“sense of resistance” is the fundamental warrant for our belief in facts external to ourselves. Such a view is inadequate, because it makes use of the category of causation as a primitive and irreducible conception. But unquestionably the facts do resist our momentary desires. Subjective, however, are all the grounds for our present acknowledgment of the facts. For in recognizing that our present wills are limited and controlled, we also recognize that only through such control can they win their determinate embodiment. And so it is our own will to acknowledge these foreign and objective limitations of our will. And thus no fact can furnish to us, wholly from without, the evidence that it exists. Nature embodies my will even in appearing foreign to my will; and thus only can I know that Nature exists as a system of facts defined by my ideas, but beyond my presentation. And, finally, the synthesis of these two characters appears in the essential Teleological constitution of the realm of facts, — a constitution which we shall soon have occasion to point out in the region where it seems least plausible, namely, in the so-called “mechanical,” or better, in the seemingly non-teleological realm of natural law.
Such, then, is the beginning of our account of the Organization of Experience as human wit conceives that organization.
