THE PRESENT PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 255 



metaphysics to seek the explanation of this dualism in some more 

 ultimate and unitary conception. Now, since the very notion of 

 metaphysics again excludes the physical alternative from the cate- 

 gory of finality, we are left with the psychic term as the one that, 

 by virtue of the fact that it embodies a form of conscious activ- 

 ity, promises to be most fruitful for metaphysics. From one point 

 of view, then, we have reduced our world to immaterialism; from 

 another, to some form or analogue of the psychic. Now it is not 

 necessary here to carry the inquiry further in this direction. For 

 what metaphysics is interested in, specially, is the fact that the 

 world must be reduced to one kind of being and one type of agency. 

 If this be done, it is clear that the dualism of body and mind and 

 the parallel orders of psycho-physics cannot be regarded as final, but 

 must take their places as phenomena that are relative and reducible 

 to a more fundamental unity. The metaphysician will say that the 

 arm moves through space in response to the will, and that every- 

 where the correlation between mechanical and teleological agency 

 takes place because in the last analysis there is only one type of agency; 

 an agency that finds its initiative in interest, thought, purpose, 

 design, and thus works out its results in the fields of space and 

 mechanical activities. 



Furthermore, on the question to which these considerations lead 

 up; that of the ultimate interpretation we are to put on the reality 

 of the world, the issue is not so indeterminate as it might seem from 

 some points of view. Taking it that the very notion of metaphysics 

 excludes the material and the physical as ultimate types of the real, 

 we are left with the notions of the immaterial and the psychic; and 

 while the former is indefinite, it is a fact that in the psychic and 

 especially in the form of it which man realizes in his own experience, 

 he finds an intelligible type and the only one that is available to him 

 for the definition of the immaterial. He has his choice, then, either 

 to regard the world as absolutely opaque, showing nothing but its 

 phenomenal dress which ceases to have any meaning; or to apply 

 to the world's inner nature the intelligible types and analogies of 

 his own form of being. That this is the alternative that is embodied 

 in the existence of metaphysics is clearly demonstrated by the fact 

 that the metaphysical interpretation embodies itself in the cate- 

 gories of reason, design, purpose, and aim. Whatever difficulties we 

 may encounter, then, in the use and application of the psychic analogy 

 in determining the nature of the real, it is clear that its employment 

 is inevitable and indispensable. Let us, then, employ the term ra- 

 tional to that characterization of the nature of things which to meta- 

 physics is thus inevitable and indispensable. The world must in the 

 last analysis be rational in its constitution, and its agencies and forms 

 of being must be construed as rational in their type. 



