Lawrence's experience of being roasted, for
instance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the
court, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other
parts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned,
fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our groping
and inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or
supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions;
the whole object, the parts observed _plus_ the parts interpolated, is
the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of
this complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other
objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe's casual sensation of light is
a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother's. The true
conditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find
by experience, sensations of light do not appear.

Had Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might have
felt that the phrase "subjective conditions" is a contradiction in
terms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and
imagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are
_ipso facto_ conceiving the potential, that is, the "objective" world.
All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objective
and all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together
the episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of
an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially
observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically;
and common-sense is right as against Kant's subjectivism in regarding
nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.
This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given
existence, from which the material part of nature, something essentially
dynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not
"conditions" inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence,
potentialities and powers? Kant's fabled conditions also are inferred;
but they are inferred illegitimately since the "subjective" ones are
dialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the
thing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function.
Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions
are inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The seconda