We must not seek the function of thought, then, in any supposed power to discover either ends not suggested by natural impulse or means to the accomplishment of those irrational ends. Attention is utterly powerless to change or create its objects in either respect; it rather registers without surprise—for it expects nothing in particular—and watches eagerly the images bubbling up in the living mind and the processes evolving there. These processes are themselves full of potency and promise; will and reflection are no more inconsequential than any other processes bound by natural links to the rest of the world. Even if an atomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatenation of everything in nature, including the mind, it cannot rob what it abstracts from of its natural weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to hold the pearls together is not the whole cause of the necklace. But this pregnancy and implication of thought in relation to its natural environment is purely empirical. Since natural connection is merely a principle of arrangement by which the contiguities of things may be described and inferred, there is no difficulty in admitting consciousness and all its works into the web and woof of nature. Each psychic episode would be heralded by its material antecedents; its transformations would be subject to mechanical laws, which would also preside over the further transition from thought into its material expression.
Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence.
This inclusion of mind in nature, however, is as far as possible from constituting the mind's function and value, or its efficacy in a moral and rational sense. To have prepared changes in matter would give no rationality to mind unless those changes in turn paved the way to some better mental existence. The worth of natural efficacy is therefore always derivative; the utility of mind would be no more precious than the utility of matter; both borrow all their worth from the part they may play empirically in introducing those moral values which are intrinsic and self-sufficing. In so far as thought is instrumental it is not worth having, any more than matter, except for its promise; it must terminate in something truly profitable and ultimate which, being good in itself, may lend value to all that led up to it. But this ultimate good is itself consciousness, thought, rational activity; so that what instrumental mentality may have preceded might be abolished without loss, if matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if that instrumental mentality is worth retaining, it is so only because it already contains some premonition and image of its own fulfilment. In a word, the value of thought is ideal. The material efficacy which may be attributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter—an efficacy which matter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism. And when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas they would appear in their proper form of expressions, realisations, ultimate fruits.
Consciousness transcendental.
The incongruity of making thought, in its moral and logical essence, an instrument in the natural world will appear from a different point of view if we shift the discussion for a moment to a transcendental level. Since the material world is an object for thought, and potential in relation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane of reality with the thought to which it appears. The spectator on this side of the foot-lights, while surely regarded by the play as a whole, cannot expect to figure in its mechanism or to see himself strutting among the actors on the boards. He listens and is served, being at once impotent and supreme. It has been well said that
Only the free divine the laws,
The causeless only know the cause.
Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless and free will evidently not be causal or determinant, being something altogether universal and notional, without inherent determinations or specific affinities. The objects figuring in consciousness will have implications and will require causes; not so the consciousness itself. The Ego to which all things appear equally, whatever their form or history, is the ground of nothing incidental: no specific characters or order found in the world can be attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience is not determined by the mere fact that experience exists. Another experience, differently logical, might be equally real. Consciousness is not itself dynamic, for it has no body, no idiosyncrasy or particular locus, to be the point of origin for definite relationships. It is merely an abstract name for the actuality of its random objects. All force, implication, or direction inhere in the constitution of specific objects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought no less than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy is generated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous objects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the natural order lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possibly intervene to fill the chasm—for these are parcels and expressions of the natural order—but only nothingness and pure chance.
and transcendent.
Thought is thus an expression of natural relations, as will is of natural affinities; yet consciousness of an object's value, while it declares the blind disposition to pursue that object, constitutes its entire worth. Apart from the pains and satisfactions involved, an impulse and its execution would be alike destitute of importance. It would matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly the world became, or what animal bodies arose or perished there; any tendencies afoot in nature, whatever they might construct or dissolve, would involve no progress or disaster, since no preferences would exist to pronounce one eventual state of things better than another. These preferences are in themselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works of supererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue of Hercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they express and depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in the causal process. Expression gives value to power, and the strength of Hercules would have no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to art and civilisation. That conceived basis of all life which we call matter would be a mere potentiality, an inferred instrument deprived of its function, if it did not actually issue in life and consciousness. What gives the material world a legitimate status and perpetual pertinence in human discourse is the conscious life it supports and carries in its own direction, as a ship carries its passengers or rather as a passion carries its hopes. Conscious interests first justify and moralise the mechanisms they express. Eventual satisfactions, while their form and possibility must be determined by animal tendencies, alone render these tendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in which benefit shall lie must be determined by irrational impulse, but the attainment of benefit consists in crowning that impulse with its ideal achievement. Nature dictates what men shall seek and prompts them to seek it; a possibility of happiness is thus generated and only its fulfilment would justify nature and man in their common venture.
It is the seat of value.
Satisfaction is the touchstone of value; without reference to it all talk about good and evil, progress or decay, is merely confused verbiage, pure sophistry in which the juggler adroitly withdraws attention from what works the wonder—namely, that human and moral colouring to which the terms he plays with owe whatever efficacy they have. Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matter of no importance; not seldom they give that name to the sum of all evils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural demand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possible from goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought about by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In excellence there is an essential bias, an opposition to the possible opposite; this bias expresses a mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred the senses and the will.