Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/40

 as the historical animal. At the same time the realisation of these ends invests him, so to say, with a new environment, a metamorphosis of nature, an artificial, humanly created, medium, which throws the immediate environment of the naked and resourceless troglodyte more and more into the background. Entre l’homme et la Nature, said Comte, il faut l’humanité.

Still, it will be objected, beyond humanity and history, beyond, if you will, the whole realm of sentient life. Nature is there all the while, and there as no mere background but as the basis of the whole, the fundamental plasma which can only be shaped because it is itself determinate and orderly. Granting this we may yet urge that there is nothing in Nature, when we try to envisage it as a whole, that is incompatible with a spiritualistic interpretation. In the historical world we place determinate agents first, and the order and development which we observe we trace to their action and interaction. It has never been shown that we need, nor made clear that we can, interpret Nature otherwise.

One problem of supreme importance to such an interpretation does however arise, and this problem the objection we are considering directly suggests. We have only to an insignificant extent shaped Nature, we have not made it; we are not even settlers from a foreign clime but aborigines seemingly sprung from the soil. But the principle of continuity is supposed to turn the edge of this objection, and to this principle panpsychism appeals, though it does not rest on that alone. “Nature never makes leaps,” said Leibniz. Every organism has its peculiar environment, the simpler the one is the simpler