[Here I enter upon the discussion of the subject proper, beginning, as above indicated, with the Fundamental Conceptions. Having followed these through the contrasts Whole and Part, Subject and Object, Reality and Appearance (or Noumenon and Phenomenon), and developed the bearing of these on the procedure of thought from the dualism of natural realism to materialism and thence to idealism, with the issue now coming on, in this last, between monism and pluralism, I strike into the contrast Cause and Effect, and, noting its unfolding into the more comprehensive form of Ground and Consequence, go on thence as follows:]
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It is plain that the contrast Ground and Consequence will enable us to state the new issue with closer precision and pertinence than Reality and Appearance, Noumenon and Phenomenon, can supply; while, at the same time, Ground and Consequence exhibits Cause and Effect as presenting a contrast that only fulfills what Noumenon and Phenomenon foretold and strove towards; in fact, what was more remotely, but not less surely, also indicated by Whole and Part, Knowing and Being, Subject and Object. For in penetrating to the coherent meaning of these conceptions, the philosophic movement, as we saw, advanced steadily to the fuller and fuller translating of each of them into the reality that unifies by explanation, instead of pretending to explain by merely unifying; and this, of course, will now be put forward explicitly, in the clarified category of Cause and Effect, transfigured from a physical into a purely logical relation. What idealism now says, in terms of this, is that the Cause (or, as we now read it, the Ground) of all that exists is the Subject; is Mind, the intelligently Self-conscious; and that all things else, the mere objects, material things, are its Consequence, its Outcome,—in that sense its Effect. And what the new pluralistic idealism says, is that the assemblage of individual minds—intelligence being essentially personal and individual, and never merely universal and collective—is the true total Cause of all, and that every mind thus belongs to the order of First Causes; nevertheless, that part, and the most significant part, of the nature of every mind, essential to its personality and its reason, is its recognition of other minds in the very act of its own self-definition. That is to say, a mind by its spontaneous nature as intelligence, by its intrinsic rational or logical genius, puts itself as member of a system of minds; all minds are put by each other as Ends—completely standard and sacred Objects, as much parts of the system of true Causes as each is, in its capacity of Subject; and we have a noumenal Reality that is properly to be described as the eternal Federal Republic of Spirits.
Consequently, the relation of Cause and Effect now expands and heightens into a system of the Reciprocity of First Causes; causes, that is, which, while all coefficients in the existence and explanation of that natural world of experience which forms their passive effect, their objects of mere perception, are themselves related only in the higher way of Final Causes—that is, Defining-Bases and Ends—of each other, making them the logical Complements, and the Objects of conduct, all for each, and each for all. Hence, the system of causation undergoes a signal transformation, and proves to be organized by Final Cause as its basis and root, instead of by Efficient Cause, or Originating Ground, as the earlier stages of thinking had always assumed.
The causal relation between the absolute or primary realities being purely Final, or Defining and Purposive; that is to say, the uncoercive influence of recognition and ideality; all the other forms of cause, as grouped by Aristotle,—Material, Formal, and Efficient,—are seen to be the derivatives of Final Cause, as being supplied by the action of the minds that, as absolute or underived realities, exist only in the relation of mutual Complements and Ends. Accordingly, Efficient Cause operates only from minds, as noumena, to matter, as their phenomenon, their presented contents of experience; or, in a secondary and derivative sense, from one phenomenon to another, or from one group of phenomena to another group, these playing the part of transmitters, or (as some logicians would say) Instrumental Causes, or Means. Cause, as Material, is hence defined as the elementary phenomenon, and the combinations of this; and therefore, strictly taken, is merely Effect (or Outcome) of the self-active consciousness, whose spontaneous forms of conception and perception become the Formal Cause that organizes the sum of phenomena into cosmic harmony or unity.
Here, accordingly, comes into view the further and in some respects deeper conceptual pair, Many and One. The history of philosophic thought proves that this antithesis is darkly obscure and deeply ambiguous; for about it have centred a large part of the conflicts of doctrine. This pair has already been used, implicitly, in exhibiting the development of the preceding group, Cause and Effect; and in so using it we have supplied ourselves with a partial clarification of it, and with one possible solution of its ambiguity. We have seen, namely, how our strong natural persuasion that philosophy guided by the fundamental concept Cause must become the search for the One amid the wilderness of the Many, and that this search cannot be satisfied and ended except in an all-inclusive Unit, in which the Many is embraced as the integral and originated parts, completely determined, subjected, and controlled, may give way to another and less oppressive conception of unity; a conception of it as the harmony among many free and independent primary realities, a harmony founded on their intelligent and reasonable mutual recognition. This conception casts at least some clearing light upon the long and dreary disputes over the Many and the One; for it exposes, plainly, the main source of them. They have arisen out of two chief ambiguities,—the ambiguity of the concept One, and the ambiguity of the concept Cause in its supreme meaning. The normal contrast between the One and the Many is a clear and simple contrast: the One is the single unit, and the Many is the repetition of the unit, or is the collection of the several units. But if we go on to suppose that there is a collection or sum of all possible units, and call this the Whole, then, since there can be no second such, we call it also "one" (or the One, by way of preëminence), overlooking the fact that it differs from the simple one, or unit, in genere; that it is in fact not a unit at all, not an elementary member of a series, but the annulment of all series; that our name "one" has profoundly changed its meaning, and now stands for the Sole, the Only. Thus, by our forgetfulness of differences, we fall into deep water, and, with the confused illusions of the drowning, dream of the One and All as the single punctum originationis of all things, the Source and Begetter of the very units of which it is in reality only the resultant and the derivative. Or, from another point of view, and in another mood, we rightly enough take the One to mean the coherent, the intelligible, the consistent, the harmonious; and putting the Many, on the misleading hint of its contrast to the unit, in antithesis to this One of harmony, we fall into the belief that the Many cannot be harmonious, is intrinsically a cluster of repulsions or of collisions, incapable of giving rise to accord; indeed, essentially hostile to it. So, as accord is the aim and the essence of our reason, we are caught in the snare of monism, pluralism having apparently become the equivalent of chaos, and thus the bête noir of rational metaphysics. Nay, in the opposed camp itself, some of the most ardent adherents of pluralism, the liveliest of wit, the most exuberant in literary resources, are the abjectest believers in the hopeless disjunction and capriciousness of the plural, and hold there is a rift in the texture of reality that no intelligence, "even though you dub it 'the Absolute,'" can mend or reach across. Yet surely there is nothing in the Many, as a sum of units, the least at war with the One as a system of harmony. On the contrary, even in the pure form of the Number Series, the Many is impossible except on the principle of harmony,—the units can be collected and summed (that is, constitute the Many), only if they cohere in a community of intrinsic kindred. Consequently the whole question of the chaotic or the harmonic nature of a plural world turns on the nature of the genus which we find characteristic of the absolutely (i. e., the unreservedly) real, and which is to be taken as the common denomination enabling us to count them and to sum them. When minds are seen to be necessarily the primary realities, but also necessarily federal as well as individual, the illusion about the essential disjunction and non-coherence of the plurally real dissolves away, and a primordial world of manifold persons is seen to involve no fundamental or hopeless anarchy of individualism, irreducible in caprice, but an indwelling principle of harmony, rather, that from the springs of individual being intends the control and composure of all the disorders that mark the world of experiential appearance, and so must tend perpetually to effect this.
The other main source of our confusions over the Many and the One is the variety of meaning hidden in the concept Cause, and our propensity to take its most obvious but least significant sense for its supreme intent. Closest at hand, in experience, is our productive causation of changes in our sense-world, and hence most obvious is that reading of Cause which takes it as the producer of changes and, with a deeper comprehension of it, of the inalterable linkage between changes, whereby one follows regularly and surely upon another. Thus what we have in philosophy agreed to call Efficient Cause comes to be mistaken for the profoundest and the supreme form of cause, and all the other modes of cause, the Material (or Stuff), the Form (or Conception), and the End (or Purpose), its consequent and derivative auxiliaries. Under the influence of this strong impression, we either assume total reality to be One Whole, all-embracing and all-producing of its manifold modes, or else view it as a duality, consisting of One Creator and his manifold creatures. So it has come about that metaphysics has hitherto been chiefly a contention between pantheism and monotheism, or, as the latter should for greater accuracy be called, monarchotheism; and, it must be acknowledged, this struggle has been attended by a continued (though not continual) decline of this later dualistic theory before the steadfast front and unyielding advance of the older monism. Thus persistent has been the assumption that harmony can only be assured by the unity given in some single productive causation: the only serious uncertainty has been about the most rational way of conceiving the operation of this Sole Cause; and this doubt has thus far, on the whole, declined in favor of the Elder Oriental or monistic conception, as against the Hebraic conception of extraneous creation by fiat. The frankly confessed mystery of the latter, its open appeal to miracle, places it at a fatal disadvantage with the Elder Orientalism, when the appeal is to reason and intelligibility. It is therefore no occasion for wonder that, especially since the rise of the scientific doctrine of Evolution, with its postulate of a universal unity, self-varying yet self-fulfilling, even the leaders of theology are more and more falling into the monistic line and swelling the ever-growing ranks of pantheism. If it be asked here, And why not?—where is the harm of it?—is not the whole question simply of what is true? the answer is, The mortal harm of the destruction of personality, which lives or dies with the preservation or destruction of individual responsibility; while the completer truth is, that there are other and profounder (or, if you please, higher) truths than this of explanation by Efficient Cause. In fact, there is a higher conception of Cause itself than this of production, or efficiency; for, of course, as we well might say, that alone can be the supreme conception of Cause which can subsist between absolute or unreserved realities, and such must exclude their production or their necessitating control by others. So that we ought long since to have realized that Final Cause, the recognized presence to each other as unconditioned realities, or Defining Auxiliaries and Ends, is the sole causal relation that can hold among primary realities; though among such it can hold, and in fact must.
For the absolute reality of personal intelligences, at once individual and universally recognizant of others, is called for by other conceptions fundamental to philosophy. These other fundamental concepts can no more be counted out or ignored than those we have hitherto considered; and when we take them up, we shall see how vastly more significant they are. They alone will prove supreme, truly organizing, normative; they alone can introduce gradation in truths, for they alone introduce the judgment of worth, of valuation; they alone can give us counsels of perfection, for they alone rise from those elements in our being which deal with ideals and with veritable Ideas. So let us proceed to them.
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Our path into their presence, however, is through another pair, not so plainly antithetic as those we have thus far considered. This pair that I now mean is Time and Space, which, though not obviously antinomic, yet owes its existence, as can now be shown, to that profoundest of concept-contrasts which we earlier considered under the head of Subject and Object, when the Object takes on its only adequate form of Other Subject. But in passing from the contrast One and Many towards its rational transformation into the moral society of Mind and Companion Minds, we break into this pair of Time and Space, and must make our way through it by taking in its full meaning.