Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/849

No. 6.] to some other valid idea, or if it be frequently evoked by reading books of a veracious character which place it in a content we can understand. On the other hand, fictitious ideas, such as are due to false tradition, worthless hearsay, or crude speculation, should be weakened by the absence of corroborating experience and by the difficulty of relating them to ideas of acknowledged validity, and thus eventually expelled from the mind into which they have intruded. These desirable processes, however, do not take place in the individual mind unless it be of an alert and progressive order. The question of supreme social interest is, do they necessarily take place in the mind of collective humanity; given the conditions of the modern world, in which there is an increasingly free interchange of opinions between thinkers of all nations and an ever-growing body of scientific and social knowledge? Perhaps the answer required depends upon answering a prior question:—is there also an increasing tendency to substitute rational co-operation in thought, as well as in deed, for the rival dogmatism of philosophies, religious nationalities, political parties, and social classes?

The abstract ideas of the simpler sorts of physical qualities, states of consciousness, and relations in place and time form predicates which help to describe subjects, but not to explain their origin or any changes they undergo. Of abstract ideas which do partially explain reality there are two sorts; (1) ideas of natural causation, and (2) ideas of conscious ends and means to be consciously employed in attaining them.

Statements of natural law are not merely statements of invariable coexistence or sequence. They do partly explain how effects are caused. What they do not explain is the ultimate why of causation; but that, from the point of view of one who believes in a universal and eternal order of things which is partially and progressively knowable, is a quite illegitimate object of inquiry. The universe is not accountable to man for being what it is. His highest ambition should be to describe it with some approach to truth. The flux of things can be partially