Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/460

Rh distinctions of organic and inorganic, of apparently living and apparently lifeless beings, — it is, I say, in case of Nature, that the diversified processes, present to our ordinary experience, arouse questions as to the special kinds of causal linkage that, in any particular case, bind one fact to another. It is in this world, — the phenomenal or natural, the essentially fragmentary world, the realm which cannot contain its whole truth within itself, — it is in this realm, I say, that the special problems concerning physical and mental causation, concerning active and inactive beings, concerning the relation of physical organism and mental phenomena, most properly arise. And we shall do well to keep separate the study of the whole constitution of the universe (conceived in accordance with the general principles of our theory of Being), from a study of the special problems of the phenomenal world. It is not my present purpose, then, to exhaust the theory of the sense in which will is, and is not, an active cause in the natural world. What can at present be asked from us is a general statement of the sense in which what exists expresses, on the one hand, the will of God; and, on the other hand, that individual will which you find at any moment present in a fragmentary way in your own finite consciousness. I shall maintain that both God’s will and our own finite will get consciously expressed in the world, and that no contradiction results from this statement.

At any moment your ideas, in so far as they are rational, embody a purpose. That we have asserted from