Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/183

It is easy to say that, by Nature, we mean the portion of the universe that our senses make known to us and that our special empirical sciences study. But the region of Being marked out by such a definition is no very precise one. What our senses make known to us means little enough until the data of sense have been organized through our conduct, and interpreted in the light of theory. Nature has therefore always been conceived by men very largely in supersensuous terms, from the days of magic lore down to the latest geological or physical or biological theories. And what our empirical sciences actually study is, according to all our beliefs about Nature, the mere fringe of a world that exists, but that we have not yet learned how to study with success. Nature is also often contrasted with Mind; but for the psychologist mental processes are a portion of the natural processes; while, for our own idealistic view, all Nature is an expression of Mind. In our own phraseology as used in these lectures, Nature has so far been contrasted several times with Man. But we of course all recognize a sense in which Man is to be conceived as a part of Nature; while on the other hand, nothing is clearer than that, for us, all our beliefs about Nature are determined by conditions which belong, in one aspect, to the mind of Man. A confessedly vague way of stating the definition of the term is to say that by Nature we mean a realm external to our own private experience, and yet this side, so to speak, of the ultimate Reality, — a realm, as it were, between the divine, viewed as the Absolute, and the knowing finite human Subject. But all of these expressions, while they are