dualistic. On the one hand we find in experience motives
that seem to lead to Materialism. For Materialism is due
simply to a one-sided emphasis laid upon certain aspects of
the World of Description. On the other hand we are
driven, by equally obvious empirical considerations, to
interpret the social world as a realm of conscious voluntary
processes, which occur because somebody finds it worth
while that they should occur. Our ordinary common-sense
view of things sets these two doctrines about the
knowable world side by side, and in general despairs of
seeing any comprehensible link between the two orders,
viz. between the mental and the material, the social and
the physical, the necessary and the free, the describable
and the spiritual. Our own general criticism of the categories
has prepared us, however, to understand, in terms
of our Idealism, both the contrast and the unity of these
two realms. In the present and in the subsequent lecture,
I propose therefore to undertake a discussion of the
concept of Nature, and to show its relation to our concept of
Mind. We shall have to explain, in the first place, what
are the main motives for our acknowledgment of the
existence of the physical world; and secondly, we shall
have to set forth in some detail the relations between our
idealistic Theory of Being on the one hand and the
empirical facts that men acknowledge on the other hand,
in dealing with one another and with Nature.
I
No precise definition of the scope covered by the term Nature can be given in advance of a Theory of Nature.
