cannot be casual and disconnected; and yet if the mechanism on the one side is a closed system, the living experience on the other cannot be even its ‘collateral product,’ as we have already seen. The hopeless impasse of dualism again confronts our naturalist, and he is fain to appeal to metaphysics; but the appeal he trusts is harmless, since he only asks for an Unknowable Reality to unite his mechanical phenomena with the psychical epiphenomena that run parallel with them. It is needless to enlarge on the absurdity of such metaphysics: that has been effectively exposed more than once already.[1] It is enough to note that all this agnostic monism comes to is the admission that there is a connexion and the confession — perhaps I should rather say, the contention — that this connexion is inexplicable. But what precisely is this connexion as a fact, and why is it inexplicable? We must turn to experience for an answer. There we find not indeed a dualism of material phenomena and mental phenomena, but a duality of object presented and subject affected, of subject striving and object attained: an interaction that is only inexplicable because for every finite experience it is ultimate — is its basal fact.
With this fact of the duality in unity of experience before us we are at the historical standpoint, the standpoint of the concrete and individual. Tracing the gradual development of experience we can see how the distinction between the real and the phenomenal arose, how with the advance of intersubjective intercourse and the growth of language the so-called trans-subjective objects, objects that, so to say, were common property,
- ↑ Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 127 ff.
