Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/186

Rh make the whole issue depend upon irreducible innate convictions. And, furthermore, it has been urged by many noted thinkers who otherwise are of the most various philosophical tendency.

According to this view, we come by our belief in the physical world simply upon the ground of the Resistance which the solid material objects offer to our touch, to our movement, and especially to our muscular sense, and upon the basis of the various other ways in which Nature sets limits to our activity. And we reason from such experiences of resistance and of limitation to the external existence of things, upon the ground that there must indeed be a cause for every effect, and therefore, in this case, a cause which resists and sets limits to our will. As this cause is not found within ourselves, we assume it as external.

No theory of our belief in an external world seems to have had better fortune than this one in popular philosophy, or even in more serious metaphysical inquiry. And yet I regard it as precisely such a mingling of true and of false analysis as is especially adapted hopelessly to confuse our whole view of nature.

This view, as I hold, is indeed sound in laying stress upon a deep connection between our observation of the significant inner life of our own will, and our assurance that the universe in which we live has true Being. But, as I have maintained in developing our Fourth Conception of Being, while our finitude always shows us that we have not won the whole of Being, it is the fulfilment, the always relative and imperfect fulfilment, — but still the fulfilment of our internal meanings, and not