Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/159

No. 2.] into its antecedents in order to explain how that knowledge originated, nor in putting the hen into her antecedents in order to explain her.

Our researches acquaint us with the natural history of the things into which we inquire and they acquaint us with nothing else. Knowing their natural history we may be led to entertain certain expectations about their future, but it is important to remember the conditions of such expectations. Now, I take it, that while the fact that we expect anything has its antecedents, these antecedents are not themselves expectations or anything like expectations. Because the sun has risen so invariably, I may expect it to continue invariably to rise; but its performance does not account for the fact that I expect it to do anything at all. That performance may lead me to expect a rising and not a setting sun, but it does not lead me to expect that the sun will do anything. In other words what our expectations about things concretely are may be due entirely to the things, but it is not due to them that we meet them in the attitude of expectation. Expectant beings must first exist before anything is expected of things. To be sure, expectant beings have a history, but what can it possibly mean to affirm that any knowledge of that history short of their existence would lead us who are expectant beings to expect that such beings would one day exist? I am not trying to say that the origin of consciousness is one of the riddles of the universe. I doubt that it is. To suppose that its origin may one day be discovered appears to me to be neither visionary nor absurd. I am trying to say, however, that the origin of consciousness, its evolution, is a matter of history only. We expect things to do what they are in the habit of doing. Because plants grow from seeds, we expect them so to grow. If they dropped from the clouds like rain, we should expect that of them. If they behaved in a way to baffle all expectation, we should expect them so to behave. If, therefore, we discovered that matter produced thought, we should expect it to produce thought. This does not mean, however, that if we knew the constitution of matter, we should expect matter to produce thought. It means rather that we can not construe matter without taking