ultimate fruits.

[Sidenote: Consciousness transcendental.]

The incongruity of making thought, in its moral and logical essence, an
instrument in the natural world will appear from a different point of
view if we shift the discussion for a moment to a transcendental level.
Since the material world is an object for thought, and potential in
relation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane of
reality with the thought to which it appears. The spectator on this side
of the foot-lights, while surely regarded by the play as a whole, cannot
expect to figure in its mechanism or to see himself strutting among the
actors on the boards. He listens and is served, being at once impotent
and supreme. It has been well said that

Only the free divine the laws,
The causeless only know the cause.

Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless and free
will evidently not be causal or determinant, being something altogether
universal and notional, without inherent determinations or specific
affinities. The objects figuring in consciousness will have implications
and will require causes; not so the consciousness itself. The Ego to
which all things appear equally, whatever their form or history, is the
ground of nothing incidental: no specific characters or order found in
the world can be attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience is
not determined by the mere fact that experience exists. Another
experience, differently logical, might be equally real. Consciousness is
not itself dynamic, for it has no body, no idiosyncrasy or particular
locus, to be the point of origin for definite relationships. It is
merely an abstract name for the actuality of its random objects. All
force, implication, or direction inhere in the constitution of specific
objects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought no
less than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy is
generated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous
objects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the natural
order lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possibly
intervene to fill the chasm--for these are parcels and expressions of
the natural order--but only nothingness and pure chance.

[Sidenote: and transcendent.]

Thought is thus an expression of natural relations, as will is of
natural affinities; yet consciousness of an object's value, while it
declares