THE PRESENT PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 249 



a basis that is constituted by a second act of reflection ; one that 

 translates our world into a system of phenomena causally inter-related 

 and connected with their underlying grounds. 



We have now reached a point where it will be possible in a few 

 sentences to indicate the rise of the metaphysical reflection and the 

 ground on which it rests. If we consider both the mathematical and 

 the physical ways of looking at things, we will find that they possess 

 this feature in common, they are purely external, having nothing 

 to say respecting the inner and, therefore, real nature of the things 

 with which they deal. Or, if we concede the latest claims of some of 

 the physical speculators and agree that the aim of physics is an 

 ultimate physical explanation of reality, it will still be true that the 

 whole standpoint of this explanation will be external. Let me explain 

 briefly what I mean substantially by the term external as I use it here. 

 Every interpretation of a world is a function of some knowing con- 

 sciousness, and consequently of some knowing self. This is too obvious 

 to need proof. A system will be external to such a knower just to the 

 extent that the knower finds it dominated and determined by cate- 

 gories that are different from those of its own determination. A world 

 physically interpreted is one that is brought completely under the 

 rubrics of physics and mathematics; whose movements yield them- 

 selves completely, therefore, to a mechanical calculus that gives rise 

 to purely descriptive formulae; or to the control of a dynamic prin- 

 ciple; that of natural causation, by virtue of which everything is 

 determined without thought of its own, by the impulse of another, 

 which impulse itself is not directly traceable to any thought or pur- 

 pose. Now, the occasion for the metaphysical reflection arises when 

 this situation that brings us face to face with, nay, makes us part 

 and parcel of, an alien system of things, becomes intolerable, and the 

 knower begins to demand a closer kinship with his world. The knower 

 finds the categories of his own central and characteristic activity in 

 experience. Here he is conscious of being an agent going out in forms 

 of activity for the realization of his world. The determining categories 

 of the activity he is most fully conscious of, are interest, idea, previ- 

 sion, purpose, and that selective activity which goes to its termina- 

 tion in some achieved end. The metaphysical interpretation arises out 

 of the demand that the world shall be brought into bonds of kinship 

 with the knower. And this is effected by generalizing the categories 

 of consciousness and applying them as principles of interpretation to 

 the world. The act of reflection on which the metaphysical interpre- 

 tation proceeds is one, then, in which the world of science is further 

 transformed by bringing the inner nature of things out of its isolation 

 and translating the world-movements into process the terms of which 

 are no longer phenomena and hidden ground, but rather inception and 

 realization, or, more specifically, Idea and Reality. And the point to 



