ame office. The function will outlast the particular organ. That
interest in reference to which the function is defined will essentially
determine a perfect world of responsive extensions and conditions. These
ideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in nature
in so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfect
and eternal realm, merely potential in existence but definite in
constitution, will thus subtend nature and be what a rational philosophy
might call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so far
as it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spirit
would be the part of nature's fertility by which such expression was
secured.

CHAPTER VI--DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS

[Sidenote: Another background for current experience may be found in
alien minds.]

When a ghostly sphere, containing memory and all ideas, has been
distinguished from the material world, it tends to grow at the expense
of the latter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematical
skeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connect
calculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred to
mind and identified with the scientific thought in which it is
represented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered moments
of life cannot connect those episodes among which it is itself the last
and the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even to
the most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort of
reputed reality--the minds of others--which could serve, even after the
supposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independent
order and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediate
consciousness nodded. But other men's minds, being themselves precarious
and ineffectual, would never have seemed a possible substitute for
nature, to be in her stead the background and intelligible object of
experience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fertile is
needed to support and connect the given chaos. Just these properties,
however, are actually attributed to one of the minds supposed to
confront the thinker, namely, the mind of God. The divine mind has
therefore always constituted in philosophy either the alternative to
nature or her other name: it is _par excellence_ the seat of all
potentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all ignorance.

Speculative problems would be grea