that “being” belongs to “thought,” that “being” is the true object of
thought, and that being is the “rational” and the “thinkable” and not
something outside thought. It is what a scientist, an expounder of
science, like Professor J. A. Thompson means and partly states when he
says, speaking of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the day,
“The matter of physical science is an abstraction, whereas the matter
of our direct experience is in certain conditions the physical basis of
life and the home of the soul.”[253]
To the objector who again retorts that this line of reflection seems to
rest upon a very large assumption as to the nature of the apparently
illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but reply, firstly,
that we know nothing of the so-called natural world save through the
so-called spiritual or psychical world,[254] and secondly, that even
the most complete description of the world from the point of view
of science would, of course, still leave the world of our mental
experiences entirely unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much
more logical to use this last world as at least the partial explanation
of the former rather than _vice versa_.
And as for the “normative” view of ethics and the help it affords to
Pragmatism in its contention in respect of final truth, it may be said,
to begin with, that it is in the ethical life that what we call the
truth of things becomes the basis of an ideal of personal achievement.
It is not merely of man’s well-known transformation and utilization of
the forces of nature that we are at present thinking, but of the fact
that in the moral life man “superposes,” as has been said, an order
of his own upon the so-called natural order of things, transforming
it into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we will, this
transformation, is revealed unmistakably in the history of the facts of
conduct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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