ORIGIN VERSUS NATURE
same way that he dicl if we asked him the
same question regarding the thing’s nature
at that point. He would have to say that
the origin of the thing observed later was
described by career up to that point; and is
not that exactly the reply he would give if we
asked him what the thing was which then
was 1 So to get any reply to the question of
the origin of one thing different from that
to the question of nature at an earlier
stage, he would have to go still further back.
But this would only repeat his difficulty.
So he would never be able to distinguish
between origin and nature except as different
terms for describing different sections of one
continuous series of aspects of behaviour.
This dilemma holds also, I think, in the case
of the intuitionist. For as far as he denies
the natural history view of origins and so
escapes the development above, he holds to
special creation by an intelligent Deity ; but
to get content to his thought of Deity he
resorts to what he knows of mental behaviour.
The nature of mind then supplies the thought
of the origin of mind.
Of course, on the view developed, the
question of the ultimate origin of the universe
may still come up for answer. Can there be
an ultimate stopping-place anywhere in the
career of the tiling-world as a whole 1 Does
not our position make it necessary that at any
such stopping-place there should be some
kind of filling drawn from yet antecedent
history to give our statement of the conditions
of origin any distinguishing character ? It
seems so. To say the contrary would be to
do in favour of the prospective categories
what we have been denying the right of the
naturalist to do in favour of those of retro¬
spect. Neither can proceed: without the
other. The only way to treat the problem
of ultimate origin is not to ask it, as an
isolated problem, but to reach a category
which intrinsically resolves the opposition
between the two phases of reality. Lotze
says that the problem of philosophy is to
inquire what reality is, not how it is made ;
and this will do if we remember that we must
exhaust the empirical ‘ how ’ to get a notion
of the empirical ‘what,’ and that there still
remains over the ‘prospect’ which the same
author has hit off in his famous saying :
‘ Reality is richer than thought.’ To desi¬
derate a what which has no how—this seems
as contradictory as to ask for a how in terms
of what is not. It is really this last chase of
the ‘ how ’ that Lotze deprecates— and rightly.
Of the great historical solutions, that of the
intellectualists leans to the retrospective, that
of the voluntarists to the prospective ; a con¬
sistent affectivist theory has never been worked
out, although something might be said for a
form of what we may baptize beforehand as
‘ aesthonomic idealism ’—aesthetic experience
being made the metaphysical prius both of
science and of value. This would be no
doubt as profitable as the Hegelian logicism
which reads reality out of the categories in
order to transcend their oppositions.
The conclusions may be summed up in
certain tentative propositions as follows :—
(1) All statements of the nature of ‘things’
get their matter mainly from the processes
which they have been known to pass through :
that is, statements of nature are for the most
part statements of origin.
(2) Statements of origin, however, never
exhaust the reality of a thing, since such
statements cannot be true to the experiences
which they state unless they construe the
reality not only as a thing which has had
a career, but also as one which is about to
have a career; for the expectation of the
future career rests upon and is produced by
the same historical series as the belief in the
past career. Cf. Pragmatism, passim.
(3) All attempts to rule out prospective
organization or teleology—the belief in the
correspondence between reality and thought—
from the world would be fatal to natural
science, which has arisen by a series of pro¬
visional retrospective interpretations of just
this kind of organization : and fatal also to
the historical interpretation of the world
found in the evolution hypothesis ; for the
category of teleology thus understood is but
the prospective reading of the same series
which, when read retrospectively, we call
evolution. Cf. the remarks on teleology and
evolution under Heredity.
(4) The fact that mental products, ideas,
intuitions, &c., have a natural history is no
argument against their validity or worth
as having application beyond the details of
their own history ; since, if so, then a natural
history series can issue in nothing new. But
that is to deny the existence of the idea or
product itself, for it is a new thing in the
series in which it arises.
(5) All these points may be held together
in a view which gives each mental content
a twofold function in the mental life. Each
such content begets two attitudes in the pro¬
gressive development of the individual. So
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