vm CONCEPTUAL RECONSTRUCTION 139 



So far the first two forms of fallacy. Let us consider 

 next the tendency to 'harden' aspects or processes which 

 in experience are interwoven into things which are mutu- 

 ally exclusive. Under the hardening treatment the 

 common categories can be pitted against one another and 

 shown to be mutually irreconcilable. Thus as long as the 

 concepts of substance and cause are taken as self-sufficient 

 entities, or as exhaustively characterising the real nature of 

 certain entities, it is impossible to reconcile them. Sub- 

 stance is the abstraction of self-supporting existence. What 

 is substantial as such is therefore unchanging, and if per 

 impossible there are changes within it they must be self- 

 determined changes. What then is a cause ? The concept 

 of causality is that of necessity in interaction, and when 

 the two concepts are put together we arrive at the idea of 

 interacting substances, that is of self-determining things 

 which are determined by one another a stark contradic- 

 tion. The possibility of a solution in which neither con- 

 cept loses its value appears when we consider each of them 

 as arising, uncritically in the first instance, as a rendering 

 of certain elements of experience. It then becomes clear 

 that to render reality as a whole intelligibly we must give 

 due place to these elements, but must also recognise that 

 each is only an element and not the whole of the truth. 

 What is real is self-maintaining, but it is also a system of 

 interrelated changes. The element of permanence in that 

 system is its substantiality, the orderly continuity of its 

 changing phases, its causality. The notion that a given 

 object must either be c a substance,' as we at first conceive 

 the meaning of that term, or must be wholly insubstantial, 

 is seen to be a false dilemma, and what is self -determining 

 whether, indeed, anything short of reality as a whole is 

 self-determining and what contingent on surrounding 

 conditions becomes a purely empirical question. The 

 concepts of substance and cause are resolved into the 

 abstractions of continuity of real existence, admitting of 

 correlated and consecutive changes of character. 



4. We have seen how fatal the < hardening' of the 

 categories may be to the concepts themselves. We may 



