280 The Origin of a * Thing* and its Nature 



of the future in terms of organization is as great as the 

 need of thinking of the past in terms of natural law. The 

 need of so-called mental organization or design is found 

 in the inadequacy of natural law to explain the further 

 career of the world, and its past career also as soon as we 

 go back to any place in the past and ask the same ques- 

 tion there. It would be possible, also, to take up the last 

 remark for further thought, and to make out a case for the 

 proposition that the categories of ' retrospective ' thinking 

 also involve a strain of organization - - a proposition which 

 is equivalent to one which the idealists are forcibly urging 

 from other grounds and from another point of view. 

 Lotze's argument to an organization at the bottom of 

 natural causation has lost nothing of its power. Viewed as a 

 category of experience, I am unable to see the force of the 

 assumption tacitly made by the Positivists, and as tacitly 

 admitted by their antagonists, that causation is to be ulti- 

 mately viewed entirely under such retrospective construc- 

 tions as 'conservation of energy,' etc. Such constructions 

 involve an endless retrospective series. And that is to 

 say that the problem of origin is finally insoluble. Well, 

 so it may be. But yet one may ask why this emphasis of 

 the 'retrospective,' which has arisen in experience with 

 only the basis of experience that the ' prospective ' also 

 has ? It may be a matter of taste ; it may be a matter of 

 'original sin.' But if we go on to try to unite our cate- 

 gories of experience in some kind of a broader logical 

 category, the notion of the Ultimate must, it would seem, 

 require both of the aspects which our conception of reality 

 includes: the 'prospective' no less than the 'retrospec- 

 tive.' Origins must take place continually as truly as 

 must sufficient reasons. The only way to avoid this is to 



