GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

246
ETHICS
a mind rather than to a machine, or it may be a colony
of souls, or it may be an actively developing spirit, a unity
of thought, or a flux of time. 1 If any of these metaphysical
views of the nature of the universe is true, or even approximates
to the truth, the commonsense conception of the
world as consisting of solid objects extended in space
separate from but interacting with one other must be false.
The universe, again, may be fundamentally duatistic;
it may, that is to say, be partly physical and partly spiritual
or mental. The physical part is, the dualist would affirm,
the order of nature which scientists study, while, of the
spiritual or mental part we have experience in our own
consciousness. It is admittedly exceedingly difficult to see
how the mental or spiritual element can interact with or
produce efiects upon the physical, but this difficulty, he
would insist, gives us no right to reject the dualist hypo-
thesis out of hand. If the dualist hypothesis is correct,
then mind or consciousness is outside that natural order of
events in which mechanistic science proclaims determinism
to reign supreme, and no arguments which purport to
establish the mechanistic nature of the physical universe
will touch the freedom of the mind.
Let us, however, suppose that we provisionally accept
the mechanistic scheme in its entirety and bring everything,
including the operations of mind, within its framework.
We shall find that we are now committed to an
that is at least as difficult to sustain as that
assumption
of the freedom of the will.
Determinisms Uncritical Acceptance of die Notion
of Causation. This is the assumption that physical
causation means something and that we know what
it means.* Upon this assumption the ^frh^mft^r concep-
tion of the universe rests* The postulate of mechanism is
that events are continually causing other events to happen;
mechanism repudiates the notion ofan uncaused event Yet,
1 Sec my Gm* * Ptiktopb, Part III, for an account of some of
thete theories.