Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/294

 282 WILLIAM JAMES : and of course the " through-and-through " character cannot be found in them. Each of them still contains among its elements what we call things, grammatical subjects, forming a sort of residual caput moriuum of Existence after all the relations that figure in the examples, have been told off. On this " existence," thinks popular philosophy, things may live on, like the winter bears on their own fat, never entering relations at all or, if enter- ing them, entering an entirely different set of them from those treated of in Mr. Haldane's examples. Thus if the digitalis were to weaken instead of strengthening the heart, and to produce death (as sometimes happens), it would determine itself, through determining the organism, to the function of " kill " instead of that of " cure ". The function and relation seem adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalis gets hold of, the digitalis and the heart being facts external and, so to speak, ac- cidental to each other. But this popular view, Mr. Haldane's friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the " existence " of digitalis and heart outside of the relations of killing or curing, is but a function in a wider system of rela- tions, of which, pro hac, vice, we take no account. The larger system determines the existence just as absolutely as the sys- tem " kill," or the system " cure," determined the function of the digitalis. Ascend to the absolute system, instead of biding with these relative and partial ones, and you shall see that the law of through-and-throughness must and does obtain. Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us completely from chopping logic about the concrete examples Mr. Haldane has chosen. It is not his fault if his categories are so fine an instrument that nothing but the sum total of things can be taken to show us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he has not the sum total of tnings to show it by. Let us fall back from all concrete attempts and see what we can do with his notion of through-and-throughness, avowedly taken in abstracto. In abstract systems the "through-and-through" Ideal is realised on every hand. In any system, as such, the members are only members in the system. Abolish the system and you abolish its members, for you have conceived them through no other property than the abstract one of membership. Neither Tightness nor leftness, except through bi-laterality. Neither mortgager nor mortgagee, except through mortgage. The logic of all these cases is this : If A, then B ; but if B, then A : where- fore if either, Both ; and if not Both, Nothing. It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to admit that the absolute totality of things mat/ be organised exactly after the pattern of one of these " through-and-through " abstractions. In fact, it is the pleasantest and freest of mental movements. Husband makes, and is made by, wife, through marriage ; one makes other, by being itself other ; everything self-created through its opposite you go round like a squirrel in a cage. But if you