i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS n 



of Reality we can attain. The response to our questions 

 is always affected by their character, and that is in our 

 power. For the initiative throughout is ours. It is for us 

 to consult the oracle of Nature or to refrain ; it is for us 

 to formulate our demands and to put our questions. If 

 we question amiss, Nature will not respond, and we 

 must try again. But we can never be entitled to assume 

 either that our action makes no difference or that nature 

 contains no answer to a question we have never thought 

 to put. 1 



It is no exaggeration therefore to contend, with Plato, 

 that in a way the Good, meaning thereby the conception 

 of a final systematization of our purposes, is the supreme 

 controlling power in our whole experience, and that in 

 abstraction from it neither the True nor the Real can 

 exist. For whatever forms of the latter we may have 

 discovered, some purposive activity, some conception of 

 a good to be attained, was involved as a condition of the 



1 That the Real has a determinate nature which the knowing reveals but does 

 not affect, so that our knowing makes no difference to it, is one of those sheer 

 assumptions which are incapable, not only of proof, but even of rational defence. 

 It is a survival of a crude realism which can be defended only, in a pragmatist 

 manner, on the score of its practical convenience, as an avowed fiction. In this 

 sense and as a mode of speech, we need not quarrel with it. But as an ultimate 

 analysis of the fact of knowing it is an utterly gratuitous interpretation. The 

 plain fact is that we can come into contact with any sort of reality only in 

 the act of knowing or experiencing it. As unknowable, therefore, the Real 

 is nil, as unknown, it is only potentially real. What is there in this situation to 

 sanction the assumption that what the Real is in the act of knowing, it is also 

 outside that relation? One might as well argue that because an orator is 

 eloquent in the presence of an audience, he is no less voluble in addressing 

 himself. The simple fact is that we know the Real as it is when we know it ; 

 we know nothing whatever about what it is apart from that process. It is 

 meaningless therefore to inquire into its nature as it is in itself. And I can see 

 no reason why the view that reality exhibits a rigid nature unaffected by our 

 treatment should be deemed theoretically more justifiable than its converse, 

 that it is utterly plastic to our every demand a travesty of Pragmatism which 

 has attained much popularity with its critics. The actual situation is of course 

 a case of interaction, a process of cognition in which the subject and the 

 object determine each the other, and both we and reality are involved, 

 and, we might add, evolved. There is no warrant therefore for the assumption 

 that either of the poles between which the current passes could be suppressed 

 without detriment. What we ought to say is that when the mind knows 

 reality both are affected, just as we say that when a stone falls to the ground 

 both it and the earth are attracted. 



We are driven, then, to the conviction that the determinate nature of reality 

 does not subsist outside or beyond the process of knowing it. It is merely 

 a half-understood lesson of experience that we have enshrined in the belief that it 

 does so subsist. Things behave in similar ways in their reaction to modes 



