PREFACE XXI 



from which we must take our whole cognitive start, 



— the theory here set forth accepts neither, but the 

 rather abandons both. It neither accepts sensation 

 as an unfathomable datum merely, nor does it en- 

 tertain the hypothesis that it is an effect produced 

 in the mind by some foreign agent acting as an effi- 

 cient cause. Its aim, so far as explanation through 

 efficient causation is concerned, is to explain Nature 

 wholly from the resources of the individual mind ; 

 and to explain it further, and in the full sense, by 

 referring it beyond the individual to the whole world 

 of minds in which every individual essentially be- 

 longs ; but here the principle of explanation changes 

 from efficient to final causation. 



In detail, the explanation is this : Each mind other 

 than God no doubt organises its own sense-contents 

 directly by its own a priori formative consciousness, 

 for spontaneity is meaningless unless it is individual ; 

 and Nature is, in so far, a product of the individual's 

 efficient causality. But all this organising of a sense- 

 world, and the having of it, falls within the logical 

 compass of each mind's central and eternal act of 

 defining itself as individual ; and this it does, this 

 it can do, only in terms of the world of other minds, 



— in the final resort, in terms of God, the Type of 

 all intelligence. Thus the primordial self-conscious- 

 ness of every mind with a sense-world, though re- 

 ceiving no contribution from the efficiency of any 



