WE have now learned something concerning the general Forms in which we conceive the facts that we acknowledge 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 significance of certain fundamental motives that guide us, from moment to moment, and from stage to stage of our intellectual 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, 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 consciousness. 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 enabled 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 Appreciation, that is, a world where other wills than our own present 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 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 voluntary processes, which occur because somebody finds it worth while that they should occur. Our ordinary commonsense 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 categories 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 concept 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 empirical facts that men acknowledge on the other hand, in dealing with one another and with Nature.

I

No precise definition of the scope covered by the term Nature can be given in advance of a Theory of Nature. 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 conceived 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 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 processes. 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 presence of sense-qualities,—colors, sounds, odors, touch, impressions, and the like. On the other hand it is perfectly indubitable that the senses show, now to one and now to another of us men, all the data that, after comparing 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 conviction, 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 whatever about a collection of principles called fundamental or innate assurances. Nor yet can we here, appealing to our more thoughtful and scientifically organized experience, 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 foundations 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 looking 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 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 external 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 philosophy, 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 Conception of Being, while our finitude always shows us that we have not won the whole of Being, it is the fulfilment, —the always relative and imperfect fulfilment,—but still the fulfilment of our internal meanings, and not the opaque resistance which the world offers to these meanings, 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 incompleteness, 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 illustrated 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 respond 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 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 presupposed 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 possession, 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 indeed 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 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 primarily 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 relation 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 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, however, 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 natural truths which are of the most theoretical importance to us, are often truths that result from an indirect interpretation of facts with which the sense of resistance in any direct muscular sense has very little to do. Do the geometrical 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 apparently 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 adequate 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 physical phenomena known to common sense and to science, is inseparably bound up with our belief in the existence of our 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 popular 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 knowable 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 instance, 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 remain 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 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 private and finite experience of any or of all men, it is different with the sort of reality which we ascribe to what we usually regard as the material world.

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 characters 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 are so constituted as to find the same sort of natural phenomena. 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 consideration 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 besides 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.

III

Our belief in Man, then, is logically prior to our interpretation 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 connectedness and interrelated unity of their common experience, despite the apparent separateness of their individual states of mind.

But what then is the source of our belief in the reality of our fellow-men? To this question the customary answer 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 expression 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 fulfilling 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 meanings. Yet even this customary way of explaining our belief that our fellow-men exist is still, to my mind, inadequate. 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 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 comments; they pass judgments; they express novel combinations 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 constantly needed supplement to our own fragmentary meanings. 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 interpretation 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 finitude 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 Conception 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 imparted 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 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 analyzed. 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 localization in our finite world, as the ideas which our fellows express, by voice, by gesture, by writing, and by countless 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 insight into our world. That he exists at all we can therefore 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 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 fellow 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 experiences, as if they were facts common to both of us. And herewith we are prepared to return to the conception of material Nature.

IV

The organism of my fellow-man is directly known to me as a phenomenal object, moving about in what my experience 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 game realm in which I see my fellow expressing his meanings, 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 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 interpretation of my own social presuppositions. I learn to conceive 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 Absolute. 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 in our Second Lecture, appears as between us; that is, it is such that our sharp distinction from one another depends 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 capable of coming into an equally close, and also equally remote, relation to all of us. Here then, is a special instance 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 interpretation, 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 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 any particular man, while the shining of the sun is still something 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 conditions 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 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 interpretation 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 definitely 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 smelling of an object; while I can both see and touch processes 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 tendency. What is seen and touched can 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 æsthetic 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 outgrowth 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 separation between material nature and the significant inner life of our fellows?

I answer, here too, it is first the way in which material nature enters into our common social life together which fixes our attention upon this contrast between persons 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 human relations to the material world have a social significance 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 purposes 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 profoundly human and social. The nature that our industrial 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 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 civilization 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 appreciators 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 Humanity 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 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 connected whole,—a social order, such as is one's own country, 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 independent 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 mystical 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 relation 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 coöperate 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 coöperation. 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 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 expression 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 animistic 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. Discrimination, 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 we 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.

All these processes are indeed kept under rigid control 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 experience” would be to cut ourselves off from definite social relations. To accept this verdict, not blindly, but with constantly renewed criticism, and with a frequent 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 uniform 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 consequents.” 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 ambiguous, 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 rational 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 definite sense. Or again, from our own point of view, the Internal Meaning of every idea demands as its complete 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 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 mathematical, æesthetic 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 relation, 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,2 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 set of “transformations” of which just that ordered series consists. This, so far, is due to the very conditions of the discrimination of serial order. The more careful the discriminations, the more minute the examination 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 law of succession which remains 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 discriminate 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 depends. 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 conceive the series (as, in the World of Description one does conceive it) as in its nature either altogether continuous, 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 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 consequents 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 character would remain unchanged in the series that were there to be found. Our principle, as thus interpreted, while applicable to the various parts of the world in space, refers especially to the temporal invariance 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 conceives 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 unrecognizably 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 Appreciation, in the life of a Self, in a realm where what is done at any time is founded upon what has been done before, in brief, in any Well-Ordered Series of events, the thesis just stated, far from being an axiom, is simply not universally true at all. Countless aspects of a Well-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 throughout 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 unvarying 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 be organized in definite ways, in case many people agree to coöperate 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 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.

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 condition 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 suggests such unvarying laws 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 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 organize our conduct in definite ways in response to these phenomena. 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 uniformity 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 verifiable 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 conception that in so far as laws that remain temporally “invariant,” have not yet been found, our subjective ignorance may be responsible for the result, while in so far as definite laws that do not vary with time have been discovered, exactly described, and repeatedly verified, we are dealing with the objective constitution of Nature. Our reason for 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 thinking that they must be the same for all of us.

Hence the so-called axiom of the unvarying character of the laws of nature is no self-evident truth, is not even at once an empirically established and an universal generalization, and possesses its present authority because of the emphasis that our social interests give to the discovery of uniform laws where we can discover them.3 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 discovery 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 to 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, commerce, and social custom, were the three early sources of interest in the uniformities of natural phenomena.

The arts needed uniform and persistently plastic materials 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 unconsciously, 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 uniformity 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 ingenuity 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 common natural phenomena whereby to organize such activities, 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 industrial and commercial arts, as from early philosophical 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 universe, a vast realm of fact other than what human minds consciously find present within their own circles of individual 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 principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description 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 constructions of Nature, and what our experience of Nature warrants us in asserting as the truth regarding 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 themselves, and apart from man, already must be so constituted 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 conceptions. 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 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 execution, from expectation to observation, with ease, exactness, 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 industrial 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 certain 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 classification, 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 industrial art, its purposes are no less human than are those of its fellow. Both coöperate to the end of man's mastery 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 clearness as to just our human place in the mists of finite experience. Both indicate a truth that is in some sense valid beyond 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 sufficient 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 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 constantly 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 trivialities 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 itself, 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 teleology, and the other, the so-called mechanical conception of nature—is as crudely anthropomorphic 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 experience of Nature, as his industrial arts are due to a conflict with Nature's seeming chaos of climates and of materials. A rigid selection, a long search, and a deliberate 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 limited 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 reference 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 meaning 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 sciences 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 construct our railways. Just so Nature permits us to form our mechanical conceptions, to make our computations, 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 enumeration 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 industrial 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 of our experience. It is our interest in social organization that has given us both industrial art and empirical science. As industrial art regards its facts as mere contrivances 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 formulas. Both doctrines are perfectly justified as expressions of the perspective view of Nature which we men naturally 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 meaning of which we men form a part, and of which the final unity is in God's life.

• 1.

  Only from the special point of view here in question is this relationship 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.

• 2.

  See above, p. 89, sqq.

• 3.

  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.”