282 The Origin of a 'Thing' and its Nature 



soon as a new experiment showed that new behaviour may 

 be different, and may contradict the reports of history, he 

 looks for a new thing, argon — new in the sense, of course, 

 that the historical manifestations of the kind of reality 

 in what is called air had never before brought it to recog- 

 nition. In other words, the nature of air had been stated 

 in terms of oxygen and nitrogen ; but he now sees that the 

 statement, founded on what was known of origin — and 

 that is what origin means in all these discussions — was in- 

 adequate. This would seem to admit, however, that if the 

 problem of origin could be really exhausted, that of nature 

 would be exhausted too; and no doubt it would. But it is 

 a corollary from the second point of objection, soon to be 

 made, that the problem of origin can never be exhausted, 

 even by philosophy, without an appeal to other than the 

 historical or retrospective categories. 



But before we pass on to the second objection to the 

 position that a thing which is admitted to have had a natu- 

 ral history must have its interpretation adequately given 

 in that history, and that this applies also to the very cate- 

 gories by the use of which its denial is effected — before 

 going farther we may note an extreme case of the main 

 position as sometimes argued by evolutionists. If, it may 

 be said, the mind has developed under constant stimula- 

 tions from the external world, and if its progress consists 

 essentially in the more and more adequate representation 

 in consciousness of the relations already existing in the 

 external world, then it follows that these internal represen- 

 tations can never do more than reflect the historical events 

 of experience. Consciousness simply testifies again to the 

 real as it has been testified to her before. How, then, can 

 there be any such thing as a phase of reality — called the 



