strictly physical order,
for the definition of the physical order involves the rejection of many
of the most familiar aspects of experience, such as its value and its
being known in conscious selves. Materialism, in that it proposes to
conceive the whole of reality as physical, must attempt to reduce the
residuum to physical terms, and with no hope of success. Goodness and
knowledge cannot be explained as mass and force, or shown to be
mechanical necessities.

[Sidenote: Truth of Psychical Relations, but Impossibility of General
Reduction to Them.]

Sect. 210. Are we then to conclude that reality is not physical, and
look for other terms to which we may reduce physical terms? There is no
lack of such other terms. Indeed, we could as fairly have _begun_
elsewhere. Thus some parts of experience compose the consciousness of
the individual, and are said to be known by him. Experience so contained
is connected by the special relation of being known together. But this
relation is quite indifferent to physical, moral, and logical relations.
Thus we may be conscious of things which are physically disconnected,
morally repugnant, and logically contradictory, or in all of these
respects utterly irrelevant. Subjectivism, in that it proposes to
conceive the whole of reality as consciousness, must attempt to reduce
physical, moral, and logical relations to that co-presence in
consciousness from which they are so sharply distinguished in their very
definition. The historical failure of this attempt was inevitable.

[Sidenote: Truth of Logical and Ethical Principles. Validity of Ideal of
Perfection, but Impossibility of Deducing the Whole of Experience from
it.]

Sect. 211. But there is at least one further starting-point, the one
adopted by the most subtle and elaborate of all reconstructive
philosophies. Logical necessities are as evidently real as bodies or
selves. It is possible to define general types of inference, as well as
compact and internally necessary systems such as those of mathematics.
There is a perfectly distinguishable strain of pure rationality in the
universe. Whether or not it be possible to conceive a pure rationality
as self-subsistent, inasmuch as there are degrees it is at any rate
possible to conceive of a maximum of rationality. But similarly there
are degrees of moral goodness. It is possible to define with more or
less exactness a morally perfect person, or an ideal moral community.
Here again it may