FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 179 



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, Defming-Bases and Ends - 

 of each other, making them the logical Complements, and the Ob- 

 jects 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. Accord- 

 ingly, 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. 



