Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/140

124 without a remainder, from pre-existent elements? Does it follow from the very nature of reason that what now is always has been and always will be, that there is nothing new under the sun, that the new is nothing but a re-arrangement of the old? If we define reality in the first place, as rigid, inert blocks of matter that can be pushed and pulled and nothing else, it follows that nothing can come out of it that was not there before. If we conceive reality as mind, and mind as a thing, as something that can do nothing unless pushed by something else, or as a static universal purpose, then, again, the world is a closed system, nothing can come into it that was not already there before. But we are not compelled to define reality in either way, and human intelligence is not by nature forced to conceive it so; it is compelled only to accept the consequences of such a definition if such a definition be accepted. Moreover, this is not the view of reality which the great historical systems have given us; to construe them in this sense is to misconstrue them. It is true, the human mind has its ways of thinking; our very problems follow from the nature of our thought and certain results follow. There is not a single faith-philosopher, intuitionist, or pragmatist who does not think in these general human ways, who does not try hard to be consistent, who does not look out for similarities and differences in his experiences, who does not single out and hold fast certain phases of them, and who does not relate them in definite ways. The mind has its ways, and some of these ways, if left to themselves, tend to stretch reality upon a static Procrustean frame to make it fit; there is always danger of one-sidedness in intelligence, that, instinct-like, it will spin the same old web around everything it meets, that it will apply everywhere the methods which Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Bergson allow it to use in the dead world, that it will try to handle life and consciousness as it would handle its corpses. There is this danger, and the thinker who deals largely in abstract formulas often succumbs to it. But it is just the business of philosophy to avoid this very danger, to apply the methods intelligently; the cure for intelligence is more intelligence. There is nothing whatever in the nature of the human mind to