Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/571

 CARVETH BEAD, The Metaphysics of Nature. 557 " activity " of Being, and the rest of Being which is manifested in phenomena they may be accounted for. For the " interaction " of the heterogeneous " parallelism " is too diagrammatic ; for psycho- logical purposes "correlation" is enough and to be preferred (p. 333). Volition and the laws of phenomena are manifestations of the same Being, it is an activity of the same order and universality of character as manifested by the laws of Nature. . . "the future of the world at any moment depends upon the combination of existing agents and of these agents each man is one ". His actions follow upon his character by necessity, but because he acts accord- ing to his character that is according to his body he feels himself free. The necessity of the action is precisely what makes it his own. " Thus the Categories of Possibility, Impossibility, Con- tingency, Necessity, have only subjective value" (p. 279); "... the past or future has existence neither more nor less than the present . . . they exist or are real by universal integration or continuity " (p. 280). " Want, insufficiency, inferiority, some- thing unattained, can never characterise the universe, if you say with Spinoza, per realitatem et per fectionem idem intelligo" (p. 341). "In the inwardness of Nature physical and final causes maybe the same principle" (p. 346), but Prof. Eead cannot help feeling that the doctrine of Final Causation, like Transcendent Being, " remains a merely indicative, orective Category. The adaptation of organisms is a fact ; and, so far as we can follow the history of the World from age to age, its gradual rise to self-consciousness is a fact; but the teleological interpretation of all this baffles our understanding." Prof. Eead carries one along with him a great way, but perhaps most people soon foresee that the end of the whole matter is like^ to be very unsatisfying and inconclusive. If I were to indicate with one word the dissatisfaction I feel with his method, I should say it was too impersonalistic. Prof. Eead might have found his best point of departure, after all, not from what we all feel but from the reflexive knowledge of man. That yields us the concept of that which maintains itself in constant change, a being that is at once the origin and goal of activity ; and it might throw light on a world of individualised existences, even on the relation between mechan- ism and teleology. But in Prof. Bead's speculations reflexion plays a scarcely less spectral part than that assigned to the Divine Consciousness. As to his result: his Transcendent Being is something out of all relation to the World, making no manner of difference to scientific or practical judgments. This being so, and the result is very disappointing, Prof. Eead's displeasure with the doctrine of interaction strikes one as excessive. He is anxious that his own doctrine of "correlation" should not be confounded with parallelism as a metaphysical theory, for that makes the mistake of treating consciousness as a phenomenon. His parallelism is " between consciousness and the rest of Being which is manifested in phenomena " (p. 240). The practical 37