Ii6 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



sciousness by that nature which presupposes it. 

 Discarding, then, the materialistic solution, can we 

 accept the Kantian dictum that the " understand- 

 ing makes nature " ? Popular thinking opposes 

 the external order of nature to our thinking, and 

 the antithesis has been emphasized by Locke as 

 if the order of nature were one thing and real, 

 while our thinking is another and unreal. But 

 nature as a system or unity is so for a conscious 

 intelligence, and yet we do not make that unity 

 for ourselves. It seems, then, that we have the 

 conception of an order of nature on the one side 

 and that order itself on the other. Either, then, 

 we must suppose "some unaccountable pre- 

 established harmony," through which there comes 

 to be such an order corresponding to our concep- 

 tion of it, or we must recognize the fact that " our 

 conception of an order of nature and the relations 

 which form that order have a common spiritual 

 source" (p. 35). At any rate, we cannot reduce 

 one to the other : 



u Intelligence, experience, knowledge, are no more a result 

 of nature than nature of them. If it is true that there would 

 be no intelligence without nature it is equally true that there 

 would be no nature without intelligence" (pp. 37, 38). 



Nature, then, in its reality implies a principle 

 which is spiritual, or at least not natural (p. 56). 

 What, then, is our relation to this principle ? We 

 are conscious of an order in nature, and this 



