Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/222

Rh speculations. The concept of the unvarying character of the laws of Nature, freed at length from its practical motives, became universal, and has inflicted itself as a dogma upon more recent thought. Yet its origin was social.

The value of this dogma, as of all the concepts of the World of Description, is relative. It reveals no absolute truth. From our own point of view, there can indeed be no doubt that our experience of the objects of Nature does prove to us that there exists, in the universe, a vast realm of fact other than what human minds consciously find present within their own circles of individual or private apprehension. And so, for us, Nature is indeed a part of Reality, and the social tests do indeed prove that this is true. But when we ask what reality Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive the World of Description, blind us to the true principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation, — we have seen from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts result. We shall no longer take this dualism too seriously. We have seen its relative justification, and its limitations.

In any case, in viewing Nature as a realm of law, we must distinguish between what our common experience permits us to verify, in the way of our own conceptual