Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/394

 382 EDMUND MONTGOMERY : tionally to control and to modify the determining complex of foreign influences, so that it shall minister with as few disadvantages as possible to our individual and generical development and destination. The fulfilment of human destiny through progressive organic elaboration is the desir- able result naturally aimed at by life itself ; and the means to subserve this end are the suitable adaptation and har- monious transformation of all available resources of nature. To become thoroughly efficient as conscious agents in human development we have, however, to guard against false mysticism on the perceptual or phenomenal side, as well as against the conceptual or intelligible mysticism which we have been here combating. Because the realm of things-in-themselves is cognisable to us only through its sensorial effects, or because only phenomena are known, it has appeared to some philosophers allowable to look upon the power affecting us, or the power behind the phenomena as the All-Being or the Absolute, or something containing infinite depths of reality. This Perceptual Transcendentalism is as demonstrably untrue as any kind of Conceptual Tran- scendentalism. Everything, in perception as well as in conception, depends on the realising agent, on the pre- established and sustained faculties of the perceiving and conceiving subject. Allow the human being in his actual state to degenerate in any respect, and where remains the virtue and beauty displayed in the higher manifestations of human life ? It is, indeed, not the conceptual recognition of exalted existence, it is just the natural realisation of exalted life, that ought to be made the object of our striv- ing; and it is the organically preserved and accumulated wealth of such life, inherited and bequeathed, that imparts to the transitory incidents of our individual existence their worth, their pathos and their sublimity. The true mystery of it all lies in the realising power itself, in the efficiency and possible concurrence of conditions rendering realisation at all practicable and actual. It is an inscrutable power that appears to us as organised entity, manifesting the wondrous properties of life ; but it is obvi- ously the harmonious co-operation of surrounding conditions that sustains such organisation and that furnishes it with its object of mental realisation. We have therefore, once more be it said, designedly and with growing insight into the means furthering human well- being, to regulate and to shape the conditions affecting us through sensory channels in order that we may maintain