Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/227

202 materials. A rigid selection, a long search, and a deliberate rearrangement of the facts offered to us by raw experience, wins, in the one case as in the other, not with any a priori certainty, but at times, and to a limited extent, and by virtue of our skill and patience. Nature, as we empirically know it, just as truly seems to resist our efforts to explain the phenomena, as in certain regions it permits us to win. When we win, when we explain and predict, doubtless that is indeed because external Nature is in itself such as to permit us to do so. But the same Nature permits us to find the clay and the coals and the metals.

Neither by our empirical science nor by our art do we then directly discover anything but this: Namely, that our human Internal Meanings do indeed possess some reference to a vast finite realm beyond ourselves, within which we men find our place. Out of this realm we ourselves have proceeded through the processes of evolution. Into this realm, at death, we seem to return. This realm is called Nature. It doubtless has its own meaning. This meaning is doubtless in itself deeply linked to ours. And this meaning is such as to permit us with varying, but on the whole, with vastly increasing success, both to develope our human arts, and to work out the relatively successful, but also distinctly human and social, descriptions and predictions of our science. Both our art and our sciences are due, however, quite as much to our conflict with the facts that our experience directly furnishes, as to any essential plasticity of these facts, either to the practical purposes of our art, or to the ideal purposes of our science. Nature permits us to mine metals and to