Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/41

 the other will be. Recent knowledge has shown the range of life to extend far into the region of what was once regarded as the inanimate, purely physical world, and it has further shown the lowest known organisms to be highly complex and extremely varied. But there is nothing to suggest that we have reached the limits of life: all we can say is that our senses and the artificial aids and methods of research at present available do not enable us to discriminate between yet simpler forms of life and their environment; not that these do not exist. There is then, it is contended, no warrant for the assumption of a completely inanimate environment at all: we ought rather with Spinoza to conclude that “all individual things are animated, albeit in diverse degrees.” We ought so to conclude too, because — continuity apart — what can neither do nor suffer, what is nothing for itself, is truly nothing at all; for — again as Spinoza maintained — every individual thing, so far as in it lies, endeavours to persist in its own being. On this, the panpsychist view. Nature thus resolves into a plurality of conative individuals; and the range and complexity of the. correspondence between a given individual and its environment marks the stage to which it has advanced in its interaction with the rest. But to cite Spinoza is to give point to the difficulty that has still to be met.

Will a plurality of interacting subjects account for itself and for the unity which interaction implies? This is the question which in the following lectures we shall have carefully to discuss. Suppose we decide this question in the negative, that will not affect the