Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/189

164 will, forces you to believe in its reality as the cause of such resistance.

If you look closer you soon see, however, as to our belief in causation, that somehow or other it helps us more clearly to grasp the internal sense, the observed inner significance, of some of our conscious states, to observe what we call their causal connections. In observing these connections, so far as they fall within our own range of experience, we there find somehow our own rational Will better expressed, or embodied, than it would be without this idea, and thereby we better win our own inner clearness. In assuming, now, that some such connection as this has validity beyond us, in a realm external to ourselves, we have begun by defining this outer realm, not as a realm that primarily resists or thwarts our Will, but as a realm that first of all embodies one of our own deepest and most rational purposes. If the external world, said to be material, is, as this view holds, above all causal, and is such as to explain the particular facts which are found in our experience, then, that world is above all a real embodiment of the very purpose which, in us, appears as our purpose of explanation.

Properly examined, then, the view here in question becomes only a form of Idealism, — a sort of primary assurance that the nature of things is rational, and fulfils our purposes. And so the problem about our belief in the existence of Nature must be solved in explicit relation to our Fourth Conception of Being. If we are to understand what we mean by Material Nature, and why we believe it to be real, we must ask, What internal