Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/32

 only distinguished relatively to each other so long as they are apperceived together by the one subject. The category of causality we owe to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and especially with each other, and we attribute it analogically to what we then call the interaction of natural agents. Then as to the regularity of Nature or the universal reign of law, this never has been, and never can be, empirically established, nor does its denial involve any contradiction: that is to say, it is neither demonstrable nor axiomatic. It is a postulate that has its root in our primitive credulity. Were this anticipatio mentis never confirmed, knowledge would be impossible; but confirmed as it is continually in our earliest experience we thus advance to an interpretatio naturae as an orderly and intelligible system, a cosmos that evinces directly or indirectly the all-pervading presence of mind.

To sum up in words that I have lately used elsewhere: — “We are active beings and somehow control the movements of the bodies we are said to animate. No facts are more immediately certain than these, and there is nothing in our actual experience that conflicts with them. From these facts we advance to the abstract concepts on the strength of which Naturalism, by a grievous misapprehension of its own standpoint, attempts to question them. Stationed at the very outskirts of the knowable and intent only on the quantitative aspects of things — like those fabulous beings of geometrical romance, the inhabitants of Flatland — it finds impassable barriers which have no existence in the fuller dimensions of concrete experience. But we, orientating from this more central