NECESSARY TRUTEB— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 635 



This sort of scientific algebra, little as it immediatelj 

 resembles the reality given to us, turns out (strangely 



modelling must be effected, there is no escape. The world's coutents are- 

 given to each of us iu au order so foreign to our subjective interests that we 

 can hardly by au effort of the imagination picture toourselves what it is 

 like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out from it 

 the items that concern us, and connecting them with others far away, 

 which we say ' belong ' with them, we are able to make out delinite threads 

 of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for 

 them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of what was chaos.. 

 Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impar- 

 tially added together au utter chaos ? The strains of my voice, the lights 

 and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking 

 of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to- 

 possess, do these make a whole at all ? Is it not the only condition of your 

 mental sanity iu the midst of them that most of them should become non- 

 existent for you, and that a few others— the sounds, I hope, which I am 

 uttering — should evoke from places in your memory, that have nothing to 

 do with this scene, associates fitted to combine with them in what we call 

 a rational train of thought ? — rational because it leads to a conclusion we 

 have some organ to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate 

 the simply given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is 

 the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such 

 a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a cross- section of all existence 

 at a definite point of lime would be? AVhile I talk and the flies buzz, a 

 sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the 

 Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a liorse dies in Tartary, 

 and twins are born in France. What does that mean ? Does the contem- 

 poraneity of these events with each other and with a million more as dis- 

 jointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them into 

 anything that means for us a world ? Yet just such a collateral contem- 

 poraneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order 

 with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as pos- 

 sible. As I said, we break it : we break it into histories, and we break it 

 into arts, and we break it into sciences ; and then we begin to feel at home. 

 We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it. On any one of these, 

 we may react as if the rest did not exist. We discover among its parts re- 

 lations that were never given to sense at all, — mathematical relations, tan- 

 gents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions, — and out of an infinite 

 number of these we call certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore 

 the rest. Essential these relations are, but on] j for our purpose, the other 

 relations being just as real and present as they ; and our purpose is to con- 

 ceive (limply and \o foresee. Are not simple conception and prevision subject- 

 ive ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science ; 

 and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by 

 any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It 

 shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our aesthetic, to 

 many of our practical purposes and ends." Cf. also Hodgson: Philos. of 

 Refl. , ch. V ; Lotze : Logik, §§ 342-351 ; Sigwart : Logik, §§ 60-63, 105. 



