Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/572

558 CRITICAL NOTICES : difference is negligible, and parallelism is treated lightly as a " fiction," "unavailing in a region where none of our terms can be just " ; whereas interaction is " the greatest absurdity that specu- lation has adopted from popular delusions ". That is both are fictions, and when one simply intends to employ that which gives the best account of Empirical Eeality the " absurdity " of inter- action is far from evident. With Prof. Eead, as always, the employment of parallelism as a regulative principle seems insepar- able from its enforceal as a dogmatic doctrine. Moreover, I cannot see that he has more than assumed that Transcendent Eeality must have manifested itself to consciousness in physical phenomena (" . . . by his body man is a cause in Nature to the full extent of his Eeality " (p. 340)), and I do not know that interaction has much to fear from the study of the physiological processes ac- companying mental life, which he so warmly recommends, for that seems to leave doubt whether physical causes are sufficient to account for non-voluntary let alone voluntary attention. In conclusion I should just like to say something regarding Possibility in relation with Prof. Eead's view that " Eternity is not a state of Being, but a Law ; and Eeality is essentially a process in Time, as witnessed by the nature of consciousness " (p. 347). I feel strongly that Prof. Eead is only emphasising one side of Eeality and of the Truth, and that there must be another some- where in the form of an immediate consciousness of the whole temporal process, but perhaps, in the meantime, there is more reason to emphasise the side he exclusively considers. Some explanation must be given of the incessant refashioning of itself on the part of Eeality, which for Prof. Eead is something more than a mere temporal manifestation of a timeless Eeality, being something actually occurring in Ultimate Eeality. As we have seen he gives the problem up, and he considers the suggestion that the Universe corrects errors and "staggers forth to some remote accomplishment as only fit to be put into the mouth of one's opponent in a Dialogue ". What if the Finite Sphere is that of the realisation of infinite possibilities ? Eeality is always systematic, but to human reflexion, at least, the present systematic adjustment of the innumerable differentiations of Eeality must appear a vast improvement on that existing in the nebular mist, and how this is to be conceived or described except as the realisation of a higher possibility, I do not know. What if change be conceived as the realisation of internal possibilities of systematic structure, and related to the most perfect possible structure as to a Final Cause ? All human effort worth expending is directed upon an increasingly perfect adjustment of those elements of Eeality over which it has control, and it often errs by developing wrong possibilities, for these in the practical sphere are emphatically not nothing. Perhaps when the finite and relative sphere, where we see this phenomenon, had accomplished its task it should have ceased to be such. Only Perfection is indeed Eeality, and modes of Being short of that must pass away.