2 74 MAN AND THE WORLD. 



appear, and shall have substituted a known and 

 knowable substratum, viz., intelligence, for unknow- 

 able ''Matter." Our *' force-atoms " will have deve- 

 loped into " monads',' spiritual entities akin to our- 

 selves. Thus the dualism of Matter and Spirit 

 would havve been transcended, and the lower, viz. 

 Matter, would have been interpreted as a phenom- 

 enal appearance of the higher, viz. Spirit. 



I 19. And a similar result follows from the ana- 

 lysis of the conception of Force. Just as Matter 

 was a conception which could not be applied to 

 ultimate reality at all, so Force is a conception which 

 inevitably implies the spiritual character of the ult- 

 imate reality. Historically it Is undeniable that 

 Force Is depersonalized Will, that the prototype of 

 Force is Will, which even now Is the Force par ex- 

 cellence and the only one we know directly. The 

 sense of Effort also, which is a distinctive element in 

 the conception of Force, Is Irresistibly suggestive of 

 the action of a spiritual being. For how can there 

 be effort without intelligence and will ? 



It is this closer reference to our own consciousness 

 which makes Force a more satisfactory explanation 

 of things than Matter : it is nearer to the higher, 

 and hence more capable of really explaining than 

 the lower. And we see this also by the Issue of the 

 attempt to interpret Force In terms of lower concep- 

 tions. Force is frequendy defined as the cause of 

 motion (cp. ch. Hi. § 10), and If this definition were 

 metaphysically true, the sooner Force were obliter- 

 ated from the vocabulary of science the better. Its 

 association with the sense of effort would lead to 

 groundless suggestions of similarity with the action of 

 our wills, which could only be misleading. But, as 

 we saw (ch. Hi. §11,8), the conceptions of cause and 



