Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/99

38 cosmic and reign in all phenomena, must have all its previous elements — succession, contiguity, causal connexion, generation (mechanical, chemical, physiological, and psychic) — translated upward into this logical genesis. We have just seen that this has its source in the mind’s organic Idea, or primal self-consciousness of its own intrinsic coherence, its own variety in unity.

(5) Final Cause, or Ideality. — This, the mind's consciousness of its own form of being as self-conscious, — that is, spontaneously conscious and spontaneously or originally real, — is the ultimate and authentic meaning of causality. In the cause as self-conscious Ideal, the consciousness of its own thinking nature as the “measure of all things,” — as “source, motive, path, original, and end,” — we at length come to causation in the strictest sense, Kant’s Causality with freedom. It might happily be called, in contrast to natural causation, supernatural causation; or, in contradistinction from physical, metaphysical causation. The causality of self-consciousness — the causality that creates and incessantly re-creates in the light of its own Idea, and by the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self-consciousness purely — is the only complete causality, because it is the only form of being that is unqualifiedly free.