BOOK II. § 3. way to Nature's agency, as distinguished from man's. It may indeed be said, that we may Apparent consider future ends and present means together as Design. a single whole, in which ends and means seem calculated for one another; and this is true; but then, by so considering them, we destroy the priority of design to effectuation, reduce the whole to the rank of an object thought of, and have before us a case of apparent and speculative, not human and practical design. The term apparent design is used to describe certain correspondences, both of co-existence and of succession, which are actually found in the Course of Nature, by reference to the common-sense conception of design in human actions. The explicit insertion of the word apparent saves the phrase from being a misleading one. Not so when, without any similar safeguard, we speak of means employed to realise nonexistent ends in Nature. No special ends, and consequently no means to effectuate any, can be truly attributed to that play of real conditions, in which the efficient action of Nature consists. In conclusion, it is necessary briefly to apply the conceptions of the present Section to the case of the known world itself, considered as a whole consisting of the two real existents, matter and consciousness, the latter being the conditionate of the former, in respect of its existence. The correspondence between these two parts constitutes the whole which they compose a single complex object thought of, exhibiting apparent design, and having the special value due to that special kind of interest. Taking the parts severally, matter, as conditio existendi only, has no value or preferability BOOK II. CH. III. § 3. Design. of its own; whatever value it has is reflected back upon it, from the nature of the consciousness which it conditions; which nature (as distinguished Apparent from its existence) is, as we have seen, not conditioned either upon the nature the nature or upon the existence of matter. Consciousness alone, and in its nature alone, is the source of all judgments of value; since it is only as applied to consciousness itself that the term value has any meaning. At this point, opinions as to the value of the world as a whole will inevitably become divergent. The reason is, that at this point we pass from the consideration of design proper to judgments of comparative desirability, which are judgments of the second head noted above. The experience of each individual will here decide his opinion, both as to the comparative value of different modes of consciousness, and as to the desirability or undesirability of his own existence as a conscious being; and therefore, derivatively, as to the value of those modes of matter upon which his existence depends. It need not be pleasure and pain in the ordinary sense, by which these judgments are determined. Some may think that even a painful consciousness is preferable to none; others, that pleasure alone is worth having. But in every case, our judgment of the value of existence, and of the world in which we exist, is suspended ultimately, not upon the existence, but upon the nature of consciousness. The fact of value, or interest, generally is not the reflex of anything in matter. Even the special interest taken in correspondence simply is different from, and additional to, the perception of the correspondence as a fact. BOOK II. § 3. The value of a fact is different from its existence, different from its perception. With the feeling of Apparent value, or interest, in general, the affective life, as Design. distinguished from the life of sense, may be said to begin. And all value is founded in the nature of consciousness, of which no conditions are $ 4. Re-union of Nature and Genesis. conceivable. § 4. These considerations bring us back again to the point from which we started at the beginning of Book I., the double aspect of consciousness or experience, (1) as process-content, (2) as existing fact. But now we return to it from and after the consideration which at first we postponed, namely, that of genesis and history. So much as this we can now affirm with certainty about consciousness, namely, that its genesis and history as a particular real existent, and in the shape in which we actually know it, I mean, in the shape, for every one of us, of an individual's consciousness, namely, his own, are conditioned upon matter. And of matter we know, that it is a real existent, positively known to us both as a real object thought of, and as a real condition, and known by means of the nature or process - content of that very consciousness, the real existence of which it conditions. The distinction upon which this knowledge immediately depends is that between objective thought and objects thought of. A real condition is a real object thought of, and both its real existence and its real operation are objects of inference. We can therefore conceive them as existing prior to and independently of the individual consciousness which is their conditionate, while at the same time the conception and act of inferring them exist as part of the consciousness which they have conditioned and continue to condition. Moreover, consciousness is always retrospective, even when states of consciousness are its only objects. We need not therefore be surprised that it should continue to be retrospective, when inferred realities are included among its objects. We return, then, to philosophy from the domain of science, which has been the main subject of the present Book, enriched with the conception of real conditioning, both in the world at large, and in the case of individual conscious beings, and also with the conception of these latter as partial realisations, or, if I may so speak, partial productions into positively known existence, of modes belonging to the infinite nature of consciousness, that nature including modes or features which are positively unknown to us, as well as those positively known modes or features, some of which we began by analysing. At the same time it is clear, that neither in that analysis, nor in the present consideration of genesis, have we overstepped the limits of experience, as existing in individuals and as positively known to us. This indeed we have done,-we have seen what and where are the limits of positive knowledge. They are the boundary between the known and the unknown worlds, but lie within the total panorama which our consciousness embraces and perceives as its object. There are beyond them, in the unknown world, existences which we must conceive, according to the modes of thought belonging to the known region, (1) as 361 BOOK II. CH. III. § 4. Re-union of Nature and Genesis. BOOK II. § 4. of Nature and Genesis. real conditions of the structure and existence of Matter, and (2) as a continuation of the known Re-union modes of consciousness by or into modes of which we can frame no positive imagination or thought. But we cannot put the question of real conditioning concerning the nature of consciousness, as we can put it concerning the structure and existence of matter. In the case of consciousness, therefore, what we must conceive as lying beyond the limits of the known is not any real condition of its nature, but other modes of consciousness itself, which, supposing them to be made part and parcel of our own human consciousness, would disclose a panorama of other real existences, which at present lie, as it were, behind an unuplifted veil. And thus these unknown existences are thought of, not as noumena which as they are in themselves are inaccessible to knowledge, but as phenomena objective to other modes of consciousness than ours, and knowable by those modes just as much, though probably not in the same way (namely by way of inference) as we know material existents, which are not consciousness, but are the inferred objects of it. Nor can we help regarding the facts in this way. We cannot but think of the existence of the unknown, because the known is limited; and we cannot but think of it as connected with the known, because the conception of a limit presupposes the conception of something lying immediately beyond it, no limit being absolutely ultimate. It is the positive content of the unknown which makes default; and in this default it is, that what is called its unknowability consists. It is unknowable by our limited range of sensibilities, and by ideas and |