Interrelation between the organism and Nature, a mistake

to be set aside? Most emphatically not so, for it seems

a vital scheme, and a necessary way of happening among

our appearances. It is an arrangement among phenomena by

which the extended only comes to us in relation with

another extended which we call an organism. You cannot

have certain qualities, of touch, or sight, or hearing,

unless there is with them a certain connection of other

qualities. Nature has phenomenal reality as a grouping

and as laws of sequence and co-existence, holding good

within a certain section of that which appears to us.

But, if you attempt to make it more, you will re-enter

those mazes from which we found no exit. You are led to

take the physical world as a mere adjective of my body,

and you find that my body on the other hand, is not one

whit more substantival. It is itself for ever the state

of something further and beyond. And, as we perceived in

our First Book, you can neither take the qualities, that

are called primary, as real without the secondary, nor

again the latter as existing apart from my feeling.

These are all distinctions which, as we saw, are

reduced, and which come together in the one great

totality of absolute experience. They are lost there for

our vision, but survive most assuredly in that

which absorbs them. Nature is but one part of the

feeling whole, which we have separated by our

abstraction, and enlarged by theoretical necessity and

contrivance. And then we set up this fragment as self-

existing; and what is sometimes called "science" goes

out of its way to make a gross mistake. It takes an

intellectual construction of the conditions of mere

appearance for independent reality. And it would thrust

this fiction on us as the one thing which has solid

being. But thus it turns into sheer error a relative

truth. It discredits that which, as a working point of

view, is fully justified by success, and stands high

above criticism.

We have seen, so far, that mere Nature is not real.

Nature is but an appearance within the reality; it is a

partial and imperfect manifestation of the Absolute. The

physical world is an abstraction, which, for certain

purposes is properly considered by itself, but which, if

taken as standing in its own right, becomes at once

self-contradictory. We must now develope this general

view in some part of its detail.

But, before proceeding, I will deal with a point of

some interest. We, so far, have treated the physical

world as extended, and a doubt may be raised whether

such an assumption can be justified. Extension, I may be

told, is not essential to Nature; for the extended need

not always be physical, nor again the physical always

extended. And it is better at once to attempt to get

clear on this point. It is, in the first place, quite

true that not all of the extended forms part of Nature.

For I may think of, and may imagine, things extended at

my pleasure, and it is impossible to suppose that all

these psychical facts take a place within our physical

system. Yet, upon the other hand, I do not see how we

can deny their extension. That which for my mind is

extended, must be so as a fact, whether it

does, or does not, belong to what we call Nature. Take,

for example, some common illusion of sense. In that we

actually may have a perception of extension, and to call

this false does not show that it is not somehow spatial.

But, if so, Nature and extension will not coincide.

Hence we are forced to seek the distinctive essence of

Nature elsewhere, and in some non-spatial character.