Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/188

prove the existence of matter? But if this be true, is not your principle of causation, your assurance that the real world is one where facts stand in rational relations, and where what happens is explicable, already presupposed not only as valid, but as valid for a real world beyond you, from the very outset of your whole inquiry? Is there not here, then, a belief deeper than your mere experience that your will is at any time resisted? For unless you had this principle of causation in your possession, and unless you first believed the principle to be applicable to a realm beyond your private experience, your will would be resisted in vain, so far as your power to learn about a real world would then go. For you would then learn nothing thereby but the blind fact that you felt limitations, as an infant feels them when he hungers. But if you already possess your principle, and believe it applicable to Reality in general, then indeed you can apply it to explain, after a fashion, any fact that you please. Already, however, in assuming that you are somehow able to know that the principle of causation applies to a realm beyond your own present will, you have found out, apart from all experience of resistance, that there is the real external world within which the principle of causation is valid. And, in that case, you have not discovered the reality of the physical world through the fact that it resists your will, but have presumed, in advance of all feeling of resistance, that there is a real world, beyond yourself, whose facts, whatever they are, are linked by a law of causation to your own experience. For surely you do not mean that the principle of causation itself, by resisting your