evolution itself. I should not have thought it worth mentioning, indeed, but for Professor Ward's approving quotation from the article. Professor Ward himself, it is fair to say, while he notes that certain pluralists, ill-advised, as he deems them, have not hesitated to draw this conclusion of absolute contingency, and have even proposed the term 'Tychism' to describe their doctrine, denies the start with chaos, and introduces a distinction between what he calls the contingency of chance and the contingency of freedom. But so long as he maintains the foregoing account of the origin of physical law, it is difficult to see how he can logically escape the consequences which he repudiates. And one cannot forget that Professor Ward, both in his earlier course of Gifford Lectures and in this one, has lent his countenance to the idea of contingency, by representing the uniformity of natural law as comparable to that of a statistical average, which gives results that are constant for large aggregates but cover an indefinite amount of variation in individual cases. Statistical results, as he puts it in his recent volume2, 'frequently hide the diversity and spontaneity of animated beings when they and their actions are taken en masse. This diversity and spontaneity' (he adds) are held to be fundamental: and the orderliness and regularity we now observe, to be the result of conduct, not its presupposition.' But, at the atomic level contemplated, it is difficult to see what scope there is for spontaneity, unless it is taken to mean a power of reacting differently in identical circumstances; for a different mode of reaction to a different stimulus is just what is implied in the idea of law which it is sought to repudiate or get behind. Professor Bosanquet, who traverses this whole line of argument, points out that relevancy, rather than uniformity, is the proper designation of the scientific postu

1 Realm of Ends, p. 454. Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii, p. 281. 2 Realm of Ends, p. 433.

IX

RELEVANCY, NOT UNIFORMITY

187

late of law, i.e. appropriate reaction, remaining the same doubtless when the circumstances are the same, but varying with every change of circumstance—the principle, in short, that 'for every difference there must be a reason'. So that fineness of adjustment, precision and relevancy of determinate response, should mean at once the perfection of the living intelligence and the completest realization of law. To take spontaneity in any other sense 'sets us wrong ab initio in our attitude to the characteristics of consciousness, teaching us to connect it with eccentricity and caprice instead of with system and rationality'. The argument from statistics seems intended to prove that the uniformity on the whole which appears in physical movements is a mere average, each individual movement being due to the 'spontaneity' of the individual particle and varying possibly in one direction or the other, and in greater or less degree, from the mean which the law formulates. But what is gained for the cause of spiritual freedom by endowing particles with a spontaneity of this kind, it is not easy Action cannot be intelligibly considered apart from the ideas of stimulus and response, and when it is so considered, spontaneity can only mean unhampered response according to the joint nature of the interacting factors. The idea of spontaneity in the abstract, apart from such a reference, must reduce itself to sheer wilfulness, and lead us back to Peirce's conception of 'feeling sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness'. A system of unvarying natural order is demanded, it may be pointed out, in the service of the higher conscious life itself as the condition of reasonable action. It is instructive, for example, to observe Hume complaining of the pains and hardships which come to individuals from the conducting of the world by general laws' and admitting in the same breath that if everything were conducted by particular volitions, the course of Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 94.

to see.

1

nature would be perpetually broken, and no man could employ his reason in the conduct of life '.1

Much the same criticism applies to the general theory of Monadism, if carried to its logical conclusion. What are we to make of those monads towards the lower limit, those bare or naked monads, as Leibnitz called them, which are simply a mens momentanea, without memory or the power of profiting by experience, and which therefore can only react immediately and to what is immediately given? If, in Professor Ward's words, they are 'beings which have only external relations to one another, or rather for which as the limit of our regress, the distinction of internal and external ceases to hold', how does their behaviour to one another differ from a case of mechanical interaction as ordinarily understood? And if the two are indistinguishable, what is the use of the monadistic construction? Might we not as well have accepted the realm of physical law to begin with, as the substructure of the spiritual, and, so far as we can see, the necessary presupposition of individual experience? On the hypothesis of Pan-psychism, it has been said,2' what becomes of the material incidents of life—of our food, our clothes, our country, our bodies? Is it not obvious that our relation to these things is essential to finite being, and that if they are in addition subjective psychical centres their subjective psychical quality is one which, so far as realized, would destroy their function and character for us?' In other words, it is as things, as externalities, that they function in our life, not as other selves; if we had to treat them as other selves, their characteristic being would disappear. We conclude, therefore, that absolutely nothing is gained, and much confusion is introduced, by resolving external nature into an aggregate of tiny minds or, still worse, of 'small pieces of mind-stuff '.

1 Dialogues, Part II.

• Bosanquet, Individuality and Value, p. 363. Cf. p. 194.

[

IX A CONFLICT WITH COMMON SENSE

189

It is sufficient for the purposes of Idealism that nature as a whole should be recognized as complementary to mind, and possessing therefore no absolute existence of its own apart from its spiritual completion; just as mind in turn would be intellectually and ethically void without a world to furnish it with the materials of knowledge and of duty. Both are necessary elements of a single system.

LECTURE X

IDEALISM AND MENTALISM

A FURTHER point requires elucidation. The conclusion we have reached-the doctrine of the self-conscious life as organic to the world or of the world as finding completion and expression in that life, so that the universe, as a complete or self-existent fact, is statable only in terms of mind -this is the doctrine historically known as Idealism, sometimes described in recent discussion 1 as objective, transcendental or absolute Idealism, according to its historical origin and colouring or the special emphasis of the controversy. But Idealism also means historically the doctrine that the being of things is dependent on their being known -the familiar Berkeleian doctrine that esse is percipi, or, as some later transcendentalists have modified it, that esse is intelligi-which yields directly Berkeley's further position that the existence of unthinking things is a contradiction in terms, and therefore, as he puts it, nothing properly but persons does exist, all other things being not so much existences themselves as manners of the existence of conscious persons'. This position, in the typical form given to it by Berkeley, is more specifically known as Subjective Idealism, but the fundamental argument on which

1

1e. g. by Professor R. B. Perry in Present Philosophical Tendencies.

2

...

Compare Mr. Bradley's statements (Appearance and Reality, pp. 144–5) : 'We perceive, on reflection, that to be real, or even barely to exist, must be to fall within Sentience. Sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real. . . . Anything in no sense felt or perceived becomes to me quite unmeaning.' Professor Taylor puts the same position in his Elements of Metaphysics, p. 347: 'We are already agreed that reality is exclusively composed of psychical fact.' I do not say that these statements are absolutely identical with Berkeley's, or intended to be so, but they are at least remarkably similar.