The 'Intuition' View 287 



what it is until it changes. So with an event or a belief or 

 any other thing in the mind of the race. It stays what it 

 is until it has to change. Its change, however, is just as 

 much an element in reality as lack of change is ; and the 

 weakening of a belief like any other change is the introduc- 

 tion of new phases of reality. A doctrine which holds to 

 intuitions which admit of no prospective exceptions, no 

 novelties, seems to me to commit suicide by handing the 

 whole case over to a mechanical philosophy ; for it admits 

 that all validity whatever must be cut from cloth woven out 

 of the historical and descriptive sequences of the mind's 

 origin. 



Our conclusions so far may be summed up tentatively in 

 certain propositions as follows : 



1. All statements of the nature of a 'thing' get their 

 matter mainly from the processes which they have been 

 known to pass through ; that is, statements of nature are 

 largely statements of origin. 



2. The statements of origin, however, never exhaust the 

 reality of a thing ; since no statements can be the entire 

 truth of the experiences which they state unless they 

 construe the reality not only as a thing which has had a 

 career, but also as one which is about to have a further 

 career ; for the expectation of the future career rests 

 upon the same historical series as the belief in the past 

 career. 



3. All attempts to rule out prospective organization or 

 teleology from the world would be fatal to natural science, 

 which has arisen by provisional interpretations of just this 

 kind of organization : and also to the historical interpre- 

 tation of the world found in the evolution hypothesis ; for 

 the category of teleology is but the prospective reading of 



