Of course the actual fate of philosophical systems depends upon the degree to which they can win the other type of validity, by commending themselves to students of philosophical problems. Every philosophy seeks this type of validity and is fortunate to the degree that it secures it, but the validity it aims at is of another type, although practically this validity may have to submit to the same test as the other one.
Philosophical explanations are sure to be determined by the aspect of experience that seems most significant, most interesting. Those who are chiefly interested in the natural and exact sciences, and charmed with the conceptual regularity and order which is characteristic of large regions in those sciences, have usually defined reality from the point of view of this prevailing interest. The goal of natural science as described by Helmholtz is an expression of this point of view.
But explanation from the side of the interest in natural science is giving way to description,[1] Statements like that of Helmholtz, quoted above, sound already a little antiquated. Explanations of experience are, therefore, coming more to be determined by the other chief factor in the natural view of the world, namely, the fellow being. Reality must be so understood as to be an adequate ground for the social aspect of experience. From the side of this interest, the dramatic aspects of human experience and human history are cared for. Moral and esthetic experience, the problem of evil, personality, are important headings. But the explanation which takes special account of these interests must not do too great violence to the other feature of the natural Weltbegriff, the outer world. The significance of my fellow depends largely upon the fact that we are supposed to have common interests and common objects, and the sphere for these must be preserved.
II
We can approach the explanation of experience by an indefinite number of ways. Every metaphysic is an attempt to explain experience. It seeks not to describe phenomena, but to get behind phenomena to some ultimate ground, and the experience to be explained presents as its most characteristic feature the cognition of apparently transcendent objects. This character, which comes out most frankly in the naive realism which I have called the natural view of the world, appears to determine metaphysics more than any other character of experience. Sir W. Hamilton testifies to this character in the following vigorous statement. "We are immediately
- ↑ See preface to second edition of Carl Pearson's ' Grammar of Science.'
