Page:Philosophical Review Volume 30.djvu/547

No. 5.] of a society of spontaneous centers of consciousness, and, in particular, natural law is the mode of behavior of these conscious subjects. That is to say, Nature is conscious, free and purposive, with a certain general tendency away from chaos and chance, and toward order and progression. This general tendency, and also a large number of special tendencies, are capable of being expressed statistically, and the laws discovered by scientists are to be regarded as statistical expressions of gradually established habits of intercourse in a panpsychical society constituted by free individuals.

The logical group, represented by the writings of Bosanquet, interprets reality in terms of mind understood, not as a number of individual centers of consciousness, finite, subjective, unanalyzable and ultimate, but as something universal and objective, a principle of direction immanent in the whole universe and developing as the principle of its development, a certain organization of the facts of experience exemplified not only in centers of subjective consciousness, but also in the inanimate world, and especially in social, supra-individual institutions. On this view, what we call natural laws are the expression of mind, not as sensory or conative, but of mind as logical principle, the principle of determination by the whole. Scientific laws express the relation of parts to one another, determined in their significance by reference to the concrete whole in which they function. In physics and chemistry there remains a certain residual datum which is external to the mind's activity; in the social sciences, in the laws of the state, in art and religion, mind "has come home to itself, and knows itself as mind." In this realm, the kingdom of values, where the world of sense is transfigured through interpretation, mind and nature work as one harmonious whole, an organization of mechanism and teleology, of relations and values, a systematic totality, a genuine universe of law. Thus interpreted, law is the relation of all the particulars in the universe, taken together and determined by the nature of the universe as a whole.

The work is not a mere study in contrasts, but the author criticizes, sharply and severely, certain presuppositions and certain consequences of the psychological view. A number of 'contradictions' are pointed out as inherent in this view. Thus, it is insisted that to construe the real in terms of conscious processes (instead of regarding mind and nature as complementary aspects of the whole) is to treat all law as derivative and contingent, and to elevate indeterminism and chance, the antithesis of law, to the rank of first principles; to make conation and not cognition the central feature of mind is regarded as a "basic inconsistency" in a view which accepts certain of the premises of rationalism, and eventually the whole position is reduced to solipsism, if not something worse.

Idealists attempt to interpret reality in terms of mind. But mind can be understood in two senses, the one more subjective and psychological, the other more objective and logical. To contrast these two senses, to