formed from an hypothesis into a theory, and from a doctrine of an eternal normal thought into a doctrine of an all-embracing Spirit.

III.

In several respects our hypothesis needs explanation before it can well please a philosophic student. This explanation will next lead us into a decidedly technical discussion, and this a reader not specially accustomed to philosophic discussions, if such a reader we yet have, will do well to omit. We must in fact, in the present section, more particularly set forth the motives that have determined us to try just this hypothesis about Reality.

First, then, we are concerned to show why we have left out of view the causal element that popular thought makes so prominent in its conception of Reality. For popular thought, the world is a Power that causes our perceptions. But we, both here and in our subsequent religious discussion, shall consider the eternal not as Power, but as Thought. Why is this? We shall here try to explain, still regarding the real world merely as something postulated to meet the inner needs of our thought. Let us ask, without as yet going beyond this point of view, what is the deepest motive of our purely theoretic postulates about reality? Is it not to have something that corresponds to our ideas, and so gives them truth? Therefore is not the postulate that reality corresponds to our ideas, deeper than the postulate that a real world causes our ideas? And so is not the

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causal postulate in fact but a subordinate form in our theory of the world? To exemplify. When I say that my thought demands some cause, C, for a sensation, s, does not my thought even here actually demand something prior to the principle of causation, and deeper than that? Does not my thought here demand that my idea c of cause in general, and my idear of the causal relation R between C and s, shall a priori somehow correspond to the truth of things? Can I conceive of a real cause save by virtue of a postulate that my conception of a real cause is like the real cause itself? Therefore, when men say: "We know external Reality because we know that our sensations need a cause, and that this cause must be external to us," do they say more than this: "We know (or postulate) that to one of our ideas, namely, the idea of a necessary causal relation, there corresponds a reality external to the idea?" For surely I do not know the validity of my idea of a causal relation merely on the ground that I know that this idea of causal relation must itself have been caused by the real existence of causal relations in the world. Such an attempt to justify my idea would mean endless regress. The deeper notion that we have of the world is therefore founded on the insight or on the postulate that there must be, not merely a sufficient cause for our thought, but a sufficient counterpart thereto.

We can easily illustrate this view by considering the nature of our thought about past time. The judgment or assertion that there has actually been a series of past events, is not a judgment of causality. I believe in a past as I believe in a future, not to satisfy my faith in the principle of causality, but to satisfy my tendency to postulate an indefinite time-stream, like in nature to my present succession of immediately given states. I believe in a real time, not primarily as the cause but as the counterpart of my notion of time. How otherwise shall I form the idea of a cause at all, unless I have already assumed the reality of time? A cause for my belief in the past is to be conceived, if at all, only as already a past fact. The conception that it is to create is a condition of its own existence, unless indeed one has admitted what we wish admitted, that, however the case may be with the belief in any one past fact, the belief in past reality as such is prior to our belief that our present state has been caused by the past. But the same priority of the belief in some agreement between my idea and the external reality, is found in all departments of thought. A material cause of my experience is a cause in space. But, however I came by the idea of space, my present belief in the reality of space precedes any particular belief in a material cause for a particular sensation, and renders the latter belief possible. The conception of reality furnished by the search for causes is thus always subordinate to the conception of reality furnished by our first postulate. This first postulate is, that our ideas have something beyond them and like them. So at each moment of my life I postulate a past and future of my own, like my present consciousness, but external thereto. So my social consciousness, my original unreflective tendency to work with and for other beings, implies the postulate of the external existence of my fellow-men, like myself and like my ideas of them. So to the present intuition of the space in the retinal field or at my finger tips I join the postulate of an infinitely extended not perceived space, like the perceived space, and like my space-ideas.

The external reality conceived by us is therefore, so far as we have yet seen, conceived through a spontaneous reaction of the receiving consciousness in presence of the sense-data received. The forms of this reaction it was the purpose of the Critical Philosophy to define. The task set by Kant has not yet been accomplished. But the fact of some reaction seems established. And the general law of the process seems to be that the external reality is conceived after the pattern of the present data, with such modification as is necessary to bring the conception into harmony with already established habits of thought, and with the conceived results of previous experience. The aim of the whole process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception of reality as is possible, a conception wherein the greatest fullness of data shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception. The effort of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness of content with the greatest definiteness of organization.

This character of our activity in forming our notion of reality implies the subordination of the causal postulate to other motives. In the scientific field the postulate of causality is predominant, because there the notion of a world of causal sequences in time and in space has been already built up, and what remains is to fill out the picture by discovering the particular sequences. But if I try to banish altogether from my notion of external reality the idea that it is an adequate counterpart of my subjective states of consciousness, what will remain? Simply the notion of an utterly unknowable external cause of my sensations. Of this nothing will be said, but that it is. Science, experience, serious reflection about reality, will utterly cease. I shall have remaining a kind of Disfigured Realism, where the real will be as unknowable, as unreal as possible. But reintroduce the omitted postulate, admit that reality is conceived as the counterpart of my consciousness, and then the principle of causality can be fruitfully applied. Then indeed experience may lead us to conceive the external reality as unlike this or that suggestive sensation, unlike this or that provisional idea. But we shall be led to new conceptions, and shall be able to make definite progress, so long as we postulate some sort of likeness between inner and outer.

In brief, as causality means uniform sequence, the acceptance of any causal relation as real involves a conception of the uniform sequence that is to be accepted. When finally accepted, the sequence in question is conceived as a real fact, wholly or partially external to present consciousness, but like our present idea of itself. Causal sequence cannot therefore be placed first, as giving us a totally undefined notion of an external reality; but second, as enabling us to develop in detail the idea that reality is