Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/165

147 process. "A mere lump would remain a lump, and never become a thing, if, to adhere to our phenomenal way of speaking, it did not pass through a series of changes. A thing must have a career." Its full reality does not appear in a mere cross-section; it comes out only in a longitudinal view of the process. "The strict adherence to the definition of a thing in terms of behavior, therefore, would seem to require that we should wait for the changes to go through a part at least of their progress for the career to be unrolled, at least in part. Immediate description gives, so far as it is truly immediate, no science, no real thing with any richness of content; it gives merely the snap-object of the child." The 'what' therefore can be stated only in terms of the 'how,' the existence only in terms the growth of the thing. "Any 'what' whatever is in large measure made up of judgments based upon experiences of the 'how.'" Statements of the existence of the thing are ultimately simply abbreviated statements of the method of its operation.

The question arises then, "How far back in the career of the thing is it necessary to go to call the halting-place 'origin'?" "How much of a thing's career belongs to its origin?" It is clear "that origin is always a reading of part of the very career which is the content of the concept of the nature of the thing." How far back must we unroll this record of the behavior of the thing to get the origin of the thing ? So "the question before us seems to resolve itself into the task of finding somewhere in the thing's history a line which divides its career up to the present into two parts—one properly described as origin, and the other not. Now on the view of the naturalist pure and simple, there can be no such line. For the attempt to construe a thing entirely in terms of history, entirely in the retrospective categories, would make it impossible for him to stop at any point and say, 'This far back is nature and further back is origin'; for at that point the question might be asked of him, 'What is the content of the career which describes the thing's origin?'—and he would have to reply in exactly the same way that he did 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