Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/27

 at all. On the other hand, if we leave him where we found him, oblivious of the essential implications of experience, and contemplating per impossibile a closed system of mass-points in motion, then assuredly the notion that these have dependent, epiphenomenal, concomitants or ‘collateral products’ will never dawn upon him, or even admit of statement without contradiction. But a workable interpretation of experience compels us not only to reject this distinction of material phenomena and mental epiphenoniena, but to reject also the tacit assumption that our percepts are merely subjective modifications. This whole distinction of phenomenon and epiphenomenon is but the old story of the Cartesian dualism over again. But after puzzling the world for nearly three centuries, it seems — at least as a philosophical tenet — in a fair way to disappear. Make two mutually exclusive halves out of the one concrete world: in the one you will find only your own so-called subjective states and have to become a solipsist; in the other the organisms you would find there you could call only automata at the best.

This brings us to another inconsistency in which Naturalism is involved; for, even if conscious, the automata as part of the continuous mechanism are, as already said, powerless to withstand or to control it: consciousness is only comparable to a shadow that incidentally in some mysterious way accompanies their working. To be sure we seem active, ever striving for ends, and the historical world would become meaningless if we were not. We do not infer this activity: it is prima facie an ultimate and constitutive fact of our daily experience and of its historical development.