Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/24

Rh from which we must take our whole cognitive start, — the theory here set forth accepts neither, but the rather abandons both. It neither accepts sensation as an unfathomable datum merely, nor does it entertain the hypothesis that it is an effect produced in the mind by some foreign agent acting as an efficient cause. Its aim, so far as explanation through efficient causation is concerned, is to explain Nature wholly from the resources of the individual mind; and to explain it further, and in the full sense, by referring it beyond the individual to the whole world of minds in which every individual essentially belongs; but here the principle of explanation changes from efficient to final causation.

In detail, the explanation is this: Each mind other than God no doubt organises its own sense-contents directly by its own a priori formative consciousness, for spontaneity is meaningless unless it is individual; and Nature is, in so far, a product of the individual’s efficient causality. But all this organising of a sense-world, and the having of it, falls within the logical compass of each mind’s central and eternal act of defining itself as individual; and this it does, this it can do, only in terms of the world of other minds, — in the final resort, in terms of God, the Type of all intelligence. Thus the primordial self-consciousness of every mind with a sense-world, though receiving no contribution from the efficiency of any