Self-
hood. Christianity, in all its essential teachings, has
emphasized a similar source and meaning in speaking of
the higher Self. The Divine Spirit enters a man in ways
that its own wisdom predetermines, and without the
work of God in preparing and accomplishing the plan of
salvation, in revealing the truth to man by outward
means, and in preparing the heart within for the recep-
tion of the truth, the nobler Self of each man not only is
unable to win control of the baser Self, but never could
come effectively to exist at all. In this sense, then, it
is not I who win salvation, but it is God who works in
me. The higher Self is originally not myself at all,
but the Spirit warring against the Flesh. This spirit is
essentially from God. It comes into the man like Aris-
totle's Creative Nous, and is precisely so much of a man
as is not his own, but God's.
252 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Now this well-known ambiguity of the traditional doc-
trines concerning the source and meaning of the higher
Self in man, is not, as some have unwisely maintained, a
mere consequence of theological and philosophical specu-
lation. On the contrary, it is an expression, in terms of
faith, of empirical facts about the Self which common
sense everywhere recognizes. The same problems, in
other formulation, exist in Hindoo philosophy as well as
in Plato's ; and they are recognized by Buddhism as well
as by Christianity. Every watchful parent, and every
conscientious teacher, is perfectly well acquainted with
facts that illustrate the doctrines of saving grace and of
the apparently external source of the higher selfhood, in
case of every plastic child. We all of us know, or ought
to recognize, how powerless we are, or should have been,
to win any higher selfhood, unless influences from with-
out, whether you know them as mother love, or con-
ceive them as the promptings of the divine Spirit, or view
them as the influences of friends and of country, have
brought into us a truth and an ideality that is in
no ordinary sense our own private creation. And
every man who knows what the wiser humility is, has
sometime said : " Of myself I am nothing. It is the
truth alone that, coming from without, works in me."
But if you lay aside the problem as to the source of the
higher Self, and consider merely the supposed duality of
the lower and the higher Self as a given fact, have you in
that case even begun to solve the problem as to what the
Self of a man actually is ? For the Self was to be some-
thing unique and individual. But the account here in
question makes of it something disintegrated and inter-
THE HUMAN SELF 253
nally manifold, and threatens to cause the name Self to
mean, in case of every individual, a mere general term,
applicable to various groups of different facts. For by
the same principle whereby you distinguish the lower and
the higher Self of a man, you might distinguish, and j
upon occasion, even in common life, do distinguish, many
various selves, all clustered together in what we call the
life of a single individual.
For if we are internally in any sense more than one
Self, then we consist not merely of the lower and the
higher self, but have, in some sense, as many selves as we
have decidedly various offices, duties, types of training
and of intellectual activity, or momentous variations of
mood and condition. Of the man who is once seriously
ill, common sense often says that he is no longer himself.
If you ask, who then is he, if not himself, you may get
the answer that he is another, a deeply changed,
a strange Self. And if the change has at all the character
of a mental derangement, common sense, ever since the
savage stage of our social life, has been disposed to con-
ceive the alteration in question as the appearance of an
actually foreign and other Self, a new and invading indi-
viduality, which the superstitious view as a possession of
the man's body by an evil spirit. Such instances are
extreme ; but health furnishes to us similar, if less un-
happy variations, with whose mystery the popular imag-
ination is constantly busy. Deep emotional experiences
give the sense of a new or of a wavering selfhood.
There are many people, of a fine social sensibility, who
are conscious of a strong tendency to assume, temporarily,
the behavior, the moods, and in a measure, both the
254 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
bearing and the accent, both the customs and the opinions
of people in whose company they spend any considerable
time. I have known amongst such people those who
were oppressed by a sense of insincerity in consequence
of their own social plasticity. " I almost seem to have no
true Self at all," such a sensitive person may say. "I
am involuntarily compelled to change my whole attitude
towards the most important things whenever I change my
company. I find myself helplessly thinking and believ-
ing and speaking as the present company want me to do.
I feel humiliated by my own lack of moral independence.
But I cannot help this fickleness. And the saddest is
that I do not know where my true Self lies, or what one
amongst all these various selves is the genuine one."
Now such confessions stand again for rather extreme
types of variability of the mere sense of selfhood. Yet
the experiences of which such less stable souls complain,
exist in various degrees in many of us who are merely not
sensitive enough, or perhaps not reflective enough, to
notice our own actual variations of self-consciousness. I
have known very obstinate men, who were full of a con-
sciousness of their own independence and absolute stability
of will and character. Yet, as a fact, they were people of
very various and complex selfhood, who were, far more
than they themselves supposed, the slaves of circum-
stances and of social influences. Only they regarded
themselves as both independent and resolutely fixed in
their individuality, merely because their o ne ty pe of reac-
tion in presence of any other man's opinion was to disa-
gree with that opinion, and their one way of asserting
their independence was to insist that their neighbors
THE HUMAN SELF 255
were wrong, while their fixed device for preserving their
independence was to refuse to do whatever external au-
thority desired them to do. But now such resolute oppo-
nents of their fellows are as much without a fixed and
rational conscious principle of selfhood as their brothers,
the self-accused slaves of the passing social situation.
For it is as fickle to disagree with everybody as to agree
with everybody. And the man who always opposes is as
much the slave of external fortune as the man who always
agrees. The simply obstinate man, who is said to be set
in his own way, but who, in fact, is always set in the
way that is opposed to the ways of whoever is just now
his fellow, such a man changes his doctrine whenever his
opponent changes ; and his teachings, his ideals, and his
selfhood play, as it were, puss-in-the-corner with those of
his neighbors.
But enough of familiar illustrations of how the mere
sense of selfhood may vary, or of how its outer and inner
expression may seem dual or multiple. What these facts
give us, is not any decision as to the true nature of the
Self, but some specification of our problem, and some ex-
planation of the reason why common sense is so uncertain
about how to define the true unity of the Self. The in-
consistencies of common sense in regard to the Self are,
upon their practical side, well summed up in the familiar
advice which we are accustomed to give the young.
" Forget yourself," we say, " all true success depends
upon freedom from yourself." But to the careless youth
we sternly say, "What! you have forgotten yourself."
One sees, it is hard for the poor Self to please common
sense. And the reason is that common sense does not in
256 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
the least know, when it appeals to the Self, whom it is
addressing, nor, when it talks of the Self, what object it
is meaning.
II
Such considerations ought once for all to give pause to
those who have regarded the problem of the true nature of
the Self as a matter of direct inner knowledge, or as some-
thing to be settled by an appeal to the plain man. But of
course these considerations merely indicate a problem, and
are by no means decisive as against any metaphysical view
which insists upon a true and deeper unity of Selfhood at
the basis of all these variations of the apparent Self. But
wherein shall our own metaphysical doctrine seek for
guidance in this world of complexities ?
I reply, The concept of the human Self, like the con-
cept of Nature, comes to us, first, as an empirical concept,
founded upon a certain class of experiences. But like
the concept of Nature, the concept of the human Self
tends far to outrun any directly observable present facts
of human experience, and to assume forms which define
the Self as having a nature and destiny which no man
directly observes or as yet can himself verify. If we con-
sider first the empirical basis of the conception of the Self,
and then the motives which lead us beyond our direct
experience in our efforts to interpret the Self, we find, as
a result of a general survey, three different kinds of con-
ceptions of what it is that one means or ought to mean by
the term Self as applied to the individual man. Each of
these sorts of conception of the human Self is once more
capable of a wide range of variation. Each can be used as
THE HUMAN SELF 257
a basis of different and, on occasion, of conflicting notions
of what the Self is. But the three have their strong con-
trasts with one another, and each lays stress upon its own
aspect of the facts.
First then, there is the more directly empirical way of j
conceiving the Self. In this sense, by a man's Self, you
mean a certain totality of facts, viewed as more or less
immediately given, and as distinguished from the rest of
the world of Being. These facts may be predominantly
corporeal facts, such as not only the man himself but also
his neighbors may observe and comment upon. In this
sense my countenance and my physical deeds, my body
and my clothing, all these may be regarded as more or
less a part of myself. My neighbor so views them. I
may and very generally do so view them myself. If you
changed or wholly removed such facts, my view of what
I am would unquestionably alter. For to my neighbor
as to myself, I am this man with these acts, this body,
this presence. I cannot see these facts as my neighbor
does, nor can he take my view of them. But we all
regard such facts, not only as belonging to the Self, but
as constituting, in a measure, what we regard as the Self
of the present life. In addition to the external or corpo-
real Self of the phenomenal world, there is the equally
empirical and phenomenal Self of the inner life, the series*
of states of consciousness, the feelings, thoughts, desires,
memories, emotions, moods. These, again, both my
neighbor and myself regard as belonging to me, and as
going to make up what I am. To be sure, within this
inner empirical Self, we all make distinctions, now so
freely illustrated, between what does and what does not
258 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
essentially belong to the Self. When a man tells me a
piece of interesting news, or expounds to me his opinions,
I naturally regard the ideas which then arise in my mind
as his and not as mine. I have to reflect in order to ob-
serve the somewhat recondite fact that the ideas which he
seems to convey to me are in one sense ideas of my own,
aroused in me according to laws of association. On the
other hand, when I think alone by myself, the ideas which
occur to me seem to be primarily mine. I have to reflect
in order to remember how largely they have been derived
from books, from nature, or from conversation, and how
little I can call originally my own. And everywhere in the
inner life, as it flits by, I observe a constantly shifting play
of what I distinguish as more truly myself, from what I
regard as relatively foreign. This feeling or purpose,
this mood or this choice, is my own. That other emotion
or idea is alien to me. It belongs to another. I do not
recognize it as mine. The distinctions, thus empirically
made, have no one rational principle. They are often
founded upon the most arbitrary and unstable motives.
The vacillation of common sense regarding the Self is
endlessly repeated in my own inner life. I am con-
stantly sure that there exists a Self, and that there I am,
present to my own consciousness as the one whose expe-
riences all these are, and who set myself over against the
foreign non-Ego at every moment. But in distinguishing
my empirical non-Ego from the Ego, I follow no stateable
rule in my inner life from moment to moment. I even vol-
untarily play with the distinctions of Self and not-Self,
dramatically address myself as if I were another, criticise
and condemn myself, and upon occasion observe myself in
THE HUMAN SELF 259
a relatively impersonal fashion, as if I were a wholly alien
personality. On the other hand, there are countless auto-
matic processes that alter or that diminish the immediately
given distinctions between Ego and non-Ego. The lover
in Locksley Hall somewhat unobservantly tells us how :
" Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with
might ;
Smote the chord of Self that trembling, passed in music out of
sight."
The lover admits that in the state which he thus de-
scribes, the Self, if invisible in the inner experience, Avas
still able, most decidedly, to make itself heard. And, as
a fact, one may well question whether, in view of what
the lover in Locksley Hall tells us, the Self of this lover
ever passed beyond his own range of vision at all, or was
in the least out of sight. But the happy emotional con-
fusion of self-consciousness here in question is familiar
indeed to all who know joyous emotion. And in the
sadder emotions one also has endless varieties in the in-
tensity, clearness, and outlines which in our empirical
consciousness characterize, from moment to moment, the
relations of Self and not-Self.
m
But one may now ask, still dwelling upon the empirical
Self, what manner of unity is left, in the midst of all
these variations, as the unity that the concept of the Self
can still be said to possess in our ordinary experience ?
And by what marks is the Self to be distinguished from
the rest of the world ? I reply, by pointing out a fact of
260 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
central importance for the whole understanding of the
empirical Ego. The variations of our experience and of
our opinion concerning the empirical Self are count-
less in number. And no purely rational principle guides
us in denning the Self from moment to moment in
the world of common sense, or in distinguishing it from
the not-Self. But there still does remain one psychological
'principle running through all these countless facts, and
explaining, in general, both why they vary, and why yet
we always suppose, despite the chaos of experiences, that
the Self of our inner and outer life preserves a genuine,
although to us hidden unity. This psychological princi-
ple is the simple one that, in us men, the distinction
between Self and not-Self has a predominantly Social
origin, and implies a more or less obviously present con-
trast between what we at any moment view as the life of
another person, a fellow-being, or, as you may for short
in general call him, an Alter, and the life, which, by con-
trast with that of the Alter, is just then viewed as the
life of the present Ego. To state the case more briefly, I
affirm that our empirical self-consciousness, from moment
to moment, depends upon a series of contrast-effects,
whose psychological origin lies in our literal social life,
and whose continuance in our present conscious life,
whenever we are alone, is due to habit, to our memory of
literal social relations, and to an imaginative idealization
of these relations. Herein lies a large part of the explana-
tion of those ambiguities of common sense upon which I
have so far insisted.
My proof for this view I cannot here give at length. I
have stated the psychological aspects of the whole case
THE HUMAN SELF 261
pretty extensively elsewhere. 1 My friend, Professor
Baldwin of Princeton University, has independently
worked out a theory of the psychological origin of Self-
Consciousness, and a doctrine about the evolution of the
relations of Ego and Alter, a theory which I am on the
Avhole prepared to accept, and which agrees with the con-
siderations that I myself have been led to develope,
and, in the places now referred to, to set forth. Here
there is time only for a brief indication of what I mean
by this theory of the empirical Ego, of its unity in
variety, and of its distinction from the world of the
non-Ego.
Nobody amongst us men comes to self-consciousness,
so far as I know, except under the persistent influence
of his social fellows. A child in the earlier stages of
his social development, say from the end of the first
to the beginning of the fifth year of life, shows you,
as you observe him, a process of the development of
self-consciousness in which, at every stage, the Self of
the child grows and forms itself through Imitation, and
through functions that cluster about the Imitation of
others, and that are secondary thereto. In consequence,
the child is in general conscious of what expresses the
life of somebody else, before he is conscious of himself.
And his self-consciousness, as it grows, feeds upon social
models, so that at every stage of his awakening life
1 See my Studies of Good and Evil, especially the essay on the Anoma-
lies of Self-consciousness, op. cit., pp. 169-197. Professor Baldwin's
very complete treatment of the topic is to be found in the second volume
of his well-known work : Mental Development in the Child and the Race,
where it dominates the entire discussion.
262 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
his consciousness of the Alter is a step in advance of
his consciousness of the Ego. His playmates, his nurse,
or mother, or the workmen whose occupations he sees,
and whose power fascinates him, appeal to his imita-
tiveness, and set him the copies for his activities. He
learns his little arts, and as he does so, he contrasts his
own deeds with those of his models, and of other chil-
dren. Now contrast is, in our conscious life, the mother
of clearness. What the child does instinctively, and
without comparison with the deeds of others, may never
come to his clear consciousness as his own deed at all.
What he learns imitatively, and then reproduces, per-
haps in joyous obstinacy, as an act that enables him to
display himself over against others, this constitutes
the beginning of his self-conscious life. And in gen-
eral, thenceforth, social situations, social emotions, the
process of peering into the contents of other minds
during the child's questioning period, the conflicts of
childish sport, the social devices for winning approval,
in brief, the whole life of social harmony and rivalry,
all these things mean an endless series of contrasts
between two sets of contents, which retain, amidst all
their varieties, one psychologically important character.
Upon this character the empirical unity and the general
continuity of our adult self-consciousness depend.
In any literal social situation, namely, one is aware
of ideas, designs, interests, beliefs, or judgments, whose
expression is observed in the form of acts, words, looks,
and the like, belonging to the perceived organisms of
one's fellow-men. In strong contrast, both in the way
in which they appear in the field of our sense-percep-
THE HUMAN SELF 263
tions, and in the current interests and feelings with
which they are accompanied and blended, are the acts,
words, and other expressions, of our own organism,
together with the ideas, designs, and beliefs which ac-
company these acts. Now these two contrasting masses
of mental contents simply constitute the Alter and the
Ego, the neighbor and the Self, of any empirical instant
of our literal social life together. That these sets of
contents stand in strong contrast to each other is, for
the first, a mere fact of sense and of feeling. One
does not reason about this fact from instant to instant.
One finds it so. Nor does one appeal to any intuition
of an ultimate or of a spiritual Ego, in order to observe
the presented fact that my neighbor's words, as he speaks
to me, do not sound or feel as my words do when I speak
to him, and that the ideas which my neighbor's words
at once bring to my consciousness, stand in a strong
and presented contrast to the ideas which receive ex-
pression in my words as I reply to him. Alter and
Ego, in such cases, are found as facts of our direct
observation. Were no difference observed between the
contents which constitute the observed presence of my
neighbor, and the contents which constitute my own
life in the same moment, then my sense of my neigh-
bor's presence, and my idea of myself, would blend in
my consciousness, and there would be so far neither
Alter nor Ego observed.
Now just such social contrast-effects have been occur-
ring in our experience since childhood. The contrasts
in question have always retained a certain general simi-
larity, despite wide and countless differences. Just as
264 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
all color contrasts are in a measure alike, so too are
all social contrasts. Always the contents which con-
stitute the Ego, at the very moment of their contrast
with the remaining contents present during the social
contrast-effect, have been associated with certain rela-
tively warm and enduring organic sensations, viz. sen-
sations coming from within our own bodies. Always
the contents belonging to our consciousness of our
neighbors have been relatively free from these accom-
paniments, and have had the characters belonging to
external sense-perceptions. And there are still other
empirical similarities present in all social relations.
Hence, despite all other changes, the Ego and the
Alter have tended to keep apart, as facts of our em-
pirical observation, and each of the two has tended
towards its own sort of organization as a mass of observed
and remembered empirical facts. The Alter, viewed
as a mass of experienced facts, the words, looks, and
deeds and ideas of other people, differentiates and in-
tegrates into all that I call my experience of mankind ;
the Ego, centred about the relatively constant organic
sensations, but receiving its type of unity especially
through the social contrast-effects, stands as that total-
ity of inner and outer experience which I recognize as
my own, just because it sharply differs from my expe-
rience of any of the rest of mankind, and stands in a
certain permanent sort of contrast thereto.
In origin, then, the empirical Ego is secondary to our
social experience. In literal social life, the Ego is always
known as in contrast to the Alter. And while the per-
manent character of our organic sensations aids us in
THE HUMAN SELF 265
identifying the empirical Ego, this character becomes of
importance mainly because hereby we find ourselves
always in a certain inwardly observable type of contrast
to the whole of our social world.
Now what literal social life thus trains us to observe,
the inner psychological processes of memory and imagina-
tion enable us indefinitely to extend and to diversify.
The child soon carries over his plays into more or less
ideal realms, lives in the company of imaginary persons,
and thus, idealizing his social relations, idealizes also the
type of his self-consciousness. In my inner life, I in the
end learn ideally to repeat, to vary, to reorganize, and to
epitomize in countless ways, the situations which I first
learned to observe and estimate in literal social relations.
Hereby the contrast between Ego and Alter, no longer
confined to the relations between my literal neighbor and
myself, can be refined into the conscious contrasts be-
tween present and past Self, between my self-critical and
my naive Self, between my higher and lower Self, or
between my Conscience and my impulses. My reflec-
tive life, as it empirically occurs in me from moment to
moment, is a sort of abstract and epitome of my whole
social life, viewed as to those aspects which I find pecul-
iarly significant. And thus my experience of myself gets
a certain provisional unity. But never do I observe my
Self as any single and unambiguous fact of consciousness.
IV
The empirical Ego has now been, in outline, charac-
terized. The source of its endless varieties has been
266 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
sketched. Its unity has been found to be not, in our
present form of existence, a fact that gets anywhere fully
presented, as a rationally determined whole of life or of
meaning. The empirical unity of the Ego depends
merely upon a certain continuity of our social and of
our inner life of experience and memory. The most
stable feature about the empirical Ego, is that sort of con-
trast in which it stands to the social world, literal and ideal,
in which we live. But precisely as here upon earth we
have no abiding city, just so, in our present human form
of consciousness, the Self is never presented except as a
more or less imperfectly organized series of experiences,
whose contrast with those of all other men fascinates us
intensely, but whose final meaning can simply never be
expressed in the type of experience which we men now
have at our disposal. Were our life not hid in an infi-
nitely richer and more significant life behind the veil, we
who have once observed the essential fragmentariness of
the empirical Ego would indeed have parted with our
hope of a true Selfhood.
But the two other types of conception of the Self re-
main to be characterized. The one of these types, the
second in our list of three, need detain us at this stage
but little. The third type we shall at once so sketch as
to define the momentous task that yet lies before us in
our later lectures.
The second type of the conceptions of the Ego consists
of all those views which regard the Self as in some meta-
physical sense a real being, without denning the true
Being of this Self in strictly idealistic terms. Such con-
ceptions of the human Self as an entity are numerous in
THE HUMAN SELF 207
the history of philosophy. Their classification and fur-
ther characterization will receive attention in the next
lecture. For the moment I may exemplify them by men-
tioning as their most familiar examples, those views
which conceive the human Self as, in some realistic sense, a
distinct and independent entity. For such views the true
Self is often essentially a Substance. Its individuality
means that in essence it is separable, not only from the
body, but from other souls. It preserves its unity despite
the chaos of our experiences, just because in itself, and
apart from all experience, it is One. It lies at the basis
of our psychical life ; and it must be sharply distin-
guished from the series of the states of consciousness,
and even from their empirical organization. It is the
source of all the order of our mental life ; and all our
self-consciousness is a more or less imperfect indication
of its nature.
Such realistic views are well known to you. And
you also know now why, without showing the least dis-
respect to their historical dignity, I can and must simply
decline to follow them into their details in these lec-
tures. They are all founded upon the realistic concep-
tion of Being. They must therefore all fall with that
conception. Their true spirit indeed is often of far
deeper moment than their mere letter. What doctrines
of Soul-Substance have often meant to express, namely,
a respect for human individuality, and an appreciation
of its eternal worth in the life of the Universe, our own
theory of the human individual will erelong develope
in its own fashion. But taken literally, the doctrine
that beneath or behind our conscious life there is a
2G8 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
permanent substance, itself never either presented or
presentable in consciousness, but real, and real in such
wise that its Being is independent of any knowledge
that from without refers to it, this whole doctrine, I
say, simply perishes, for the purposes of our argument,
together with Realism, and only its revised and purified
inner meaning can reappear, in quite another guise, in
the world of Idealism. Whatever the Self is, it is not
a Thing. It is not, in Aristotle's or in Des Cartes'
sense, a Substance. It is not a realistic entity of any
type. Whether we men ever rightly come to know it
or not, it exists only as somewhere known, and as a part
of the fulfilment of meaning in the divine life. We
are spared the trouble of proving this thesis here in
detail, simply because our general proof of Idealism
has discounted the entire issue. We are not comdemn-
ing Realism unheard ; but only after the most careful
analysis of its claims. But with Realism passes away
every view which regards the real Self as anything but
what every real fact in the universe is: A Meaning
embodied in a conscious life, present as a relative whole
within the unity of the Absolute life.
Well, there remains the third type of conception of
the Self, namely, the strictly idealistic type. And pre-
cisely this type it was that I exemplified before, when
I spoke of the way in which the Self has been distin-
guished, even by common sense, into a higher and a
lower, a nobler and a baser Self. As stated in ordinary
fashion, such concepts, as we saw, remain crude, and
lead to frequent inconsistency. Revised with reference
to the demands of our Idealism, the concept of the
THE HUMAN SELF 269
Self will assume a form which will reduce to unity
these apparent inconsistencies of ethical common sense,
and will also escape from bondage to those empirical
complexities forced upon us by the Ego of the passing
moment. We shall then see that the concept of the indi-
vidual Self is, in its higher forms, in large measure an
essentially Ethical Conception. And the third type of
conceptions of the Ego consists of definitions which
have always laid stress upon just this aspect. From
this point of view, the Self is not a Thing, but a
Meaning embodied in a conscious life. Its individual-
ity, in case of any human being, implies the essential
uniqueness of this life. Its unity, transcending as it
does what we ever find presented in our present type
of consciousness, implies that the true individual Self
of any man gets its final expression in some form of
consciousness different from that which we men now
possess. The empirical variety, complexity, ambiguity,
and inconsistency of our present consciousness of the
Self, is to be explained as due to the fact that, in the
moral order of the universe, no individual Self is or
can be isolated, or in any sense sundered from other
Selves, or from the whole realm of the inner life of
Nature itself. Consequently, even what is most indi-
vidual about the Self never appears except in the closest
connection with what transcends both the meaning and
the life of the finite individual. Now, in our present
form of conscious existence, we catch mere glimpses of
the true meaning of the individual Self, as this meaning
gets expressed in our deeds and in our ideals, and we
also obtain equally fragmentary glimpses of the way in
270 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
which this Self is linked to the lives of its fellows,
or is dependent for its expression upon its relations to
Nature, or is subject to the general moral order of the
universe. These various transient flashes of insight
constitute our present type of human experience. And
it is their variety, their inanifoldness, and their frag-
mentariness, which together are responsible for all those
inconsistencies in our accounts of the Self, incon-
sistencies which our present discussion has been illus-
trating. But if you want to free yourself from hopeless
bondage to such inconsistencies, you must look, not to
some realistic conception of a Soul-Substance, but to
some deeper account of the ethical meaning of our
present life than we have yet formulated. And from
this point of view we get a notion of Selfhood and of
individuality which may be summarized at the present
stage much as follows.
Our general idealistic theory asserts that the universe
in its wholeness is the expression of a meaning in a life.
What this view implies about every fragment and aspect
of life that your attention may chance to select, or that
your human experience may bring before you as the topic
of inquiry, we have in former lectures repeatedly pointed
out. Any instant of finite consciousness partially embod-
ies a purpose, and so possesses its own Internal Meaning.
Any such instant of finite consciousness also seeks, how-
ever, for other expression, for other objects, than are now
present to just that instant, and so possesses what we
have called its External Meaning. Our Idealism has de-
pended, from the first, upon the thesis that the Internal
and the External meaning of any finite process of experi-
THE HUMAN SELF 271
ence are dependent each upon the other, so that if the
whole meaning and intent of any finite instant of life is
fully developed, and perfectly embodied, this Whole
Meaning of the instant becomes identical with the Uni-
verse, with the Absolute, with the life of God. Even
now, whatever you are or seek, the implied whole mean-
ing of even your blindest striving is identical with the
entire expression of the divine Will. And it is in this
aspect of the world that we have found the unity of
Being. On the other hand, as we have also seen, this
unity of the world-life is no simple unity, such as the
mystic sought. It is an infinitely complex unity. And
of this complexity, of this wealth of life that the com-
plete expression of even your most transient and finite
glimpses of meaning implies, the foregoing facts about
the Self are merely instances. If you are in company
with a friend, the whole meaning of your thoughts and
of your interests while you speak with him, not only
requires for its complete expression his inner life as well
as yours, and not only requires the genuine and conscious
unity of his life and of yours by virtue of the ties of
your friendship ; but this same meaning also demands
that, despite this unity of your life as friends, yes, even
because of this unity, your friend and yourself shall
remain also contrasted lives, whose unity includes and
presupposes your variety as these two friends. For a
friendship is not a simple unity of conscious life, but the
unity of two conscious lives each of which contrasts itself
with the other, and feels in the other's relative indepen-
dence the fulfilment of its own purpose. And just so,
when your meaning is not friendly but hostile, and when
272 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
you stand in presence of your opponent, your rival, your
enemy, your finite conscious meaning still implies, even
in the midst of all its confused illusions, the demand that
the very life of your enemy shall exist as the expression
of your hostile intent to hold him as your real enemy,
while nevertheless this life of his, other than your
present conscious experience, and linked with your expe-
rience through the ties of meaning, is contrasted with
your own life as the life that yours opposes and in so far
seeks either to win over to your purposes, or to annul.
Finite love and finite hate, and human experience of life
in any form, always imply, therefore, that the will now
present, but imperfectly expressed, in this passing instant,
is genuinely expressed through other conscious life that,
from the Absolute point of view, is at once in conscious
unity with this instant's purpose, and also in conscious
contrast with this instant's purpose.
Primarily then, the contrast of Self and not-Self comes
to us as the contrast between the Internal and the Exter-
nal meaning of this present moment's purpose. In the
narrowest sense, the Self is just your own present im-
perfectly expressed pulsation of meaning and purpose,
this striving, this love, this hate, this hope, this fear,
this inquiry, this inner speech of the instant's will, this
thought, this deed, this desire, in brief, this idea taken
as an Internal Meaning. In the widest sense, the not-Self
is all the rest of the divine whole of conscious life, the
Other, the outer World of expressed meaning taken as in
contrast with what, just at this instant of our human form
of consciousness, is observed, and, relatively speaking, pos-
sessed. Any finite idea is so far a Self ; and I can, if you
THE HUMAN SELF 273
please, contrast my present Self with my past or my
future Self, with yesterday's hopes or with to-morrow's
deeds, quite as genuinely as with your inner life or with
the whole society of which I am a member, or with the
whole life of which our experience of Nature is a hint,
or, finally, with the life of God in its entirety. In every
such case, I take account of a true contrast between Self
and not-Self. All such contrasts have a common charac-
ter, namely, that in them an imperfectly expressed will is
set over against its own richer expression, while stress is
laid upon the fact, a perfectly genuine fact of Being,
the fact that the whole expression always retains, and does
not merely absorb or transmute, the very contrast between
the finite Self and its desired or presupposed Other, its
world of External Meanings. But if you ask how many
such contrasts can be made, I reply, An infinite number.
In countless ways can the Self of this instant's glimpse of
conscious meaning be set into contrast with the not-Self,
whose content may be the life of past and future, of
friends and of enemies, of the social order and of Nature,
of finite life in general, and of God's life in its wholeness.
But if the contrast of Self and not-Self can thus be
defined with an infinite variety of emphasis, the unity of
each of the two, Self and not-Self, can be emphasized
in an equally infinite number of ways, whose depth and
whose extent of meaning will vary with the range of
life of which one takes account, and with the sort of
contrast between Self and not-Self which one leaves still
prominent over against the unity. Thus, in the familiar
case of our ordinary social self-consciousness, I first view
a certain realm of past and future experience as so bound
274 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
up with the internal meaning of this instant's conscious
experience, that I call this temporal whole of life the life
of my own human Self, while I contrast this private
existence of mine with that of my friends, my opponents,
or of my other fellows, or with that of human society in
general. The motives that lead to such an identification
of the Self of the instant with a certain portion of that
which is the instant's not-Self, namely, with a certain
portion of past and future experience, are, as we have
seen, extremely various, and in our empirical existence,
both fickle and transitory. Whoever believes that he
has any one rational principle for his usual identification
of his past and future with the Self of this instant, has
only to consider the psychological variations of self-
consciousness before enumerated to discover his error.
What will remain, after such an examination of the Self
of common sense, will be the really deep and important
persuasion that he ought to possess or to create for himself,
despite this chaos, some one principle, some finally signifi-
cant contrast, whereby he should be able, with an united
and permanent meaning, to identify that portion of the
world's life which is to be, in the larger sense, his own,
and whereby he should become able to contrast with this,
. his larger Self, all the rest of the world of life.
And now this very consideration, this fact that one
ought to be able to select from all the universe a certain
portion of remembered and expected, of conceived and of
intended life as that of his own true and individual Self,
and that one ought to contrast with this whole of life,
with this one's larger or truer individuality, the life of all
other individual Selves, and the life of the Absolute in
THE HUMAN SELF 275
its wholeness, this consideration, I say, shows us at
once the sense in which the Self is an Ethical Category.
At this instant, as I have said, you can indeed identify
the Self, if you please, with just the instant's passing
glimpse of Internal Meaning ; and in that case you can
call all else the not- Self. To do this is to leave the
Self a mere thrill of transient life, a fragment whose
deeper meaning is wholly external to itself. But you
can, and in general you do, first identify a remembered
i past, and an intended future, with the Self whose indi- /
Ividuality is just now hinted to you; and this enlarged(
self of memory and purpose you then oppose to a not-/
Self whose content is first the world of your fellow-men,\
and then the world of Nature and of the Absolute in its
wholeness. Now what justification have you for this
view of your larger Self ? Apart from the capricious
and shifting views of common sense, you can have, I
reply, but one justification, namely this : You regard this
present moment's life and striving as a glimpse of a
certain task now assigned to you, the task of your life as
friend, as worker, as loyal citizen, or in general as man,
i.e. as one of God's expressions in human form. You
conceive that, however far you might proceed towards the
fulfilment of this task, however rich this individual life of
yours might become, it would always remain, despite its
unity with the world-life, in some true sense contrasted
with the lives of your fellows, and with the life of God,
just as now you stand in contrast to both. While your
whole meaning is now, and will always remain one with the /
entire life of God, you conceive that this whole meaning
expresses itself in the form of an articulate system of ,
276 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
contrasting and cooperating lives, of which one, namely
your own individual life, is more closely linked, in
purpose, in task, in meaning, with the life of this in-
stant, than is the life of any other individual. Or as you
can say : " At this instant I am indeed one with God, in
the sense that in him my own absolute Selfhood is ex-
pressed. But God's will is expressed in a manifold life.
And this life is a system of contrasted lives that are
various even by virtue of their significant union. For
true unity of meaning is best manifested in variety, just
as the most intimate and wealthy friendship is that of
strongly contrasting friends. And in the manifold lives
that the world in its unity embodies, there is one, and
only one, whose task is here hinted to me as my task, my
life-plan, an ideal whose expression needs indeed the
cooperation of countless other Selves, of a social order, of
Nature, and of the whole universe, but whose individual
significance remains contrasted with all other individual
significance. If this is my task, if this is what my past
life has meant, if this is what my future is to fulfil, if it is
in this way that I do God's work, if my true relation to
the Absolute is only to be won through the realization of
this life-plan, and through the accomplishment of this
unique task, then indeed I am a Self, and a Self who is
nobody else, just precisely in so far as m} r life has this
purpose and no other. By this meaning of my life-plan,
by this possession of an ideal, by this Intent always to re-
main another than my fellows despite my divinely planned
unity with them, by this, and not by the possession of any
Soul- Substance, I am defined and created a Self.''''
Such, I say, will be your confession, if once you come
THE HUMAN SELF 277
to define the Self in the only genuine terms, namely,
in ethical terms. If once you choose this definition,
then the endless empirical varieties of self-consciousness,
and the caprices of common sense, will not confuse
you. You will know that since now we see through a
glass darkly, you cannot expect at present to experience
your human selfhood in any one consistent and final
expression. But, too, you will know that you are a
Self precisely in so far as you intend to accomplish
God's will by becoming one ; and that you are an indi-
vidual precisely in so far as you purpose to do your
Father's business in unique fashion, so that in this instant
shall begin a work that can be finished only in eternity,
a work that, however closely bound up it may be
with all the rest of the divine life, still remains in
its expression distinguishable from all this other life.
You will indeed recognize that at every moment you
receive from without, and from other Selves, the very
experiences that give your Selfhood a chance to possess
its meaning. You will know that of yourself alone
you would be nothing. You will also know that as
co-worker with your fellows, and as servant of God,
you have a destiny of which our present life gives us
but the dimmest hint.
This is in outline, the doctrine of the ethical Self, to
whose development and defence our later lectures shall
be devoted.
^
*.<
IJCf
LECTURE VII
LECTURE VII
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING
In the last lecture, after a study of the various forms
which our empirical self-consciousness assumes, we reached
an idealistic definition of what we mean by an individual
human Self, regarded as a Real Being. During the
present lecture I shall, by the term Self, denote, unless
I expressly declare to the contrary, the human Self, as
thus defined, and not the Absolute Self as the Absolute.
In the present lecture I propose, first, to make some
further comparison of our theory of the Self with doc-
trines that have been maintained in the history of
thought, and in this connection to develope our own
thesis more fully. Secondly, I shall undertake to
consider the relation of our theory of the individual
to that Interpretation of Nature which we expounded
in our Fourth Lecture, and to discuss the sense
in which, from our point of view, new individuals
can appear in the course of natural evolution. Thirdly,
I intend to consider briefly the question as to the
degree to which the Self is causally determined, as
to its experience and its will, by its relations to the
natural order. Finally, I shall discuss the sense in
which the individual Self can possess ethical Freedom,
in view of its relation to the divine Will.
281
282 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
Historically, there are theories of the Self which cor-
respond to each of the four conceptions of Being.
And in the first place, ever since the doctrine of the
Sankhya, that classic instance of early Realism, realistic
Metaphysic has been an especially wealthy source of
various theories of the Self. Not always has Realism
taken the form of the Soul-Substance theory, although,
as we saw at the last time, that theory itself is a typical
instance of Realism, and is an especially frequent in-
stance of the realistic view of the Self. But any theory
of the Self uses the realist's conception of Being, in
case this theory views the Self as logically or essentially
independent, in its innermost nature, of the fact that
other Selves exist, so that you could conceive other
Selves vanishing, while this Self still remained, in
some innermost core of its Being, unaltered. Leibniz's
Monads are realistic selves ; and very frequently the
extremer forms of ethical individualism, in order to
preserve the dignity, or the freedom, or the rights of
the Self, have chosen to use a realistic formulation.
When thus defined by the more ethical types of indi-
vidualistic Realism, the Self seems to stand, within its
own realm, as a sort of absolute authority, over against
any external will or knowledge that pretends to deter-
mine its nature, or its precise limits, or its meaning.
It is merely what its own substantial nature determines
it to be. It is thus a separate entity, in its essence
unapproachable, in some sense, by God or man, uncon-
querable, possessing perhaps its own inalienable rights,
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 283
the unit of all ethical order, the centre of its own uni-
verse. From this point of view, the principal problem,
for any such realistic Individualism, always becomes the
question how this Self, whose interests are essentially
its own, can rationally come to recognize any responsi-
bility to other Selves or to God, or to any absolute
Ought, beyond its own caprice. Just because, within
its own realm, it is whatever it is in entire indifference
to whether you from without know it or not ; or to
whether your external will approves it or not ; the
problem at once arises as to why this Self should, in
its turn, recognize any authority. In its knowl-
edge of Being, the independent Self of any theoreti-
cal form of Realism, when once the independence of
this individual Self has come to be recognized, tends
to become, in extreme cases, solipsistic. But in its
morality, this same Self, in equally extreme forms of
ethical Realism, teuds to become an anarchist. 1 If, in
such extreme and less common forms, Realism, untrue
to its usual historical tendencies, throws off its usual
and respectable conservatism, that is merely because,
in general, extremes easily meet, and because, in the
special case of the theory of the Self, Realism deals
with a test problem which is peculiarly apt to bring
out its deeper inconsistencies. About the world ex-
ternal to all our human Selves, Realism, as it appears
1 Max Stirner's Der Einzige unci Sein Eicjenthum is in the main an
example of this type of treatment of the Self. Nietzsche's conception,
however, cannot properly be placed here in view of the idealistic element
which, as I think, can justly be recognized in his conception of the
individual.
281 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
in history, is typically submissive, respectable, and con-
servative, just because it is dealing unreflectively with
an unapproachable and absolute Reality beyond our own
life. But so soon as Realism attempts to apply its
categories to the realm within, where its unreflective
methods are decidedly not at home, it does not, indeed,
become less dogmatic than usual, and not the less dis-
posed to cite tradition, and to hurl its customary patho-
logical epithets at its opponents, but it becomes more
manifestly unable, when once it has defined any one
of its Independent Beings, to say what link or tie, what
law or reason, what obligation or responsibility, can
ever bind this Independent Being to any other. Hence
the dogmatic anarchists of the history of ethics are
often realists in their theory of the Self.
As to the Mystical theory of the Self, we have
already followed to the end its account of the problem
of life. The Self is the Absolute, the Absolute is simple,
and there is neither variety of individuals, nor form nor
law of life left. The only word as to the true Self is
the Hindoo's Neti, JSTeti. Consequently Mysticism simply
condemns all finite individuality as an evil dream.
Modern Critical Rationalism also has its own accounts
of the Self. These again are manifold. But the Third
Conception of Being in general, as we have all along
seen, is both reflective and widely observant ; and its
theories of the Self have, in most cases, their large
measure of truth. For Critical Rationalism the Self is
no independent entity, nor any mere experience, but a
being whose reality involves the validity of a system
of laws and relationships. These laws may be viewed
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 285
in their psychological aspect. In this sense my Self
extends as far as my possible memories, or expectations,
or definable plans hold valid for the empirical region
called my human life. And my existence as a Self
means merely that these laws of my memory, of my
will, and of my personal experience are valid as long
as I live. Or the laws in question may be viewed as
those of an ethical interpretation of life. In this case,
by the Self, Critical Rationalism means a being defined
in the terms of a certain valid system of laws about
the rights and the duties of persons. The Self, in the
view of such theories, does not first exist as an Inde-
pendent Being and then either originate, or else acquire,
as an external addition, its system of rights and of
duties. But, for Critical Rationalism, the ethical Self
is defined and exists only through the prior recognition
of these valid rights and duties themselves. Whoever
has not learned to recognize his office in the world, as
a subject of the moral law, or as a member of a social
order, is therefore no ethical Self at all. But whoever
is a Self, is such by virtue of this recognized validity
of law. In the history of recent thought the Kantian
conception of the Self, apart from its realistic elements,
is, in its consequences, essentially of this third type.
Kant's knowing Self exists, from our human point of
view, precisely in so far as the Categories, which express
its unity in the realm of experience, are valid. Its
existence as the Subject of Knowledge, so far as we
can know it, thus becomes coextensive with the range
of such validity. Kant's ethical Self exists as the free
recognizer of the Moral Law. And in Fichte, who
286 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
purged Kant's doctrine of its realistic elements, this
view of the Self especially conies to light, and contends
with the purely idealistic tendencies of Fichte. For
Fichte, the Self, although the very principle of Being,
rather ought to be than is.
Now the truth, and the practical value of every such
doctrine, lies in the fact that it recognizes the valid rela-
tions of the Self, and the laws which bind the Self to its
fellows, as conditions without which the Self can neither
exist nor be conceived. The defect of Critical Rational-
ism lies in the consequences of its essentially abstract and
impersonal view of Being. The Self, in this sense, is a law
rather than a life ; and a type of existence rather than an
Individual. It is precisely the restoration of individual-
ity to the Self which constitutes the essential deed of
our Idealism. For us the Self has indeed no Independent
Being ; but it is a life, and not a mere valid law. It
gains its very individuality through its relation to God ;
but in God it still dwells as an individual ; for it is an
unique expression of the divine purpose. And since the
Self is precisely, in its wholeness, the conscious and
intentional fulfilment of this divine purpose, in its own
unique way, the individual will of the Self is not wholly
determined by a power that fashions it as clay is fashioned
and that is called God's will ; but, on the contrary, what
the Self in its wholeness wills is, just in so far, God's will,
and is identical with one of the many expressions implied
by a single divine purpose, so that, for the reasons already
set forth, in general, in the closing lecture of the fore-
going series, the Self is in its innermost individuality, not
an independent, but still a Free Will, which in so far
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 287
owns no external Master, despite its unity with the whole
life of God, and despite its dependence in countless ways
upon Nature and upon its fellows, for everything except
the individuality and uniqueness of its life.
Meanwhile, I cannot too strongly insist that, in our
present form of human consciousness, the true Self of any
individual man is not a datum, but an ideal. It is true
that people at first very naturally, and often very resent-
fully, reject this interpretation. "Do I not directly
know," one insists, " that I am and who I am?" I
answer : You indeed know, although never in a merely
direct way, that you exist. But in the present life you
never find out, in terms of any direct experience, what
you are. I know that I am, as this individual human
Self, only in so far as every Internal Meaning, that of my
present experience included, sends me elsewhere, or to
some Other, for its complete interpretation, while this
particular sort of Internal Meaning, such as gets expressed
in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, the meaning whereby I
come to be aware of myself as this individual different
from the rest of the world, implies and demands, for its
complete embodiment, some sort of contrast between Self
and not-Self. I am assured of myself, then, only in so far
as I am assured of the Nature of Being in general. I am
indeed right in thus contrasting Self and not-Self ; but
my certainty regarding the Being of this contrast depends
upon the same general assurances that lead to my whole
metaphysical view of the nature of Reality.
And now as to the finding out what I am, the answer
to this question involves, upon its empirical side, all the
complications and inconsistencies of common sense which
288 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
we set forth at the last time. If you take ine merely as
common sense views me, I am, from moment to moment,
whatever social experience or lonely reflection makes me
seem. I am, so far, whatever my empirical contrast with
you, with society in general, with those whom I love, or
with those against whom I contend, I am, in brief,
whatever my remembered or anticipated powers, fortunes,
and plans, cause me to regard with emphasis as myself in
contrast with the rest of the world. There is no instant
in our human experience when I can say, Here I have not
merely assumed, or presupposed, or conceived, but actu-
ally found in experience the Self, so that I here observe
what I finally am.
In what way then can I just now rationally define my-
self as this actually unique and real person ? Already
we have seen, in general, the answer to this question.
The Self can be defined in terms of an Ideal. If we ask
a man to observe once for all what he now is, we call his
attention to various empirical accidents of his life, to
his bodily presence, to his organic sensations, to his name,
to his social status, and to his memories of the past. But
none of these are of any uniquely determined significance;
and not thus can we show a man what he is. But when,
in vexation at the moral ineffectiveness of a man, we sig-
nificantly use the imperative mood and say, " Whatever
you know or do not know about yourself, at all events be
I somebody" we lay stress upon what is, after all, the
essential point. What we mean by our words is the ex-
hortation : " Have a plan ; give unity to your aims ;
intend something definite by your life ; set before your-
self one ideal." We conceive, in such cases, that the
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 289
Self is definable in terms of purpose, of continuity of life-
plan, and of voluntary subordination of chance experi-
ences to a persistently emphasized ideal. If this ideal
keeps the individual contrasted with other individuals, as
the servant of these masters, or again as the servant, in
some unique fashion, of God, as the friend of these
friends, as the teacher of these pupils, as the fellow-
worker with these comrades, then the Self which we have
defined is the Self of an individual man. It is in so far
not to be confounded with their selves just because the
ideal, if expressed in a life, would be expressed in con-
stant contrast with these other lives. Our idealistic
theory teaches that all individual lives and plans and ex-
periences win their unity in God, in such wise that there
is, indeed, but one absolutely final and integrated Self,
that of the Absolute. But our idealism also recognizes
that in the one life of the divine there is, indeed, articu-
lation, contrast, and variety. So that, while it is, indeed,
true that for every one of us the Absolute Self is God, we
still retain our individuality, and our distinction from one
another, just in so far as our life-plans, by the very ne-^
cessity of their social basis, are mutually contrasting life- 1
plans, each one of which can reach its own fulfilment only
by recognizing other life-plans as different from its own.
I And if from the Absolute point of view, as well as fronK
our own, every individual life that has the unity of a
plan, takes its own unique place in the world's life,
then for God, as for ourselves, we various human beings
live related lives, but still contrasting and various lives,
each one of which is an individual life, connected
within itself, but distinguishable from all the other lives,
u
290 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
precisely as our normal social consciousness makes us
seem.
But now, if my human Self can be defined in a single
and connected fashion only in terms of such an ideal, we
see at once that, in our present human life, no one life-
plan ever gets both a precise definition and a complete
embodiment ; and, therefore, we can say, Never in the
present life do we find the Self as a given and realized
fact. It is for us an ideal. Its true place is in the eter-
nal world, where all plans are fulfilled. In God alone do
we fully come to ourselves. There alone do we know
even as we are known.
The conception of the Self thus sketched involves diffi-
culties, and leaves special questions still to be answered,
such as I should be the last to ignore. It was for the
sake of meeting just such difficulties that our whole pre-
vious discussion of the Theory of Being was required as
a beginning of our enterprise ; and that our Theory of
Nature has also been needed as a preliminary to the
study of the Self. In general we stated both these diffi-
culties and their answers in dealing with the general
problems of Being. But in defining the Self we have
already recognized these general problems in a case where,
owing to the complex natural relations of the Self, they/
possess peculiar significance. Nobody can deal with the
problem of the Self upon the basis of the empirical facts
about human selfhood without seeing, as we saw at the
last time, that the Self is in the most intimate relation of
dependence upon both natural and social conditions, for
every one amongst its attributes that can be defined in
general terms. It has an origin in time. It has an
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 291
hereditary temperament. It is helpless to become any-
thing apart from social training. And, if you remove
from its inner consciousness the recognition of its rela-
tions of contrast to its literal and to its more or less
ideally conceived comrades, rivals, and authorities, it
loses at any moment all that makes self-consciousness
either worth having, or conceivable. Its whole ethical
significance thus depends upon relations to God and to
man which, in its capacity as finite being, it can only
accept and cannot create. In all these senses the Self
temporally appears as a product, a result, a determined
creature of destiny. Remove from it the support of the
world, and it instantly becomes nothing. Moreover, you
in vain endeavor to save the independence of the Self by
defining it as a Substance. For all the independence
that it ever can even desire to have is a consciojis_inde-
pendence, and to this a Soul-Substance contributes noth-
ing. And if your consciousness is merely based upon an
existence which lies beneath the consciousness, and which
never comes to light as your own present will and mean-
ing, you gain nothing but a name when this unobserved
substratum of your personality is called your Soul. The
Cartesian res eogitans is significant precisely in so far as
it is the name for a rational thinking process, but not in
so far as it is a res. What you want, however, for your
Self, is conscious meaning, conscious individuality, and
conscious freedom. And the problem is, in view of your
unquestionable dependence upon the world for all your
endowments, How shall you win this conscious mean-
ing and freedom and individuality ; and how is it possi-
ble that in any sense you should possess them ? Now it
292 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
is precisely these questions that our Idealism undertakes
to answer.
From our point of view, your distinction from the
rest of the universe, your contrast with other selves,
your uniqueness, your freedom, your individuality, all
depend upon one essential principle. This world that
we live in is, in its wholeness, the expression of one
determinate and absolute purpose, the fulfilment of the
divine will. This fulfilment is unique, just because, in
the world as a whole, the divine accomplishes its pur-
pose, attains its goal, finds in absolute dominateness
what it seeks, and therefore will have no other world
than this. Now for this very reason, since the world in
its wholeness is unique, every portion of this whole life,
every fragment of experience, every pulsation of will
in the universe, every intent anywhere partially em-
bodied, is, by virtue of its relation to this unique
whole, also unique, but unique precisely in so far as
it is related to the whole, and not in so far as you
abstract its various features and endowments from their
relation to God, and view them in finite relations.
Taken apart from its relation to the whole, the finite
fragment appears as something more or less incompre-
hensible, and therefore as something more or less vaguely
general, a mere case of a type, a member of a series
a temporal expression of dissatisfied will, a fact that
seeks for other facts to explain it, a bit of experience
subject to various psychological laws, a sort of life
that can be interpreted now in this way, and now in
that, just as, at the last time, we found the Self subject
to the most varying interpretations and estimates.
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 293
Yet fear not to find in what manifold ways your
life depends upon Nature and Society. It depends
upon them for absolutely all of its general characters.
That is, whatever character it shares with others, implies
dependence upon others. If it did not so depend, it
would have no intimate share in the common life.
But its dependence means precisely that it derives
from the other lives everything except its uniqueness,
everything except its individual fashion of acknowledg-
ing and taking interest in this its very dependence, and of J
responding thereto by its deeds. When, as man, you take
your place amongst men, you thus derive all of your
life from elsewhere, except in so far as your life becomes
for you your own way of viewing your relation to the
whole, and of actively expressing your own ideal re-
garding this relation. This your own way of expressing
God's will is not derived. It is yourself. And it is
yours because God worketh in you. The Spirit of God
in its wholeness compels you, the individual, the
Self, the unique personality, in the sense that it com-
pels you to be an individual, and to be free. Or it
compels your individual will only in so far as you
consciously compel yourself.
You indeed find then, as Goethe found in his well-
known verses about heredity, that your dependence on
the rest of the world extends to every character of
your nature, precisely in so far as you can define such
a character in general terms. Your temperament you
derived from your ancestors, your training from your
social order. Your opinions, as definable ideas, belong
to many of your neighbors also. Your consciousness
294 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
of yourself, from moment to moment, depends upon
social contrast effects, and varies with them. But your
purpose, your life-plan, just so far as it possesses true
rationality of aim, is the purpose to find for yourself
just your own place in God's world, and to fill that
place, as nobody else can fill it. Now this purpose, I
maintain, is indeed your own. As nobody else can
share it, so nobody else can create it ; and from no
source external to yourself have you derived it. And
this I say on the sole ground that in you, precisely in
so far as you know the world as one world, and intend
\ your place in that one world to be unique, God's will is
\ \ consciously expressed. And his will is one, and in that
^- will every life finds its own unique meaning. Hence
our theory of the Self assigns to it the character of the
\ Free Individual but maintains that this character belongs
to it in its true relation to God, and cannot be observed,
at any one instant of time, as an obvious and independent
fact.
II
But herewith, having defined what general Form of
Being the Self possesses, we come to a question that in
the former lecture was kept in the background, although
it lay very near to us. This is the question as to the
precise relation of our present doctrine about the i ndi-
vidual huma n Selfto our general theory of the process
of Evolution in Nature. If the individual is, within the
range of our experience, already known as a product of
Nature, and of his social relations, by so much the more
must his temporal origin, in those aspects of it which
\
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 296
escape our direct observation, be viewed as a portion of
the vast activities that are hinted to us by our experience
of Nature in general. Therefore an effort to bring our
theory of the Self into closer relation to our former
interpretation of the process of evolution, must form at
once the culmination of our doctrine about Nature and
a sort of test of our views as to the Self. To such an
effort we are now ready to proceed.
As has now been sufficiently shown, a frank admission
of the natural origin of the Self, and a study of its rela-
tions to the physical world, in no sense involves an aban-
donment of the idealistic point of view. That the world
is the expression of my will, and that nevertheless there
has been an infinite past time in which I, the human
individual, did not exist may indeed seem at first a
hard saying. But our discussion of the general Categories
of Experience, our idealistic theory of Time, and our por-
trayal of the contrast between the private Self of the
human individual and the Absolute Self in its wholeness,
all these preliminaries have cleared the way for an under-
standing of every such difficulty. In dealing with the
categories of the Ought, we saw how and why it is always
my will as this human being to acknowledge what is
other than the present temporal expression of my will.
In our doctrine of Time, we reconciled the fact of our
acknowledgment of a remote past time with our assur-
ance that all temporal facts are at once present to the
Absolute. In our development of the concept of the
human Self, we have shown that we ourselves demand
the other individuals, as the very condition of our ex-
istence in the Absolute, and that through a wealth of
296 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
individuality other than our own, and only through such
variety, is our own life-purpose to be attained. Just as
my opponent in a game embodies my will to play with
him by opposing me, and gives me an opportunity to be
myself through the very fact that he expresses my will
in the form of a selfhood whose particular plans are uncon-
trolled by my private will, while mine are in part uncon-
trolled by his, so in general, the private Self is this
Self only through contrast with and dependence upon
others ; and finds its complete Selfhood embodied in other
individual life than its own. Moreover, in order that my
private will should at this temporal instant form a definite
plan, I must always presuppose some world of completed
fact as the basis of my present deed ; and the realm of
that which is viewed as the so far completed expression of
the Will, is the temporally Past. The Past too, in its
own way, embodies my present will, but embodies it by
virtue of the very fact that the Past is the realm of the
irrevocable, which I am therefore able to presuppose as a
fixed starting-point in forming every new plan. The
manifold dependence of my present will upon the social,
natural, and temporal order, is thus not only matter of
fact, but also a requirement of our idealism.
Ill
Meanwhile, in order to give full expression to our
hypothesis regarding the temporal evolution of new forms
of individual selfhood, it will be necessary first to recall
some features of our doctrine of the sense in w hich the
Absolute includes a variety of lives, and possesses a
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 297
temporal expression at all. Only then can we see in
detail how what we call novel forms of life can arise in
time.
In our criticism of Mysticism, in the former Series of
these lectures, 1 we pointed out that a goal which is " a
goal of no real process, has as little value as it has con-
tent, as little Being as it has finitude." Ever since, in
defining the Absolute from our own point of view, we have
indeed declared it to be a goal, i.e. a fulfilment of pur-
pose, but have also insisted that, corresponding to each
result that is attained in the Absolute, there must also be,
in the real world of the Absolute itself, a corresponding
purpose or intent, which, just because it is fulfilled in the
whole, is at the same time consciously distinguished, as a
longing, a pursuit, a finite idea, from its own fulfil-
ment. This consideration has constituted, throughout,
the ground of our deduction of finitude, our means of
conceiving the union of the One and the Many in the
unity of the Absolute Consciousness. For, as a con-
sequence of this principle, the Absolute Life is definable,
in the terms of our Supplementary Essay, as a Self-Rep-
resentative System. Every fact in this system, namely,
fulfils a purpose. The consciousness of this purpose is,
however, a fact distinct from the fulfilment, and yet cor-
respondent thereto; while, on the other hand, this con-
sciousness itself, as a fact, belonging to the system of the
Absolute, is in its own turn the fulfilment of another pur-
pose, which is the consequence, in some degree, of another
act that has led up to it ; and so on ad infinitum. A con-
sciousness of purpose, distinct from fulfilment, is, how-
1 Lecture V, p. 193.
298 NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
ever, when viewed by itself, a longing, a dissatisfaction,
an incompleteness. Hence the Absolute Life includes an
infinity of longings, each one of which, in so far as it is
taken in itself, is a consciousness of imperfection and
finitude seeking its relative fulfilment in some other finite
act or state. Only through such consciousness is perfec-
tion attainable. The only alternative here is Mysticism,
and that is Nothingness. But, as our Supplementary
Essay also showed, 1 any system that is self-representative
in one way, is self -representative in countless other ways,
and the consciousness of the system involved in each one
of these ways of self-representation is therefore distinct
from the consciousness involved in any of the others, since
each way involves a series of voluntary strivings after a
goal. In consequence, as the Supplementary Essay 2 also
pointed out, whoever conceives the Absolute as a Self,
conceives it as in its form inclusive of an infinity of vari-
ous, but interwoven and so of intercommunicating Selves,
each one of which represents the totality of the Absolute
in its own way, and with its own unity, so that the sim-
plest conceivable structure of the Absolute Life would be
stateable only in terms of an infinitely great variety of
types of purpose and of fulfilment, intertwined in the
most complex fashions. Apart from any doctrine of
evolution, then, we have to regard the Absolute in its
wholeness as comprising many Selves, in the most various
interrelations.
Now we must urgently insist that, when once we have
recognized this variety of finite purposes, and of infinite sys-
1 See the former Series of these lectures, p. 515, sqq.
2 p. 546.
THE PLACE OF THE SELF IN BEING 299
tems consisting of finite purposes, within the Absolute, we
are not at all obliged to assume, as many more or less ideal-
istic systems have done, some further principle of blind
self-differentiation within the Absolute as the ground of
the separation or falling away of the finite beings from
their divine source. Longing, considered as a fact other
than fulfilment,/ is, indeed, in its own already distinguished
nature, to any extent blind. But, by our hypothesis, long-
ing exists in the Absolute Life, and as a significant portion
thereof. Any temporal present, taking that word in the
" inclusive " sense that was defined in our Third lecture
of the present Series, contains, as we saw in discussing
Time, just such an experience of finitude and of dissatis-
faction. Now longing, in itself, means wow-possession of
the goal ; and the temporal instance shows us that the
proposition: " To-day the ideal is so
