第104章

the simplicity, by deducing them out of the smallest possible number of permanent and independent primordial entities: the definite organization, by assimilating these latter to ideal objects between which relations of an inwardly rational sort obtain.That these ideal objects and rational relations are will require a separate chapter to show. Meanwhile, enough has surely been said to justify the assertion made above that no general off hand answer can be given as to which objects mankind shall choose as its realities.The fight is still under way.Our minds are yet chaotic; and at best we make a mixture and a compromise, as we yield to the claim of this interest or that, and follow first one and then another principle in turn.It is undeniably true that materialistic, or so-called 'scientific,' conceptions of the universe have so far gratified the purely intellectual interests more than the mere sentimental conceptions have.But, on the other hand, as already remarked, they leave the emotional and active interests cold.The perfect object of belief would be a God or 'Soul of the World,' represented both optimistically and moralistically (if such a combination could be), and withal so definitely conceived as to show us why our phenomenal experiences should be sent to us by Him in just the very way in which they come.All Science and all History would thus be accounted for in the deepest and simplest fashion.The very room in which I sit, its sensible walls and floor, and the feeling the air and are within it give me, no less than the 'scientific' conceptions which I am urged to frame concerning the mode of existence of all these phenomena when my back is turned, would then all be corroborated, not de-realized, by the ultimate principle of my belief.The World-soul sends me just those phenomena in order that I may react upon them; and among the reactions is the intellectual one of spinning these conceptions.What is beyond the crude experiences is not an alternative to them, but something that means them for me here and now.It is safe to say that, if ever such a system is satisfactorily excogitated, mankind will drop all other systems and cling to that one alone as reel.Meanwhile the other systems coexist with the attempts at that one, and, all being alike fragmentary, each has its little audience and day.

I have now, I trust, shown sufficiently what the psyche-logic sources of the sense of reality are.Certain postulatesare given in our nature;

and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real. I might therefore finish the it not that a few additional words will chapter here, were it not that a reset the truth in a still clearer light.DOUBT.

There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) would not say that things come to us in the first instance as ideas ; and that if we take them for realities, it is because we add something to them, namely, the predicate of having also 'real existence outside of our thought.' This notion that a higher faculty than the mere having of a conscious content is needed to make us know anything real by its means has pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the tradition of Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense.Just as sensations must come as inward affections and then be 'extradited;' as objects of memory must appear at first as presently unrealities, and subsequently be 'projected' backwards as past realities;

so conceptions must be entia rationis till a higher faculty uses them as windows to look beyond the ego, into the real extra -mental world; -- so runs the orthodox and popular account.

And there is no question that this is a true account of the way in which many of our later beliefs come to pass.The logical distinction between the bare thought of an object and belief in the object's reality is often a chronological distinction as well.The having and the crediting of and idea do not always coalesce; for often we first suppose and then believe; first play with the notion, frame the hypothesis, and then affirm the existence, of an object of thought.And we are quite conscious of the succession of the two mental acts.But these cases are none of them primitive cases.They only occur in minds long schooled to doubt by the contradictions of experience.The primitive impulse is to affirm immediately the reality of all that is conceived. When we do doubt, however, in what does the subsequent resolution of the doubt consist? It either consists in a purely verbal performance, the coupling of the adjectives 'real' or 'outwardly existing' (as predicates) to the thing originally conceived (as subject);

or it consists in the perception in the given case of that for which these adjectives , abstracted from other similar concrete cases, stand.

But what these adjectives stand for, we now know well.They stand for certain relations (immediate, or through intermediaries) to ourselves.Whatever concrete objects have hitherto stood in those relations have been for us 'real,' ' outwardly existing.' So that when we now abstractly admit a thing to be 'real' (without perhaps going through any definite percep-