ining Space;
that at a point in this real energetic system organically related to the
intelligent self, the transmutations occurring there constitute the
individual's sensible experience; that his mind, by also actively
influencing the system at that point, can stimulate the train of
transmutations which constitute his world of ideas; that the mind can
discover itself as Will influencing transmutations in the organism which
are transmitted through a wider, larger portion of the system; and can
recognise the transmutations at the related point as influenced
sometimes by its own Volition and sometimes by other agents. We seek to
bring the added light of scientific theory to reconcile the conflict
between the law and the fact, between the objects of reflection and the
objects of sense, between the world of thought and the world of
phenomena,--the problem which Plato raised and which has since been the
central problem of Metaphysics. In doing so we present a doctrine which
not only maintains the truth of the Ideal, and the actuality of the
phenomenal, and the relative reality of both, but which proves, with
all the cogency of Science, how it is that the Sensible is permeated by
and made knowable only by the Ideal, by the laws of the transmutations
which constitute actuality, and that, on the other hand, the Ideal only
enters experience as the regulative principle of the ever-transmuting
Reality.

The world consists not merely of phenomena, nor of phenomena and laws
which regulate them. These are but transitional and imperfect aspects of
Reality. "Our standard of Truth and Reality," says a recent writer,
"moves us on towards an individual with laws of its own, and to laws
which form the vital substance of a single existence." We approach such
a goal in the conception of Energy--the laws of whose constant
transmutations are what we call Nature.

We must distinguish Energy as Absolute Reality from such conceptions as
Activity, which is its subjective aspect, or as Force, which is really
the rate at which Energy is, in certain cases, transformed. Dynamics,
which investigates Force, is a study of the fundamental transmutations
of Energy. It postulates Energy as the Real Entity in terms of which it
can frame a satisfactory theory of dynamical phenomena.

The metaphysical labours of the century which has elapsed since Kant
have not been altogether in vain. The deeper thinkers are pretty nearly
agreed that the Absolute is not to