Page:Philosophical Review Volume 5.djvu/676

nection with the controversy between the determinists and indeterminists in regard to the freedom of the will. Experience itself is a whole, qualitative and indivisible. But in scientific procedure this living unity is broken up into factors externally united. Thus what we call facts are not the reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but adaptations of the real. The motive for, and function of, this scientific abstraction are found in the exigencies of social life. That is, the abstraction subserves a practical purpose in life. It is by means of it that experience appreciated as a whole is defined and set clearly before the mind. Now one of the qualities of experience is that it is a moving continuity. In immediate experience its parts are bound up together, but when abstraction is made for practical purposes, this whole falls into a dualism of the permanent and the changing. That is, in ordinary experience we have objects, and these objects change. Or more scientifically, we have atoms and motion. But in whatever form stated, we have to do with an abstraction from the immediate unity of living experience, an abstraction made for practical purposes and to be viewed from this standpoint. The overlooking of the nature of the abstraction has given rise to the contradictions which in all times have been found in reference to the permanent and the changing. The only solution is to be found in seeing that both are but one-sided abstractions from experience, which in its immediate nature is a moving continuity.

S. F. MacLennan.