Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/187

162 the opaque resistance which the world offers to these meanings, which both defines our warrant for finding that the universe has Being, and gives us, in the form of the Internal Meaning of our Ideas, our only and our valid means for defining wherein that Being consists. Our limitations do, indeed, send us beyond themselves for the truth. But the proof that a real world is here about us, is never the mere opaqueness of fact, the blind presence of something which besets and hinders us ; but rather it is the relative transparency of our inner life, the observed manifestation of meaning in our experience, which constantly tells us that we are in an universe where, in view of our present incompleteness, rational truth beyond us is to be found. What is, is the completion of our incompleteness, and not any fate that merely overcomes us. This we have fully illustrated in the foregoing discussion of the Categories.

Furthermore, the view that we here criticise makes the whole case depend upon an appeal to the principle of causation. The resistance that my will meets, needs explanation. It is explained by the hypothesis of a material cause which resists us. But hereupon I respond to the defender of this theory, What is, then, your principle of causation? Is it not this, namely: that whatever happens needs, from your point of view, to be explained, and finds, as a fact, its explanation in its relation to other facts? And if this be your belief, as it doubtless is, is not your principle of causation for you a principle somehow first known to govern the real world which your experience of resistance is said to make manifest to your senses, before you can use the principle to