ABSTRACT
The “persons” and “things” of experience have, as we have urged, their measure of independence or substantiality. But they are also interdependent and related in their behaviour to one another. The one thing ultimately and completely “substantial” or self-subsistent is reality as a whole, and to the conception of this whole we are led by many converging lines of thought. The question then arises, What conception, if any, can be formed of the whole of things? The purport of such a question in such a work as the present must be taken in a narrower and more limited sense than the actual words would imply. Our knowledge of the universe, inadequate as it is, is to be pieced together from all the fragments of all the sciences, and is not to be determined by logic alone. But logic may and must have something to say upon the form which our ideal of knowledge takes, and on certain broad characteristics of the world which that ideal implies. What indications have the preceding discussions given us on this point? What knowledge and what explanation of the whole is possible? Under what conditions is it possible? And what form would it take?
