306 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



rence of any event, including therefore even the 

 event of death. But we can carry our legislative 

 and directive relation to experience much farther 

 if we will, — as far as the complete summary of the 

 conditions prerequisite to the whole process of Nature, 

 and thus discover our personal self to be the regu- 

 lative source of all the laws under which natural 

 or sensible existence must have its course, and so 

 to be possessed of a being that by its essence tran- 

 scends all the vicissitudes of the merely natural 

 world, surviving all its possible catastrophes and 

 supplying the ground for its continuance in new 

 modes under new conditions. For, evidently, we can 

 apply the same reasoning to Space and to Causa- 

 tion that we have applied to Time. By the same 

 arguments from unity, infinity, and strict necessity, 

 we must conclude to the a priori or spontaneous 

 character of the forms of consciousness which we 

 call Space and Cause. Thus we conclude to the 

 dependence of Nature upon ?/j, taken in our primary 

 and active being, instead of our derivative depend- 

 ence upon Nature. In the place, then, of death's 

 ending us, — death, but one item in the being of the 

 natural world, the whole of which is conditioned upon 

 our central self-consciousness, — we arrive at the set- 

 tled and logically immovable conception that we are 

 ourselves the changeless ground of that transition in 

 experience into which death thus gets interpreted. 



