links to the rest of the world. Even if an
atomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatenation of everything in
nature, including the mind, it cannot rob what it abstracts from of its
natural weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to hold the pearls
together is not the whole cause of the necklace. But this pregnancy and
implication of thought in relation to its natural environment is purely
empirical. Since natural connection is merely a principle of arrangement
by which the contiguities of things may be described and inferred, there
is no difficulty in admitting consciousness and all its works into the
web and woof of nature. Each psychic episode would be heralded by its
material antecedents; its transformations would be subject to mechanical
laws, which would also preside over the further transition from thought
into its material expression.

[Sidenote: Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence.]

This inclusion of mind in nature, however, is as far as possible from
constituting the mind's function and value, or its efficacy in a moral
and rational sense. To have prepared changes in matter would give no
rationality to mind unless those changes in turn paved the way to some
better mental existence. The worth of natural efficacy is therefore
always derivative; the utility of mind would be no more precious than
the utility of matter; both borrow all their worth from the part they
may play empirically in introducing those moral values which are
intrinsic and self-sufficing. In so far as thought is instrumental it is
not worth having, any more than matter, except for its promise; it must
terminate in something truly profitable and ultimate which, being good
in itself, may lend value to all that led up to it. But this ultimate
good is itself consciousness, thought, rational activity; so that what
instrumental mentality may have preceded might be abolished without
loss, if matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if that
instrumental mentality is worth retaining, it is so only because it
already contains some premonition and image of its own fulfilment. In a
word, the value of thought is ideal. The material efficacy which may be
attributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter--an efficacy which
matter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism.
And when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas
they would appear in their proper form of expressions, realisations,