Metaphysical Analogies

Abstract

In earlier chapters we have considered experience as arising out of a nexus of relationships and as shaped by interpretation into symbolic forms. All experience, we said, was shaped by the impulse towards the creation of form, which is at the root of mental activity, and possibly of life. But experience is not merely symbolic form, driven forward and controlled by the principles of its own inner development. We saw reason to reject those kinds of speculative and epistemological idealism which would have us identify reality with the immanent development of the forms of thought, maintaining that there is nothing in principle which these cannot permeate, so that the final goal of experience would be a state in which thought and being were one. Beyond experience would then be nothing which could significantly be called real ; the only distinction which could significantly be drawn would be between a vague and inchoate experience and an articulate experience, fully mastered by the forms of thought. But we have been unable to accept this idealist presupposition. We have looked at experience not merely as creation of form, but as creation of form arising out of an initial situation of interrelated processes.