Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/435

416 that the unity which the evolutionary processes indicate is one that no simple scheme of the formal classification of natural processes into mechanical, chemical, and organic, or even into those of living and non-living nature, can any longer attempt at all exhaustively to characterize.

So much the more must an idealist to-day be unwilling to talk of nature as coming for the first time to self-consciousness in man, or to limit the categories in terms of which nature is to be interpreted, to those which are found directly serviceable in the human process of cataloguing and describing the natural phenomena which come within our finite ken. The older philosophy of nature was not merely too much disposed to anticipate scientific results in an a priori way; it was also too crudely and anthropocentrically empirical in its classifications of natural fact, and in its attempts to unify natural fact. Our doctrine, indeed, invites man to be at home in his universe, but does not make man, in so far as you first separate him from nature, the one finite end that nature seeks.

For us to-day, as I may as well forthwith assert, the conceptions which, from our idealistic point of view, promise to admit of the most plastic adaptation to the varieties of empirical fact, and consequently of the most universal application to the interpretation of the inner life of nature, are our social conceptions. These at once are intensely human, and capable, as Kant’s ethical doctrine already showed, of a vast extra-human generalization, in so far as we take account of other possible moral agents. In the form of finite social intercourse, amongst human beings, we find exemplified a type of unity in