and essential to every act. On this side, too, we carry our abstraction to the utmost possible; we say that light, or vibrations of ether, is the essential condition of the act of vision. The eye now becomes the capacity of seeing; the vibrations of ether, conditions required for the exercise of the capacity. That is to say, instead of frankly recognizing that eye and vibrations are pure abstractions from the only real thing, the act of seeing, we try to keep the two in their separateness, while we restore their unity by thinking of one as capacity, or possibility to be realized only when the other is present. Instead of the one organic activity we now have an organ on one side, and environment on the other.
But we cannot stop here. The eye in general and the vibrations in general do not, even in their unity, constitute the act of vision. A multitude of other factors are included. These vary from time to time. Those which continue to attract attention least often are dismissed as merely indifferent; others appear with sufficient frequency so that some account of them has to be taken. The original core which was abstracted and identified with the reality, comes to be conceived as capacity for reaching these things as ends also, while they are conceived as conditions that help realize it.[1]
With this in mind let us return to our child possessed of an artistic capacity. I hope the preceding discussion has made it obvious that the recognition of artistic capacity means that we are now becoming more aware of what the concrete reality of the child’s activity is. We are not primarily finding out what he may be, but what he is. But having already identified his self with what we previously knew of it, we try to reconcile our two different conceptions by still keeping our old
- ↑ In my Outlines of Ethics, pp. 97–102, I have developed this same idea by showing that we may analyze individuality into the two sides of ‘capacity’ and ‘environment’ (this, of course, being what I have above termed ‘conditions of action’), and then destroy the separateness seemingly involved in this analysis by recognizing that either of these, taken in its totality, is the other. In an article entitled “The Superstition of Necessity” in the Monist, Vol. III, No. 3, I have developed at greater length the idea that necessity and possibility are simply the two correlative abstractions into which the one reality falls apart during the process of our conscious apprehension of it.
