What now are
the complementary conditions? They are first such a mixture of
things as will in the fulness of time give us a chance, a gap that
we can spring into, and, finally, OUR ACT.
Does our act then CREATE the world's salvation so far as it makes
room for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create,
not the whole world's salvation of course, but just so much of this
as itself covers of the world's extent?
Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of
rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask WHY NOT?
Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make
ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are
closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and
complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may
they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they
seem to be, of the world--why not the workshop of being, where we
catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any
other kind of way than this?
Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and
patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently
of the rest? There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the
last resort can any reason be looked for save in the material
pressure or the logical compulsion of the total nature of the world?
There can be but one real agent of growth, or seeming growth,
anywhere, and that agent is the integral world itself.
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