e spectator. Of course the pure experience does not offer us anything of that kind. We insisted that the objects of our real life are objects o
ject. If we want to live our life, we must adjust our attitudes to things, and, as we know our will, we must seek to understand the other factor in the complex experience, the object of our will, and we must find out what it involves in itself. But we do not understand the object and the submission which it demands if we do not completely understand its relation to our desires. Our total submission to the thing thus involves our acknowledgment of all that we have to expect from it. And although the real experi
ficult to understand the second step which naturalism has to take before a natural science is possible. It must dissolve the object of will into an over-individual and an individual part and must eliminate the individual. That part of my objects which belongs to me alone is their psychical side; that which belongs to all of us and is the object of ever new experien
d is the necessity of the process. Of course we have to formulate laws, and as soon as we acknowledge a special law to be expressive of a necessity, the subsumption of the particular case under the law will satisfy us even if the necessity of the connection is not recognized in the particular case. We are satisfied because the acknowledgment of the law involved all possible cases. But we do not at all feel that we have furnished a real explanation if the law means to us merely a generalization of routine experiences, and if thus no absolute validity is attached to the law. This necessity between cause and effect must thus have its ultimate reason in our own understanding. We must be logically obliged t
y discovery of necessary connection is ultimately a demonstration of identity. If we seek connections with the final aim to understand them as necessary, we must conceive the world of our objects in such a way that it is possible to consider the successive experiences as parts of a self-identical world; that is, as parts of a world in which no substance and no energy can disappear or appear anew. To reach this end it is obviously needed that we eliminate from the world of objects all that cannot be conceived as identically returning in a new experience; that is, all that belongs to the present experience only. We do eliminate this by taking it up conceptually into the
n the various experiences only that is identical which is independent of the momentary individual experiences, and therefore we need as the ultimate aim a reconstruction of the object into the two parts, the one perceptional, which refers to our individual experience; and the other conceptional, which expresses that which can be conceived as identical in every new experience. The ideal of this constructed world is the mechanical universe in which every atom moves by causal necessity because th
hored in the identity of the object through various experiences; while the object of experience was psychical for us just in so far as it could never be conceived as identical in different phases of reality. The psychical object is an ever new creation; my idea can never be your idea. Their meaning may be identical, but the psychical stuff, the content of my consciousness, can never be object for any one else, and even in myself the idea of to-day is never the idea of yesterday or to-morrow. But if there cannot be identity in different psychical experiences, it is logically impossible to connect them directly by necessity. If we yet want to master their successive appearance, we must substitute an