Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/436

Rh variety, and of variety recalling us always to the recognition of unity, — a type, I say, which permits us, as I believe, to go further in our hypotheses for the interpretation of the vast finite realm called nature, than we can go by the use of any other types of conception. The social life finds room for the most various sorts of mutual estrangement, conflict, and misunderstanding amongst finite beings; while, on the other hand, every form of social intercourse implies an ultimate unity of meaning, a real connectedness of inner life, which is precisely of the type that you can best hope to explain in terms of our Fourth Conception of Being. When I tell you then, in advance, that in the second series of these lectures I shall try to explain our relations to nature as essentially social, and therefore in their deepest essence ethical relationships; when I predict that, without transcending our legitimate rights as interpreters of the empirical results, we shall undertake to show that nature, in a fashion whose details are still only faintly hinted to us men, constitutes a vast society, in whose transactions finite processes of evolution when viewed, not with reference to the eternal meaning of the whole, but with reference to the temporal series of facts, are presumably mere passing incidents, — when I say this, I indicate in some measure how our Idealism will undertake to explain the unity of the world, without becoming, upon that account, merely anthropocentric in its accounts of nature.

There is a sense, as I have said, in which all the world may be viewed as centred about the fully expressed inner meaning of any finite rational idea. But then human ideas, as in fact is implied in their very conscious sense of