distinctions of organic and inorganic, of apparently
living and apparently lifeless beings, — it is, I say, in case
of Nature, that the diversified processes, present to our
ordinary experience, arouse questions as to the special
kinds of causal linkage that, in any particular case, bind
one fact to another. It is in this world, — the phenomenal
or natural, the essentially fragmentary world, the realm
which cannot contain its whole truth within itself, — it
is in this realm, I say, that the special problems concerning
physical and mental causation, concerning active
and inactive beings, concerning the relation of physical
organism and mental phenomena, most properly arise.
And we shall do well to keep separate the study of the
whole constitution of the universe (conceived in accordance
with the general principles of our theory of Being),
from a study of the special problems of the phenomenal
world. It is not my present purpose, then, to exhaust
the theory of the sense in which will is, and is not, an
active cause in the natural world. What can at present
be asked from us is a general statement of the sense
in which what exists expresses, on the one hand, the will
of God; and, on the other hand, that individual will
which you find at any moment present in a fragmentary
way in your own finite consciousness. I shall maintain
that both God’s will and our own finite will get
consciously expressed in the world, and that no
contradiction results from this statement.
II
At any moment your ideas, in so far as they are rational, embody a purpose. That we have asserted from
