is possible. There are many enquiries which are legitimate. To ask about the “seat” of the soul, and about the ultimate modes of sequence and co-existence, both physical and psychical, is proper and necessary. We may remain incapable, in part, of resolving these problems; but at all events the questions they put are essentially answerable, however little we are called upon to deal with them here. But the connection of body and soul is in its essence inexplicable, and the further enquiry as to the “how” is irrational and hopeless. For soul and body are not realities. Each is a series, artificially abstracted from the whole, and each, as we have seen, is self-contradictory. We cannot in the end understand how either comes to exist, and we know that both, if understood, would, as such, have been transmuted. To comprehend them, while each is fixed in its own untrue character, is utterly impossible. But, if so, their way of connection must remain unintelligible.
And the same conclusion may be reached by considering the causal series. In this normally the two sides are inseparable from each other, and it was by a licence only that we were permitted ever to disregard one side. But, with this result, still we have not reached the true causal connection. It is only by a licence that in the end both sides taken together can be abstracted from the universe. The cause is not the true cause unless it is the whole cause; and it is not the whole cause unless in it you include the environment, the entire mass of unspecified conditions in the background. Apart from this you have regularities, but you have not attained to intelligible necessity. But the entire mass of conditions is not merely inexhaustible, but also it is infinite; and thus a complete knowledge of causation is theoretically impossible.[1] Our known causes and
- ↑ Cf. Chapter vi.
