Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/23

 inertia and rigorous concatenation; to the one the notions of end and value are fruitless, nay meaningless, for the other they are of paramount importance. And yet the two cannot be separated, for Nature not only provides the scenery and properties of history but the actors themselves seem to have sprung from its soil, to owe their position largely to its cooperation, and to come into touch with each other solely through its means. After all, these so-called realms are but ‘aspects’ of one world; and it is precisely this fact that makes their seeming contrariety and incompatibility a problem for philosophy: where and how are we to find the final unification or mediation of the two? It will be one step towards a solution if we can determine which aspect is the more fundamental. It hardly needs to be said that since the dawn of speculation the claims of both aspects have had, as indeed they still have, their advocates. Those who assign the priority to Nature we call Naturalists: those who contend for the priority of free agents we may call Spiritualists. In a previous course of Gifford Lectures which I had the honour to deliver in Aberdeen ten years ago, I endeavoured to show the superiority of the spiritualistic position. The main lines of the argument can be very briefly indicated and I trust it will seem to you fitting that I should recapitulate them by way of introduction to the further inquiry into the nature of the spiritualistic realm and to the discussion of some of its problems, which I propose in the present course to attempt.

Reviewing the progress of the natural sciences since the times of Galileo and Descartes we may note