# The World and the Individual, Second Series/Lecture 1

THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL
SECOND SERIES: NATURE, MAN, AND THE MORAL ORDER
LECTURE I
INTRODUCTION: THE RECOGNITION OF FACTS
With no question is the student of Philosophy more familiar than with the inquiry: Of what bearing upon life are the studies in which you are engaged? This challenge, when uttered by one not engaged in the study of philosophy, comes home with especial force to the investigator of the fundamental problems of metaphysics. For such problems are, upon their face, of the most universal character. It would seem as if their significance for the whole business of every man ought to be immediately obvious, unless indeed the philosopher who expounds them has failed in his task. What concerns any man more than his place in the world, and the meaning of the world in which he is to find this place?
But when the layman listens to the actual teachings of students of philosophy, as they discourse concerning knowledge and being, concerning truth and duty, and when, after listening, such a layman then asks afresh, “What is it that I have learned about my life, and my duty, and my world of daily business?” — the answer of many a listener is too well known: “I have learned,” ​such an one will often say, “not at all what I hoped to learn. I have learned that problems are intricate, and that truth is far away. I have learned how little the wise men see, and so I am fain to turn back again to life, that I may there find how much the good men do. The philosophers do not help me as they promised. Action is more enlightening than speculation. I will work while it is called the day, but I will not try, like the philosophers, to look with naked eyes upon the sun of truth. Such researches only hinder me.”
Both this confession of too many listeners to philosophical discourses, and the resulting question to which I have just referred, are to nobody more familiar, I have said, than to the student of philosophy himself. Nobody, in fact, ought to know better than he does the limitations of mere speculation. Does he not often feel them bitterly himself? Is not the imperfection of what he would like to call his wisdom, brought home to him at every moment when he has his own practical problems to solve? But a confession of weakness is not a cry of despair. Part of the business of life, and no small part of it, is to learn to live with our inevitable defects, and to make the best of them. The inevitable defects of philosophical study are to nobody clearer than to one who, sincerely loving philosophy, devotes his life, as best he can, to seeking clearness of thought and a soul-stirring vision of the truth. The way of reflection is long. The forest of our common human ignorance is dark and tangled. Happy indeed are those who are content to live and to work only in regions where the practical labors of civilization have cleared the land, and where the task of life is to ​till the fertile fields and to walk in the established ways. The philosopher, in the world of thought, is by destiny forever a frontiersman. To others he must often seem the mere wanderer. He knows best himself how far he wanders, and how often he seems to be discovering only new barrenness in the lonely wilderness.
Yet if such defects are to be freely confessed, and if the philosopher even glories in them, because they are for him a part of the search for truth, the practical good sense of mankind is to be respected when it demands that the solitary labors of the seeker for truth shall in the end be submitted, not only to those theoretical tests which philosophy recognizes as, in its own domain, the only decisive ones, but also to the social and ethical judgment of practical men. The truth of a philosophy is indeed a matter for reason alone; but the justification of the pursuit of philosophy as one of the tasks to which a man’s life may honestly be devoted, requires a recognition of the common interests of all men. The frontiersman may wander; but he must some day win what shall belong to the united empire of human truth. Those are wrong who ask him merely to stay at home. He wanders because he must; and God is to be found also in the wildernesses and in the solitary places of thought. But those are right who ask that the student of philosophy shall find, if he succeeds at all, a living truth; and that the God of the wilderness, if indeed he be the true God, shall show himself also as the keeper of the city.
Now, in the former series of these lectures, appealing as a student of philosophy to fellow-students, I undertook what was, from the start, and confessedly, a wandering ​into the most problematic regions of theory. And in the present course, especially in the earlier lectures, I shall still be busy with highly theoretical issues, and I shall still appeal, above all, to my fellow-students. But we have now won the philosophical right, and have become subject to the practical obligation, not only thus to follow out our theoretical interests, but also to show how the philosophy set forth in our earlier lectures stands related to the more immediate problems of life. I shall devote the present lectures, in the main, to considerations that, however abstract they may seem, are meant to help us towards an interpretation of Man’s place in the universe; and I shall be guided by a determination to attempt, before I am done, a definition of man’s nature, duty, and destiny. The former lectures emphasized the World; the present course shall be directed towards an understanding of the Human Individual. The previous discussion dealt with the Theory of Being; the aim of what is to come shall be a doctrine about Life. This doctrine will still belong to philosophy; but its outcome shall have to do with the practical interests of Religion.
The order which has so far been followed is, indeed, as I must hold, the only order for a student of philosophy. Therein, if you please, is just where lies the practical defect of philosophy, — viz. in that it can only reach the civilized realm of our daily business by the way of the wilderness of solitary reflection; that it must first, to use Emerson’s word, meet God in the bush, so that only later, and painfully, it learns to find him in the mart and the crowded street. I confess the defect. I want to show also some of the excellencies of the very ​way which this defect has required me to follow. Faith has its glories; but the hard toil of critical reflection brings its own rewards. None prize the home-coming more than those who wander farthest.
I
My first task, in the present lecture, is to indicate in what spirit the Theory of Being, to whose definition and defence the former series of these lectures was devoted, is hereafter to be applied to the treatment of the more special problems of experience and of life. Our Theory of Being had especially this character, namely that it did not undertake to demonstrate a priori what particular facts we should meet with anywhere in the world, but that it did undertake to show us a certain method whereby we ought to proceed in attempting to estimate those facts, to interpret them, to find what rank they held in the realm of Being. People come with false expectations to philosophy when they expect it to furnish them any substitute for special science, any peculiar power to anticipate the particular results of experience, any intuitive capacity to see in the finite world facts that other methods of inquiry have not made evident. For the primary purpose of a Theory of Being is not thus to discover what special finite beings are real, but to interpret the sense in which any fact whatever can be real. Its application, therefore, does not come in advance of experience. On the contrary, it is a critical study of the meaning of experience, which it therefore presupposes. And we are now to endeavor to find of what nature such applied Philosophy may be. ​
For just in such application lies, as we shall come to see, the peculiarly intimate relation between what is deepest in philosophy, and what is truest and most abiding in religion. Some people have expected the philosopher to construct for them, a priori, a precise scheme of all things in heaven and in earth. But just so other people have looked to their religious faith to tell them, in advance, their private fortune, to assure them that their days would be long, their flocks prosperous, and their health abounding. And just as too enthusiastic students have thus anticipated from philosophy a certain magical insight regarding the detailed structure of nature and of man, so an unenlightened generation has asked its religious teachers for signs and wonders, and has held that the true faith must manifest itself through special Providences. But the one hope is as little founded in the deeper spirit of reasonableness as is the other; and the demand for a direct sign from heaven is not the abiding expression, either of the religious or of the philosophical consciousness.
Applied philosophy is like practical religion. It illumines life, but it gives no power to use the arts of the medicine man. What religion practically gives to the faithful is not the means for predicting what is about to happen to themselves, but the strength to endure hardness as good soldiers. Religious faith involves no direct access to the special counsels of God; but it inspires the believer with assurance that all things work together for good, and endows him with readiness to serve in his station the God who is All in all. Such religion is not, then, the power to work ​miracles, but it is the wisdom to find in all things, however obscure, or fragmentary, the expressions, however mysterious, of the Divine Love. The faith of the devout does not forewarn them as to the future, nor does it annul the value of worldly prudence; but it makes them glad to suffer, and willing to wait, and sure that however far off God seems, he actually is near. Now what faith accomplishes in the daily practice of the devout, a Theory of Being must also undertake, in so far as it is successful, to provide for us in our efforts to understand Nature and Man.
What we men call Nature comes to us as a matter of our extremely finite common experience. In dealing with nature, we feel our way; we pass from fact to fact; we collect fragments. When our special sciences succeed in joining these fragments into some sort of empirical unity, the procedure is distinctly human, and the result is always provisional. Now no philosophy can predetermine in this realm, either what special facts shall be observed, or what particular hypotheses as to their connection shall first be attempted, or what provisional theories shall prove best adapted to the purpose of any special science. Philosophy is powerless to act as a substitute for special science, precisely as it is powerless to add to the products of the industrial arts. It is as unable to formulate a thesis in the realms properly belonging to physics or to biology as it is to build a steam engine.
And in the same way, when we deal with Man, — with the concrete issues of his daily life, — with the problems of private passion or of public policy, we have to do, primarily, with human nature as it is, and with all the ​unconquerable naïveté of our desires, of our imperfections, and even of our virtues. Philosophy does not create men, but reflectively considers their life. And man is as full of mystery as is the rest of nature, and is known to our experience as a mere fragment of a whole whose inmost unity is far beyond the reach of our present form of consciousness. Psychology, viewed as one of the special sciences, studies man; and so also do all the human branches of inquiry, — political science, economics, anthropology. Philosophy cannot predetermine the course and the outcome of any of these sciences. The Theory of Being is not based upon our knowledge of any such special regions of experience, but is due to a thoroughgoing reflection upon the presuppositions of all experience. In its turn the Theory of Being teaches us neither anthropology nor psychology, neither economics nor politics. Into such regions the philosopher, as philosopher, enters like any other layman, to learn the facts if he desires to know them, but not as one endowed with any magic power of divination.
And yet, just as the devout are required by their religious faith to see God’s hand in whatever happens, and to view their life as his constant revelation of his will, although they can work no miracles, and cannot tell what a day shall bring forth; just so our philosophy, if indeed our former Theory of Being was sound, has its strength in the general interpretation of the facts, when once they have been found. The Theory of Being requires us to view every fact of nature, and of man’s life, as a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life, as a revelation, however mysterious and to us men now in ​detail illegible, of the unity of the perfect Whole. Why we hold this to be a true theory, we have set forth at length in the foregoing series of lectures; and the detailed proof of the general thesis concerns us here no longer. But the spirit in which we are to apply our doctrine to the theory of our knowledge of particular facts, and to the interpretation of such facts, interests us here in much the same way in which practical religion is interested in the spirit that the faithful ought to preserve amidst the cares and sorrows of daily life. What is it to believe, as the faithful do, that God is in all their fortunes? What is it to maintain, as our Theory of Being does, that, amidst all the complexities of Nature and man's life, we are dealing with fragmentary glimpses of an Absolute Unity, of the type depicted in our foregoing series of lectures? The two problems, in many respects, resemble each other. What you already know of the solution of one problem goes far to prepare you for the other.
II
The scope and the proposed order of the present series of lectures may be more precisely indicated as follows: —
I shall begin our inquiry by a preliminary study of some of the conditions that are characteristic of our human type of knowledge. Knowledge, such as we have of particular facts, is only one special case of what we can and do conceive as the range of the possible forms of knowledge. Not only theology and philosophy, but also, as we shall see, the empirical sciences themselves depend upon conceiving of higher types of knowledge, higher ​"forms of consciousness," than our human type, as at least possible. By contrast with such ideally definable higher types of insight we constantly become aware of our own limitations as human seekers for truth. We shall, accordingly, try to characterize in general terms some of the most marked limitations and powers of man's intellect. As we do so we shall be led to state the first principles of a theory of the Organization of Human Experience. Kant's problem of the Categories, which determine in what way we conceive the objects of human knowledge, and which also, in giving form to our experience, define the unity that we ascribe to Nature and to our own life, is one that we can only touch upon very briefly. But so far as our time permits, we must outline our view as to the essential forms in terms of which we conceive concrete facts and their connections. Upon the basis of the general theory of human knowledge thus broadly sketched, we shall next pass to a study of the questions offered to our scrutiny by Nature, when viewed in its relation to Man. Here our main purpose shall be to apply our general idealistic doctrine, concerning what is meant by Reality in general, to the problem as to the sense in which Nature and Man are real.
In case of Nature we have to deal with a realm whose material seeming, whose unchanging laws, and whose apparent indifference to all individual interests, and to all ethical ideals, constitute a formidable obstacle in the way of every interpretation of Reality in the interest of the religious consciousness. It will be our task to scrutinize the reasons that make Nature wear, to our vision, this forbidding aspect. Hereby we shall be led especially to consider ​the centrally important place that Man, when viewed as a product of Nature, occupies in our ordinary views about the cosmos. And so the development of our Metaphysics of Nature will enable us, before we are done, to sketch an hypothesis as to the meaning of the processes known to us men, at present, under the now favorite name Evolution. The sense in which Nature is a realm of fixed law will also engage our attention; and in the same connection we shall prepare the way for our theory of the Freedom of the Will. Passing over, after we have studied these problems, to what is properly called the Moral World, we shall, in our closing lectures, apply our general interpretation of Being to a study of the Human Self, of its Place in Being, and of the Moral Order, to a consideration of the problem of Evil, and finally to a statement of what seem to us to be the results of Idealism regarding the final relations of the Absolute and the human Individual, or in ordinary speech, of God and Man. In this connection we shall be led to state briefly our own thesis regarding Immortality. Herewith the task of these lectures will be completed.
Ill
I pass to the promised general considerations regarding the limitations of our human type of knowledge, and regarding the organization of experience.
All knowledge is of matters of experience, — this principle we ourselves have maintained as part of our Idealism. But what does this proposition mean when applied ​to the case of human knowledge? Whose experience is ill question when we speak of truth?
By any man’s private experience, taken in the narrowest sense of the words, we mean what a man now has present to his consciousness. As I speak, I am conscious that these words are now uttered. This is present experience. You have a corresponding present experience as you listen. One’s whole present consciousness of his meaning, i.e. of what we before called the Internal Meaning of his ideas, is, in a similarly limited sense, empirical. But the term experience, as customarily employed when our human science is said to be founded upon experience, is used in a much broader sense. The term, as thus applied, refers to a wide range of facts which are said to have been experienced by various men at various times. But, as we had occasion to point out in the Eighth Lecture of our former series, it cannot be asserted that any human experience (taking that word in the narrowest sense) ever makes present to any man the fact that various men besides himself have their various experiences present to them. The broader conception of what is called “human experience” is a conception that thus obviously transcends every particular present human experience. The very existence of the body of facts called “man’s experience” has never been verified by any man.
Now this perfectly simple observation gets a serious importance so soon as we consider its bearing upon the question: What shall constitute, for an empirical theory of knowledge, the test of an “accredited fact”? When and how is any fact known to be a “fact of human experience”? ​
We often say that the results of scientific observation and experiment, or the contents of the world of common sense, as known to men in their daily life, are typical examples of “empirically accredited facts.” These, as we add, belong to the “accessible realm.” These we cannot deny without “running counter to actual observation.” On the other hand, the contents of any religious faith, — assertions about God, about Immortality, or about the “Unseen World” in general, — these are typical examples of what we frequently regard as lying “beyond the range of human experience.” These, then, are “inaccessible” matters. What is in such regions fact “nobody amongst men can verify.” Equally, of course, a philosopher’s assertions about the Absolute, — as, for instance, an idealist’s Theory of Being, — are concerned with what “lies beyond all human experience”; and such theories attempt to “transcend the range of verifiable fact.” This contrast between the “empirical” and the “metempirical” realm is very familiar. It is apparently a fairly definite contrast. And to be sure, if you first define arbitrarily the limits of the collective whole called “human experience,” you may, with equal arbitrariness, define a realm of what is to be called “transcendent” or “inaccessible” fact, lying beyond this whole.
But what now concerns us is not an arbitrary classification of conceived ranges of knowledge, but a closer consideration of a very obvious and natural distinction between the two conceptions: (1) Of that which any man at any time experiences as present; and (2) Of the totality of the several facts that are, or that have been experienced by the various men. The question is: ​Does any man experience the fact that there exists any collective whole to be called the totality of human experience? Does any man experience the fact that any other man has experience? Surely, the astronomer does not observe in his world of presentations the fact that the physician observes the phenomena of disease, or that the carpenter observes the making of houses. But if the carpenter, the physician, and the astronomer believe, as they do, each one, that the others have experience of facts, then each believes in an existence, viz. in the existence of the totality formed of their three orders of experience, although this totality is “inaccessible” to the personal experience of any of them. And still more, when the astronomer or the physician or the carpenter appeals, as a man of science or of common sense, to the “general experience of mankind,” or to the experience of any selected company of experts, as the guarantee of the truth of any of his beliefs, each of them appeals to a body of fact which, as such a body of fact, has never been present to the experience of any man at any time.
It is plain, then, that if we say: “That only is to constitute ‘accredited fact’ which some individual man has verified for himself through its presence in his experience,” our doctrine can be interpreted in either one of two ways. The first and in fact the usual way of interpreting the thesis is as follows: “There does exist the body of accredited facts, ɑ, b, c, etc., such that any fact belonging to this body of facts as, — for instance, — ɑ has been verified by the experience of some man, let us say by A, while some other man, as B, may ​have experienced as present to himself the fact b, and so on, — some of the various facts having been observed indeed by the same man (as a Galileo or a Faraday observed, each for himself, various physical facts), while different facts, in many cases, have been severally presented in the experience of different men. Now only such facts as belong to this body of ‘facts of experience’ are to be regarded as duly ‘accredited.’” The thesis thus stated, with various added provisos regarding the sorts of experience, or the types of observers whose facts are of enough importance or exactitude to count as sufficiently verified, represents a frequent interpretation of the meaning of the doctrine called empiricism. But it is obvious that, in this formulation, familiar though it be, the thesis simply contradicts itself. For it expressly asserts the existence of the various facts, ɑ, b, c, etc., while referring them, in general, to the experience of various observers, A, B, etc., whose existence is also regarded as “accredited.” But since A, by hypothesis, has never had present to his experience the experience of B, nor any observer the observations of another observer, it is plain that there is no one man who has personally experienced either the existence of all the several observers, A, B, etc., or the presence of their various facts, ɑ, b, c. Yet these existences and these various facts are, according to the thesis, “accredited facts,” in case the thesis itself is to be an accredited truth. And, nevertheless, according to the same thesis, no facts were to be regarded as “accredited” unless some man, A, or B, or some other, had verified them in his experience. The thesis, as stated, consequently asserts ​the existence of an indefinitely vast range of fact that it also declares to be not “accredited fact.” To become consistent our thesis would have to be amended thus: “No fact is ‘accredited’ unless it belongs to the system above defined, except, to be sure, the fact that this system, together with its various observers, exists. That fact, indeed, is present to no human observer’s experience. And yet, although it thus transcends every man’s observation and verification, it is an ‘accredited’ fact.” But the thesis, as thus amended, is no longer even a relatively pure empiricism. It is a synthesis of an appeal to human experience with an admission of principles that, whatever they are, or however they are grounded, transcend every man's experience. This is a simple, but a curiously neglected, consideration.
The second form in which the thesis may be held is this: “No fact is ‘accredited fact’ except in so far as it is verified by the present momentary experience of myself, here and now, to whom it thus becomes accredited fact.” So stated, the thesis is indeed remote enough from common sense, since it excludes me from recognizing, not only your experience, but my own experiences of an hour since, or of yesterday, or of last year, as “accredited fact,” and so excludes me from regarding as “accredited fact” either the observations of experts, or the experience of mankind in general, or the results of my own observations during the course of my brief life, as far as that life lies beyond the limits (whatever they are) of what I call the present. We are not concerned with examining here all of the metaphysical implications of this form of the thesis now in question. The result ​of such an analysis, if thoroughgoing, would involve, as we indicated in the passage just cited from the Eighth Lecture of our First Series, the same dialectic process by which we were led through the series of the concepts of Being from Realism to Idealism. For we should have to ask: What form of Being have the facts that are at present so verified by me as to constitute a realm, however apparently insignificant, of “accredited facts”? And the answer to the question would lead us to observe that these facts, in so far as they have true Being at all, are neither wholly independent, nor wholly immediate, nor merely valid, but are what they are by virtue of their place in a self-determined system of facts, whose totality is simply our idealistic Absolute.
Meanwhile, however, although it concerns us not here to go again over the ground of our whole metaphysic, it will be of service to us to recall so much thereof as to let us see that the thesis, in this second form, is, as it stands, quite as self-contradictory as it was in its first form, unless, indeed, it means to assert that at the present instant I can verify an infinity of facts.
A moment’s reflection serves to show me, for the first, that I do not clearly know what constitutes the whole, the totality of fact, that I can and do just now verify in my present experience. Nor can I clearly distinguish between what is now verifiable and what is not now verifiable. I may say that I verify the fact of my present speaking of these words, so that thus much, at least, is, in the sense of my thesis, “accredited fact.” But what is it to speak these words? What is it that I verify in observing my own speech? Nothing is harder than to ​say how, at any one instant, taken, so far as possible, by itself, my words are present as facts in my own consciousness. Nor can I easily verify how far I just then realize what I mean by them, or how far their sound, their connection, or the act of uttering them is emphasized or obscured in consciousness by my concern that you should hear me, or by my chance consciousness of how the light of yonder window falls upon this paper, or by my muscular sensations as I turn the leaves of my manuscript. Ask me, then, to tell what is now present to my consciousness, and the notorious difficulty of every introspective problem reminds me that by what now is actually present to my consciousness, I mean much more than I can be said, in every sense, now consciously to verify. Even my verification itself occurs in degrees. I may verify without being clearly conscious that or what I verify.
And thus the present moment has about it all the mystery that everywhere clouds finite facts. I am conscious just now, but I am not wholly conscious of my consciousness. If I were, I should be capable of verifying an infinity of facts; for, as the Supplementary Essay, published with the former series of these lectures, has shown at length, to be self-conscious, in any complete sense, would be to be aware of the completion of an infinite series of presented facts. But if, as is true, I am not completely self-conscious, then I never completely verify what it is that I am just now verifying.
“But,” you may insist, “surely I can now verify some present fact of experience, the sound of this word, the presence of this feeling of discomfort, or of this intel​lectual inquiry.” Yes, — I answer, the present moment may answer, and does answer up to a certain point, although never completely, certain specific questions that have been submitted to it, by my former processes of inquiry, for its definite verification. If I have asked a specific question: “Does some word now sound?” “Is this definite hypothesis now verified?” — then a present, although always a fragmentary and unsatisfactory answer, may be possible. But my consciousness, even now, has its background as well as its foreground, its obscurity as well as its clearness, its presented questions as to its own constitution as well as its presented answers to definite questions. And nobody amongst us human beings, as now we are, can verify precisely the whole of what it is that the present moment furnishes to his experience. In other words, the present experience itself, or even the verification of the facts of this present experience, has more Being than I am able now to observe. It is more than it at present shows; it means infinitely more than it brings to the light of passing human consciousness. Just this aspect of the present moment was the one that we emphasized when we defined our Fourth Conception, and our relation to the “Other” which a finite consciousness always seeks as its own fulfilment.
Whatever, then, it is that I now verify, and whatever sense or degree of verification I count as sufficient, still, the very fact known to me through verification may be also known, through an indirect demonstration, to contain more Being than I verify. Thus let us suppose again that I verify the fact of my present utterance of words. If I do ​so, then the fact that I verify my utterance of words is as much a fact as is the fact verified, viz. the utterance itself. For the whole fact defined is, by hypothesis, the fact of my verification of my utterance of words. But to be conscious of my consciousness involves something more than merely to be conscious without such self-consciousness. In general, unless a philosophical argument calls my attention to the matter, I shall verify the fact of my utterance of the words without verifying, i.e. without consciously observing the first verification itself. That is, I shall verify without being aware that I do so. Now not only is this the case, but to deny that our verifications, whatever they are, always are facts that in their turn contain more Being than we at present verify, would be to assert that at present we consciously verify an infinity of facts. For to verify the fact that we make verifications, and to verify again this verification, and so on, all at the present moment, would indeed involve a present and completed infinite complexity of consciousness. Whoever asserts the thesis, however, that no fact is “accredited” from my point of view unless I now verify it, asserts a fact, viz. the fact of my verification of facts, while not meaning to attribute to me the infinite present knowledge that would be implied in declaring that my verification itself is reflectively and exhaustively verified.
Moreover, whoever asserts this same thesis defines as real the fact that “I” experience. “I,” then, am a fact. But at this moment, unless I have completely solved the problem of self-consciousness, I am in some respects, yes, obviously in nearly all respects, ignorant of who I really am, or of what the true nature of the Ego is. What ​deeper human mystery is there than the Ego? On the other hand, if I have completely solved the problem of self-consciousness, and if I am aware at this instant of the solution, so as to verify all that, as a fact, I am, then, for the same reason as the one before cited, I have present to myself an infinity of contents of consciousness. The maintainer of our thesis does not intend to assert that the Ego of this instant, of whom he speaks, does at present consciously verify this infinity of facts. It is clear to me just now that I do not do so. But the only alternative for the defender of our thesis is the assertion of a fact, viz. the Ego, — a fact whose Being is not wholly verified at present, although it is indirectly known as a fact, and as a fact possessed of this verified wealth of reality. And thus the thesis is indeed reduced to a self-contradiction. For the result is that there are “accredited facts,” implied in the very acceptance of the thesis, which are still not facts now verified by me.
IV
It is quite impossible, then, to assert that there are no “accredited facts” in the world, as known to us men, except those which have been verified, or which are verified in the experience of some individual man, or in the several experiences of various men. Human experience is logically and inseparably bound up with elements which remain for us men, in our present form of consciousness, metempirical. The assertion that we know the world only in so far as individual human experience has verified the facts of the world cannot be consistently stated, and is never consistently applied, even by the most ardent and ​most sceptical empiricists. While then philosophy is unable to predict a priori the special contents of human experience, it is forced to insist that by the term “human experience” we always mean more than the facts that are verified by individual men.
It remains perfectly true, of course, that the empiristic thesis which has just been examined is not without its deep significance, and that what empiricism has intended to emphasize is, when its statement has been properly modified, a truth, and one of the first importance. In the former series of lectures, we had occasion, when discussing the Third Conception of Being, to point out the sense in which, even in pure mathematics, “experience is the only guide to concrete results.” As we there indicated, all our transcending of experience is in a perfectly definite sense based upon our experience. When we reason about the unseen, as, for instance, about the “infinite assemblages” of recent mathematical theory, or about our idealistic Absolute, still, in all our investigations, “actual experience guides,” “presented facts sustain” us, just as, in the passage cited, we set forth. Yet there is no inconsistency between observing this truth, and still rejecting the thesis of the empiricist in the form in which it has often been stated. Our whole argument in our transition to the Fourth Conception of Being illustrated how it is of the very nature of our human experience of our Internal Meaning to point beyond what is presented, for the sake of defining the very fulfilment which our presented meanings demand, and without which they have neither truth nor Being. It is true that every exact and demonstrative ​proposition which does transcend the presented and verified data of our experience is capable, for us men, only of an indirect demonstration, such as we in fact gave for our conception of the Absolute in the Eighth Lecture of the foregoing course, and such as we have just given for our assertion that every human experience is inseparably bound up with elements which remain, for us men, metempirical. Yet an indirect demonstration involves precisely an appeal to present experience (namely to the present experience of an incongruity in the form in which given ideas now present themselves to us), for our warrant and guide in an undertaking whereby we transcend present experience. In fact, then, our presented experience is indeed our only guide; but it always guides us by pointing beyond itself to that without which it becomes self-contradictory. We know of no metempirical truth except by means of presentations. But our presentations, in our present form of consciousness, get their whole sense from their reference to what, for us, remains metempirical truth. No fact gets “accredited” unless our experience gives it credit. But experience, when rationally interpreted, in the light of our indirect demonstrations, never gives credit to any facts except to those which, in some aspect, transcend our presentations.
The most manifest lesson of memory, of our social consciousness, and of our reasonings about mathematical and physical truth, is that, for us men, the office of what is given to us, as presented fact, is to point beyond itself to what is not presented. Common sense generally makes this transition too easily, on grounds of mere habit, of prejudice, or of traditional faith. Philosophy has to criticise the grounds of the transition, and does so, ​hoping to learn to distinguish prejudice from rational insight, and well-grounded assurance from uncertainty. But while we live in presentations, and think in terms of them, we all constantly use them, whether rationally or irrationally, only to transcend them. What is given is indeed our guide; but what is not now given, namely, the whole true Being of things, is our goal.
In still another respect, as we also saw in our former course, the assertion of empiricism conveys a deep truth in an inadequate expression. The term “metempirical,” which we have just used, is only a relative term. We have here employed it with express reference to the transcending of the narrow limits of human experience. But of course such transcending, so far as we get our indirectly demonstrable right to the assertion that facts lie beyond these narrow limits, is not a transcending of all experience. What lies beyond our presentations is still, in so far as it has true Being, presentation. For the world of fact exists in so far as it is presented in unity to the Absolute Experience. That we have asserted throughout. In so far as a consistent empiricism is opposed to Realism, our own argument has fully accepted the theses involved in such opposition. Every question about Being is also a question about the organization of experience, that is, about the organization of the true, the final experience, of which our own is always a fragment.
V
The characteristic limitation of human experience is, then, that it grasps, within the narrow limits of this ​or of this instant, fragments of a meaning which can only be conceived with consistency by regarding it as embodied in an experience of wider scope, of determinate constitution, and of united significance. That this is true, our general Theory of Being undertook to show. How in the concrete it takes place, in what special ways our consciousness is at once transcended, and included in a wider experience, it is the purpose of our whole present series of discussions to make clearer; and not until the end of the undertaking can one judge the degree of our success.
We proceed next to the characterization of certain more special principles that consciously determine us, at any moment, to acknowledge as real one rather than another fact or system of concrete facts, such as the existence of our fellows, or of Nature, or our own past lives. Herewith we enter upon the promised study of some of the fundamental Categories of human experience. We care not to write out or to defend any table of such Categories. We make no attempt to be exhaustive or systematic. But some specification of our general theory, in such wise as to show its application to our special type of human knowledge, is indeed a necessary preliminary to our study of Nature and of Man.
As in our general discussion of Being, so here, we must take our starting-point from the fact that our knowledge always involves deeds. In so far as I now consciously mean anything, I am acting. But, as I find, I am acting at present under a twofold limitation. I neither know the whole of what it is that I mean to ​do; nor do I know more than the most insignificant fragment of the facts that express my will. In consequence, the problem of philosophy, as of life, is twofold: (1) A practical problem, viz. the problem, What am I seeking? What is the Self whose purpose is mine, and whose life is the world? — and (2) A theoretical problem, viz. How is this purpose expressed in the facts? Now our discussion will throughout undertake, so far as that is possible, to treat these two problems in close connection. But they will tend, at various points, to fall apart in the argument. In the present lecture, in dealing with the most fundamental Category of Experience, we shall indeed be able to show very explicitly that our acknowledgment of facts as real is determined by definite, and philosophically justified, practical motives. But when we pass on, in the next lecture, to more special categories, we shall be led to make a provisional sundering of the two points of view, viz. (1) that of our appreciative or more explicitly volitional consciousness, and (2) that of our descriptive or more theoretical, consciousness. We shall know indeed that the sundering is provisional; but under our human limitations, it will prove, in its own place, inevitable. It will be by means of a further definition of just these contrasted points of view that we shall be able to explain the relation between our belief in the physical world, and our belief in the minds of our fellow-men. We shall express the opposition of the two points of view by calling the realm of Being as our more abstractly theoretical consciousness defines it, the World of Description; while the world as otherwise interpreted is the world of Life, — the World of Appre​elation. We shall show that, while the two points of view are contrasted, they arise in our minds in close connection with each other. The only justification for the more abstractly theoretical conception of the World of Description is its value as a means of organizing our conduct, and our conception of what the will seeks. On the other hand, without such a definite conception as the World of Description furnishes, the finite will is left only to vague longings. The two points of view will first be considered (in the next lecture) as they appear in the individual consciousness of any one of us. Then they will be discussed in their social aspects in the lecture on our conceptions of Man and of Nature.
For the moment, however, we begin not with the sundering of the two points of view, but with their unity. When I know, I am acting. My theoretical life is also practical. But, from my own conscious point of view, my acting is also a reacting. I am acting in what I often call “the given situation.” And the word given here means, not only what is strictly the given, that is, not only the situation as now presently verified by myself, but also the whole situation which I acknowledge as real. I am conscious that I can mean something only by presupposing something; that I can seek an end only by acknowledging a starting-point and a goal; that I can create only on the basis of a recognition of what I am ​not now seeking to create; — in brief, that the fulfilment of my will through my present search logically depends upon my accepting a foundation on the basis of which I will, and an environment in which I work. Now what I thus presuppose as the hidden ground of my meaning, what I acknowledge either as the starting-point or as the goal of my seeking, what I thus recognize, not as my momentary creation, but as the condition of my activity, — this — the foundation of my present will — constitutes for me that concrete reality in which, at any moment, I believe as my special “world of facts.”
A fact, then, is at once that which my present will implies and presupposes, and that which, for this very reason, is in some aspect Other than what I find myself here and now producing, accomplishing, attaining. Because of that aspect of a fact which the word Other very properly emphasizes, we are prone to insist that it is of the essence of facts to be “stubborn,” to be “foreign to the will,” to be, as facts, “beyond our power,” “necessary,” “forced upon us.” But it is equally important, from our idealistic point of view, to remember that, in so far as I purpose, intend, pursue, or find myself accomplishing, it is of the very essence of my will to demand its own Other, to set its fulfilment beyond its present, and so to define its own very life as now in some sense also not its own, or as in some wise now foreign. Our rational purpose in living as we human beings now do, is essentially and always the wanderer’s purpose. We seek our home, our city out of sight, our lost truth. But in the very search itself lies the partial embodiment of what we ourselves will. ​It is, then, not merely our fate that makes our home far off, or the truth a lost truth. It is we ourselves who demand our object as the Beyond; and we are pilgrims and strangers in a world of seemingly foreign facts, not only because the facts, as such, are stubbornly foreign, but also because we insist that ours shall be the wanderer’s portion. The very attitude of any questioner illustrates this truth. To question is to be active, to express an interest; and so it is to seek, as the relative fulfilment of one present purpose, a state of mind which also involves the dissatisfaction and instability of viewing something as still unknown and foreign. Nor can we here say that it is the compulsion of the foreign facts which is the sole awakener of our questions. Even a child’s questions often illustrate the free play of a consciousness that restlessly longs to inquire, and that seems to us deliberately to create its own recognition of mystery, in order that it may have wherewith to concern itself. Still more, however, does the theoretical work of pure science illustrate this nature of the will to inquire. What foreign “compulsion” of facts is solely responsible for the astronomer’s inquiries into the classification of stellar spectra, or for the modern theory of algebraic equations? Yet our whole modern conception of Nature and of Man has been the product of just such a free activity of asking questions.
Facts, then, are never merely Other, or “stubborn,” or “compulsory.” My will is never compelled merely by what is foreign to itself. It always coöperates in its own compulsion. The disappointed lover is such, not ​merely because his mistress rejects him, but because he wills to love her. If he did not so will, she could not reject him, and would lose her “compelling” character altogether. She controls his will by his own connivance. All this we saw in general in our former consideration of the concept of Being. It follows, however, that no account of the categories of experience, which founds our consciousness of facts solely upon our experience of their compulsory or foreign character, can be just to the nature of knowledge. What we experience is, in one aspect, always our own will to be compelled by facts.
The most universal character, belonging to all the various types of concrete facts that we recognize, is accordingly a synthesis of their so-called “stubborn” or “foreign” character, with their equally genuine character as expressions of our own purpose. A fact is for me, at any moment, that which I ought to recognize as determining or as limiting what I am here consciously to do or to attempt. For a particular fact I recognize, at any moment, only in connection with a particular attempt at action. This is the obverse aspect of what is denned, in Psychology, as the principle that all our cognitive processes accompany “responses to our environment.” In explaining, for psychological purposes, the natural history of cognition, one presupposes an environment whose facts already have a recognized form of existence. One supposes also a conscious process as an existent fact, whose development is to be described. The basis of one’s description is then the principle that the external facts, which are supposed directly or indirectly to determine the conscious process, arouse responses in the ​organism of the being whose consciousness is in question; and that the conscious states which constitute cognition accompany these responses of the organism to the environment. But our own theory of the categories of experience cannot thus base itself upon the assumption that the objective world, first existing, produces a series of corresponding responses in an organism, and consequently in the cognitive life which accompanies the processes of this organism. On the contrary, our purpose, in such a theory of the categories of experience, is to point out the principles that lead us, from within, i.e. from our own conscious point of view, to make any particular assertions whatever about the objective world. For us, therefore, in this theory, the objective world is not first known as prior to the cognitive responses, but is viewed as it is because the conscious process regards itself as meaning a response to a situation. The world of “accredited facts” is known to us to exist, because we know it to be acknowledged as existing. And it is thus acknowledged because the purpose of any instant of rational consciousness is fulfilled better by recognizing it as thus and thus existent than by viewing it otherwise. This assertion is the application of our general Theory of Being to the case of our concrete knowledge of any special fact or range of facts.
I acknowledge a particular fact, then, in connection with a particular attempt at action. My particular action is willed by me under certain limitations. These limitations are given to me, at the moment, in the form of my sense of incompleteness, of dissatisfaction, of imperfect expression of my present will. But they are not merely thus ​given to me as immediate contents of consciousness. They are defined for me by my consciousness that such and such further determination of my present actions would mean a completer expression of my will. The correlative of such completer action would be, as I hold, the experience of such and such, more or less completely defined, further contents of experience. And these further contents of experience constitute the facts that I acknowledge as real.
When I say to myself, “Such and such deeds, not now done by me, would more fully express my will,” my practical consciousness is the one which is summoned up by further saying, “Then I ought to tend, even now, towards such acts.” And the theoretical Ought of our judgments about facts, like the practical Ought of Ethics, is after all definable only in terms of what Kant called the Autonomy of the Will. I ought to do that which I even now, by implication, mean to do. My Ought is my own will more rationally expressed than, at the instant of a capricious activity, I as yet consciously recognize. The consciousness of the more rational purpose, — of a purpose looming up, as it were, in the distance, beyond my present impulses, and yet even now seen as their own culmination, like a mountain crowning the ascent from the foothills, — the consciousness, I say, of such a purpose, is what we mean in Ethics by the Ought. This Ought may appear foreign, but yet it is never at once the Ought and still something wholly foreign to my own will. Constraint, as such, is never moral obligation. The Ought is another will than my impulse, yet it is one with my own meaning; and it expresses more fully and rationally what my impulse even now implies. But if the practical Ought of Ethics is thus ​the fuller determination of my own will, viewed at once as mine and yet as superior to my present capricious and imperfect expression of my purpose, the theoretical Ought of our present discussion of the categories of Experience is similarly related to the theoretical aspect of my present conscious activity. The expression of my Internal Meaning, as I now embody my purpose, has contents and a structure, has characters and relations within itself, and so is not only a “mere Idea,” but also has the correlative character of being, as we have all along seen, a fragment of Reality. The fuller expression of my will, defined by the Ought, has, in the same way, its own correlative embodiment in the Real. This embodiment constitutes my world of recognized facts. In recognizing the Ought on its practical side, as that to which I should even now conform my deed, I inevitably recognize the embodiment of this Ought, in the world of my completed will, as a fact. The present deed should be, then, at once a conformity to the Ought, viewed as a mode of action, and an adjustment or response to the facts, as the Ought, which is embodied in them, requires me to recognize them. The facts, as real, are embodiments of my purpose, yet not of my purpose as just now it transiently seems, but as it ought to be viewed. In recognizing them, I limit my present expression of myself through deeds, by virtue of my reference to these facts themselves. That shall be now (namely, in my deed), which conforms to the whole system that I mean, viz. to the world of the facts. To view my present act thus is to recognize the facts as such.
The extremely manifold and subtle implications of this ​view of our consciousness of the realm of concrete facts can here only be indicated. Our later discussions of Nature and of Man must supply the details. It is plain, at once, that, according to our view, every concrete fact in the universe becomes for us, just in so far as it is acknowledged, the expression of a purpose, and so is never a mere datum of anybody’s present experience, and is never a mere constraining power, that from without simply forces our assent. A fact may be acknowledged while yet many aspects of it remain mysterious. In so far it remains a “foreign” fact. But it is also our thesis that no purpose in the universe either is, or can now be rationally viewed by me, as wholly foreign to my own; while facts, so far as I understand them, become ipso facto expressions of ideas, and so of purposes. All purposes seek the expression that even now I am consciously seeking. Thus I myself am real, and I regard nothing real as a me alienum.
But, on the other hand, facts unquestionably limit me, and now seem to possess, at this passing instant, their often overwhelmingly foreign aspect. Why? In so far as I remain in suffering unreasonableness, no answer is apparent to such a question. But then, suffering unreasonableness, — a merely fragmentary mood of finite life, — if taken by itself, asks no very definite questions. For definite questions are reasonable, and imply successful inner deeds. But the mood of the unreasoning sufferer is lost in its mere failure to act successfully. It expresses its purpose only in so far as it is now conscious of its suffering. The rest of the universe it finds merely as something negative. Its word is, “True Being is ​not here.” Whoever, on the other hand, not only suffers, but also asserts: “These and these are the objective facts: my disease is this or this — my enemy has won against me thus or thus — cruel Nature, indifferent to my will, has such and such a constitution” — any such more rational sufferer lays himself open to the question, “How do you know these ideas of yours about those foreign facts to be true?” If the answer is, “Such is the verdict of human experience in general,” — then we already know that this very conception involves what we called relatively metempirical elements. No man of us has ever experienced what the general verdict of human experience really is. But if one answers, “This is what I myself now experience,” — then we reply “But you do not now experience the constitution of those external facts which you yourself characterize as foreign to you. You now only experience that you are not now succeeding.” But if the sufferer goes on to say, “It would be, in view of my experience, simple folly, mere unreasonableness, to admit the doubt that the foreign facts really are such and such” — then his position, as far as his comprehension of the facts enables him to go, is at once substantially identical with ours. He recognizes that he reasonably ought to view certain facts as in particular ways external to the internal meanings of his own ideas. But a world where that is real which now ought to be regarded as real, is a world where explicitly at least a certain aspect of one’s Internal Meaning is already recognized as expressed by the facts. For the Ought, as such, is never merely foreign to my own will. To recognize the whole fact-world as the final embodi​ment of Internal Meaning is merely to carry out to the end this same procedure.
Yet, as one may still insist, the question is not answered, Why do the facts often seem as foreign as they do? Why is their explicit conformity to our purpose, as defined by the Ought, joined with aspects of such hostility to all our purposes? In part this question is simply the problem of Evil, which will concern us later in another connection. In part our further discussion of the categories of experience, in our next lecture, will suggest its answer. In order to express the whole will which comes to our present consciousness in this so fragmentary human form, the facts, as we shall soon see, have to involve aspects that must now seem to us infinitely remote, and consequently, beyond our detailed comprehension at this instant. Thus, as we shall see, even the foreign aspect of the facts fulfils a purpose.
VI
It should be sufficiently plain by this time that in regarding our acknowledgment of facts as an expression of the Will, we do not assert that the will acknowledges facts in any merely capricious way. The will, whose relative satisfaction in this or in that present belief, or undertaking, or act of acknowledgment, or acceptance of the Ought, we have been observing, is known to us at any moment as by no means an altogether free or unconstrained will. Of the relative freedom of the finite will we shall speak hereafter. But for the present, when we say, “It is our own will which expresses itself in our interpretation of the real world,” we are not to be ​answered by such a retort as, for example, the following: “Surely, you cannot help believing as you now do in these physical and social facts, in these rocks and hills, in these fellow-men, and in the rest of your well-known world. Therefore, it is not of your own will that you thus acknowledge their presence. If it were, you could cease, at pleasure, to believe in their existence. For if it is your will that causes your belief, your will could, if it chose, cause a change of belief, and at pleasure you could instead acknowledge the truth of the Arabian Nights tales, and believe yourself a dweller in Sirius. As a fact, you must believe in the facts of common sense, whether you will or no.”
I reply to such an objection, first, that I do not call our will the cause of our present recognition of an external reality, and so still less the wholly free cause of this recognition, as if the will were a power that could now of a sudden change all our beliefs. What I say is that our present recognition of the concrete things in which we all believe is not a mere acceptance of any content of sense, but does include an intention to act, and does fulfil, as far as it goes, a purpose, and our own conscious purpose. How we came to get this purpose I do not here in the least care to explain by the hypothesis of any natural or supernatural causal process. Still less do I care now what psychological conditions enable the purpose to get itself expressed in our special beliefs. I report the observable inner facts, as the singer observes his own singing. It is so. I care not now what causes made it so. All our doctrines about causes, and about causation, whatever they are, are instances of just ​such expressions of rational purposes, — not means of explaining the fundamental fact that rational purposes get expressed in our conscious life. The so-called axiom of causation, or even the more generally stated “principle of sufficient reason,” is only one of the forms in which the Idea gets partially embodied in our thought about things. And the only warrant for believing in such a principle at all is the Ought, whose deepest basis lies in our fundamental assurance that all reality embodies purpose. So I do not base my view on the assertion that the will causes our beliefs and is free to change them. I point out simply that to believe as we do about men and things seems just now more reasonable to us than does any other belief which we chance to have in mind as an alternative. But seeming reasonable means seeming to fulfil a purpose. And I prove my doctrine not only by this appeal to consciousness, but, indirectly, by letting my opponent try to refute me. If he does so, it soon appears that he rejects my account as something that seems to him unreasonable, i.e. as something that ought not to be held, just as our realist, in our former discussion, was found appealing to the “sanity” of his beliefs, to their usefulness for practical human purposes, as part of his warrant for maintaining that the reality is independent of all purposes. One thus refutes our doctrine of the Ought only by appealing to it. All logical discussion is, in fact, appeal to a norm, and a norm is a teleological standard.
Meanwhile, to say that my will is just now expressed in a given way, is by no means equivalent to denying that, in large measure, I must just now will thus. For ​that must be whose denial conflicts with what is already recognized as actual. If I am this way of willing, then one can express the fact in terms of a must. In one aspect my will may indeed possess freedom. In another aspect I am obviously as much under “constraint” in willing as in any other aspect of my conscious life. Only the constraint is not wholly external. It is my own. If I were to find my hand too near the fire, I should will to withdraw it, and should express my will in struggles if another man constrained me. But my willing itself, my determination to struggle for my freedom, would here be as clear a case of something that I just then must will, from the very internal nature of my will, as the act of my enemy who held my hand towards the fire would be the case of a condition externally forced upon my attention. In such a case I will, but to say that I also must will thus, is to express an aspect of what my will actually and consciously includes. So, too, it is in case of our disappointed lover, whose will gives his mistress power over him. His love is his will, but just now he must love. So our acknowledgment of the Ought is an act of will, but there may be a must bound up with this acknowledgment. Will is not mere wavering. It has a determinate nature. And whatever has a definite character, is such that you can express certain aspects of this character in terms of what you then call necessity.
VII
The category of the Ought thus has two aspects, and implies their unity. The aspects are those which, in our ​general Theory of Being, we defined as the External and Internal Meaning of Ideas. Only, in that general discussion, we were considering our relation to the universe as a whole. Here we are concerned to point out how our relations to the particular objects of experience result from those involved in our general theory of reality. When we define any particular object as real, we are indeed momentarily conscious of the aspect of external necessity, foreign constraint, compulsion; and this aspect, as a rule, is, in our present life, predominant. But when we were inquiring into the general metaphysical issues, our whole attitude was deliberately reflective, self-conscious, observant of the demands that our ideas consciously make. Hence the bridge that leads over from an idealistic metaphysic to a theory of our knowledge of Nature and of Man is always difficult to find. The reader of idealistic theory accordingly often says, “All this seems plausible, but what has it to do with hard facts?” Now we have pointed out that the “hardness” of particular facts depends upon their having a more or less determinate structure. We human beings, however, never verify at any one moment this structure in so far as it is “hard,” i.e. stubborn, enduring, valid for all men, and real beyond the range of our momentary wishes and purposes. We can at any moment verify the fact that just then we do or do not find present what we seek. And we always do verify the fact in some respect, what we seek is present, since our seeking is already an act, and our act is already an expression of an idea. We also always verify the fact that, in some respect, what we seek is not present, since we are always dissatisfied. But ​the “objective facts,” in Nature or in the life of Man, are not thus ever to be verified, at any one instant of our lives. They are real for us, but they are real as the acknowledged objects whose structure transcends what is now given to us. Our question in the present discussion being this, “What determines us to acknowledge as real one rather than another system of particular facts?” we have here pointed out that the first determining principle, namely, the Ought, requires us to acknowledge at each moment as real certain particular facts which, even while they are conceived as limiting, constraining, and so determining our acts, are also conceived as thereby enabling us even now to accomplish our will better than we could if we did not acknowledge these facts. The “constraint” to which we here refer is meanwhile not first known as due to a cause, but comes to us in the form of the fact that our will is not now wholly expressed.
The Category of the Ought may thus be defined as implying three subordinate Categories: first, that of the Objectivity of all particular facts; secondly, that of the Subjectivity of the grounds for our acknowledgment of every particular fact; thirdly, that of the universal Teleology which, from our point of view, constitutes the essence of all facts. Objective are the facts that our experience suggests to us, because they are always, in some respect, other than what we now consciously find presented to us, as the relative fulfilment of our purposes, within our momentary experience. In this aspect they appear foreign to our will, and they so appear in various degrees, so that many writers have maintained that our ​“sense of resistance” is the fundamental warrant for our belief in facts external to ourselves. Such a view is inadequate, because it makes use of the category of causation as a primitive and irreducible conception. But unquestionably the facts do resist our momentary desires. Subjective, however, are all the grounds for our present acknowledgment of the facts. For in recognizing that our present wills are limited and controlled, we also recognize that only through such control can they win their determinate embodiment. And so it is our own will to acknowledge these foreign and objective limitations of our will. And thus no fact can furnish to us, wholly from without, the evidence that it exists. Nature embodies my will even in appearing foreign to my will; and thus only can I know that Nature exists as a system of facts defined by my ideas, but beyond my presentation. And, finally, the synthesis of these two characters appears in the essential Teleological constitution of the realm of facts, — a constitution which we shall soon have occasion to point out in the region where it seems least plausible, namely, in the so-called “mechanical,” or better, in the seemingly non-teleological realm of natural law.
Such, then, is the beginning of our account of the Organization of Experience as human wit conceives that organization.
* ↑ See First Series, p. 364, sq.
* ↑ See p. 253 of that series.
* ↑ I made use of this terminology for expressing the contrast between the two aspects of Reality in 1892, in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Lecture XII. The choice of the term Description in that work was determined by the known usage of Kirchhoff, Mach, and others, in defining the purpose of natural science as the exact “description” (as opposed to “explanation”) of facts.