Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/182

Rh dualistic. On the one hand we find in experience motives that seem to lead to Materialism. For Materialism is due simply to a one-sided emphasis laid upon certain aspects of the World of Description. On the other hand we are driven, by equally obvious empirical considerations, to interpret the social world as a realm of conscious voluntary processes, which occur because somebody finds it worth while that they should occur. Our ordinary common-sense view of things sets these two doctrines about the knowable world side by side, and in general despairs of seeing any comprehensible link between the two orders, viz. between the mental and the material, the social and the physical, the necessary and the free, the describable and the spiritual. Our own general criticism of the categories has prepared us, however, to understand, in terms of our Idealism, both the contrast and the unity of these two realms. In the present and in the subsequent lecture, I propose therefore to undertake a discussion of the concept of Nature, and to show its relation to our concept of Mind. We shall have to explain, in the first place, what are the main motives for our acknowledgment of the existence of the physical world; and secondly, we shall have to set forth in some detail the relations between our idealistic Theory of Being on the one hand and the empirical facts that men acknowledge on the other hand, in dealing with one another and with Nature.

No precise definition of the scope covered by the term Nature can be given in advance of a Theory of Nature.