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 consciousness 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.

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 unquestionably have a basis in extra-human truth. This is what all our previous analysis has shown us. Moreover, 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 verified, 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 regular 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 theories 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, as they come to us, and with them in hand, and with the mere memory that the two sorts of ideas in question 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 contrast between Consciousness and what seems to us to be unconscious Matter.

I

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 changing 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 meanings. 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 contrast 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, 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 thinkers 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 evolution has lately forced upon the attention of all who have taken Nature at all seriously. Now, if man's experience 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 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 deceptive 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 continuous gradations into B and vice versa, then the next natural presumption about A and B is that it is their wide difference which actually constitutes the deceptive appearance, 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 constitutes the most fascinating part of the seeming history 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 appearances 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 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 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 hopelessness, 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 rigidity of lawful behavior, are its ultimately real characters? 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. Suppose 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.

II

And first, let us for the moment merely assume as true the ordinary presuppositions of science. Let us ask ourselves 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 pretends 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 good reason to assert that the most exactly stated of the laws of the World of Description, explicitly represent not directly observed facts, or any immediately verifiable and literally true statement about things as we men can experience then, 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 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 moving, 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 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 behave. 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 processes of nature, you are dealing with profoundly instructive ways of behavior of the natural world. These ways of the world's behavior 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 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 hypothetical summaries of vast ranges of experience,—but in a highly conceptual, in a mathematically artificial form. They are laws that explicitly 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. They 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 remote from Mind. But the other laws, the laws of the irreversible processes, are in their most general type, common 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 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 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.

III

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 possibly 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 between the most remote and the nearest regions of Nature. It is an analogy that has attracted considerable attention. 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 processes 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 communicate 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 Nature 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 appearances of processes resembling those which, in the life of a mind, we call Habits. Here again both Mr. Charles Peirce and Mr. Cope, as well as other students of evolution, 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 stability” in material systems. Let a complex material system, subject to certain general restrictions, once begin a series of movements. Then, in the long run, as Fechner showed, this system, if let alone, will tend to assume a somewhat stable series of rhythmically repeated movements, the more irregular movements being eliminated 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 tends 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.

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 before. 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 be 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 variations, 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 disturbances, 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 approximate rhythms. They are mixed up with all sorts of irreversible tendencies, which in the end tend to overwhelm them one and all. But while they last they are instances 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 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 literally constant laws of observable Nature, these approximate 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 processes 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 metaphysical 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 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 processes 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 question, 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 formulas, 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 consciousness 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 equations, 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.”

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 mathematical 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 mathematical 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 behavior 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 evolutionist 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 instead of these. But we do know, meanwhile, that the processes called by us growth and decay are facts as genuinely 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 Matter, and coming to their continuity and analogy, my present hypothesis runs: (2) That we have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates from ours that we cannot adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward 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 portions 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 characters 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 suppose, 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 consciousness 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 repetition, in the other direction towards the irrevocable leaving 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 constantly coming into view and into relation to former experiences. I suppose that the field of Nature's experience is everywhere leading slowly or rapidly to the differentiation 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 nebulæ, 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 happens 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 dynamite explosion is.” In the other case, events, such as the wearing of the Niagara gorge, would be to us what a single musical phrase now is, namely, something instantaneously present, and grasped within the arbitrary present moment. Such relations to time would be no more arbitrary, 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 material 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 permanence 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 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 separate regions of this world of conscious life.1 This intercommunication takes place as a simply universal process of finite experience. As it takes place, new and significant 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 preëxistent, but still undeveloped consciousness, as to awaken there new ideals, a new selfhood, a relatively novel individuality. If, as I myself suppose, personal 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 significant enough to express themselves in new ideals, and in a new unification of experience in terms of these ideals.

Meanwhile the evolutionary changes of the whole conscious world would be based upon processes whose basis would be viewed as threefold. First, they would be fluent processes, full of significant change, more or less obviously 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 acquisition of definite habits. As these definite habits, so far as acquired at all, would be established under the influence 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 rendered uniform by intercommunication, like the customs of a nation, or like the sounds of a given language appearing 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, 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.2

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 natural 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 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 consciousness you choose, what happens there depends not merely upon the communications sent in, or upon the fatal onflow 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 individual. In that case, this individual animal is no rational person, but he may well be, so to speak, a temporally 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 rationality, 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 individual, unless we are in intelligent communication with that individual's inner life. Hence, I do not suppose that any individual thing, say 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 differentiations 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 continuous 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.3

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 natural facts, but that does not pretend to exclusive possession of the field. It is related, partly by derivation, partly by resemblance, to several other cosmical hypotheses, amongst which that of Mr. Charles Peirce4 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 one another, and as linked merely through laws of causation, 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 experiences 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 has, 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 experience 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 substance exists independently of all Mind. But just as we ascribe some sort of Being beyond our own individual minds, to the minds of our fellow-men, so the hypothesis here in question ascribes an existence, beyond 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 communication, and of an intimate linkage between the happenings 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. 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 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 multitude 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 preëstablished 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 preëstablished harmony of all the Monads. And when Leibniz emphasizes this aspect, his theory tends to lose its realistic hardness of outlines, and to lapse into a view for which the ideal relationships of the Monads, their significant 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, however, 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 Independent 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 Monadology of Leibniz. In Nature, as in man, we find individuality linked in the closest fashion with intercommunication, 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 Individual. Hence we do not assume the variety of individuals within the natural world to be a wholly original 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 preëstablished. 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 communication 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 processes summed up in the word Evolution, to attempt to conceive that inorganic Nature consists of a vast collection 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 separately 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 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 doctrine 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 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 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 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 interpretation, merely a fragment and a hint of a larger rationality which gets its fuller individual expression in the evolution 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 conditions 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 determined for us by our Fourth Conception of Being, and stands or falls therewith. It is the detail of our hypothesis, and its special adaptation to our experience of Nature, which we regard as tentative, and so as subject to correction. But in rejecting the Mind-Stuff theory of Clifford, our grounds are general and positive. That theory implies an essentially realistic conception of Being, and falls with Realism. The same is true of Leibniz's Monadology. The Unconscious we reject, because our Fourth Conception of Being forbids all recognition of unconscious realities. It follows that any hypothesis about Nature, which is just to the demands of a sound Metaphysic, must, like ours, conceive the natural world as directly bound up with the experiences of actually conscious beings. That, in addition to all these considerations, we should be led to reject Berkeley's cosmological hypothesis, is due, in part, to our own special form of 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.

• 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.

• 2.

  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 consider later, in the lecture on the Place of the Self in Being.

• 3.

  Compare the further considerations in the lecture on the Place of the Self in Being.

• 4.

  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.