led, then, in a way that profoundly concerns the interests of religion, to view the true world in another light. The genuine Facts of the universe are the facts of Life; and this, the necessary result of our general idealistic doctrine, will get a special expression in consequence of our present way of stating the contrast between the World of Description and the World of Will or of Appreciation. The one aspect of reality we shall later find embodied in the conception that nature’s laws are invariable. The other aspect will receive embodiment in our Social Consciousness. The two aspects will be reconciled in subsequent lectures, by means of our Interpretation of Nature. We shall maintain that all special physical laws are only relatively invariable, and that our deepest relations to Nature are social.
To the consideration of the foregoing Categories in
general, as leading up to our later study of Nature and of
Man, the present lecture is to be devoted.
I
And first as to the Likenesses and Differences of Facts. The logic of the relations of likeness and difference first came to our notice when we were dealing with the problem of Realism in our former series of lectures.[1] We became better acquainted with the bearing of the general concept of Being upon these relations in the course of the Ninth and Tenth lectures of that series. Here we have to deal with the topic still more at close range. Every student of these problems knows that likeness and difference are two aspects of the world that simply cannot be
