Page:Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect.pdf/38

pleteness. Abstraction expresses nature’s mode of interaction and is net merely mental. When it abstracts, thought is merely conforming to nature—or rather, it is exhibiting itself as an element in nature. Synthesis and analysis require each other. Such a-conception is paradoxical if you will persist in thinking of the actual world as a collection of passive actual substances with their private characters or qualities. In that case, it must be nonsense to ask, how one such substance can form a component in the make-up of another such substance. So long as this conception is retained, the difficulty is not relieved by calling each actual substance an event, or a pattern, or an occasion. The difficulty, which arises for such a conception, is to explain how the substances can be actually together in a sense derivative from that in which each individual substance is actual. But the conception of the world here adopted is that of functional activity. By this I mean that every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality, consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it. In enquiring about any one individual we must ask how other individuals enter ‘objectively’ into