Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/41

 realism with the erroneous side of Kant's synthetic unity.

No mind can make a world synthetic if that world is not synthetic in itself. But again; no world can be synthetic in itself, that is, can possess universals as a part of its own nature, if its elements have not, pervading them, the living nexus and endeavour towards a whole which indicates participation in the nature of minds. I cannot understand any attempt to explain a universal which does not recognise that it absolutely consists in the effort of a content to complete itself as a system. You may say that it would not do this of itself, but only by the mind working in it. And I am disposed to agree. But then you have abandoned the doctrine that the universal is a physical reality, so far as that means a reality that working as a universal can exist independently of mind. Either you throw the work of mind on the shoulders of a physical reality, and thereby transform the latter fundamentally, or you connect it with