336 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



idea and shaping the course of things to the final realisation 

 of that idea. The difficulty arises when we contemplate 

 the relation of the mind to the conditions operated upon. 

 Our model suggests that in the beginning of things the 

 Spirit moves upon the face of the waters of chaos, evolving 

 out of them an ordered world. But this, once again, is 

 sheer dualism, and our whole conception was founded on 

 the necessity of conceiving an ultimate unity of the organic 

 kind. If this is to be achieved, we must clearly bring the 

 'conditions' into closer relation to the purposive scheme. 

 On one side, this is not difficult. We may, without incon- 

 sistency, suppose that everything real is so far conditioned 

 by the Purposive principle that at one stage or another in 

 the process it has an essential part to play. We might con- 

 ceive, for instance, that its value in the scheme is not in its 

 initial existence but in the use to which it may ultimately be 

 put. If so, the real limiting condition of the Good would 

 be the necessity of organisation. The elements of the 

 Good would be here all along, but not in the form in which 

 their value can be realised. The condition under which 

 the Good can be reached would be the process of shaping, of 

 development, by which harmony, in the full sense, is to be 

 attained. We come then to the conception of the Good 

 of the world as consisting in a Harmony achieved through 

 development, a conception which accords well with the 

 results of ethical analysis. But even so, dualism is not 

 extirpated, for the operating mind is still set over against 

 the conditions upon which it operates, and, however diffi- 

 cult it may be to imagine the relation, it is clear that if 

 reality is an organic whole, this isolation must give place 

 to* a conception of the mind as itself dependent on the 

 conditions which yet it has to subdue. The strife which 

 makes up the world-process may then be conceived more 

 on the analogy of the efforts of the mind in man to subdue 

 the body on which it depends for its own existence, or to 

 the regenerative efforts of a self-governing society in 

 relation to its own members, and the development implied 

 in the idea of a gradually realised purpose, would be not 

 merely a step by step reduction to order of a soulless 

 material by an intelligence operating from without, but 



