failed to
satisfy me, and I was at first tempted to write a Note animadverting
upon them in detail. The growth of the limb, the sea's contour, the
vicarious functioning of the nerve-centre, the digitalis curing the
heart, are unfortunately _not_ cases where we can _see_ any
_through-and-through_ conditioning of the parts by the whole. They are
all cases of reciprocity where subjects, supposed independently to
exist, acquire certain attributes through their relations to other
subjects. That they also _exist_ through similar relations is only an
ideal supposition, not verified to our understanding in these or any
other concrete cases whatsoever.

If, however, one were to urge this solemnly, Mr. Haldane's friends could
easily reply that he only gave us such examples on account of the
hardness of our hearts. He knew full well their imperfection, but he
hoped that to those who would not spontaneously ascend to the Notion of
the Totality, these cases might prove a spur and suggest and symbolize
something better than themselves. No particular case that can be brought
forward is a real concrete. They are all abstractions from the Whole,
and of course the "through-and-through" character can not be found in
them. Each of them still contains among its elements what we call
_things_, grammatical subjects, forming a sort of residual _caput
mortuum_ of Existence after all the relations that figure in the
examples have been told off. On this "existence," thinks popular
philosophy, things may live on, like the winter bears on their own fat,
never entering relations at all, or, if entering them, entering an
entirely different set of them from those treated of in Mr. Haldane's
examples. Thus _if_ the digitalis were to weaken instead of
strengthening the heart, and to produce death (as sometimes happens), it
would determine itself, through determining the organism, to the
function of "kill" instead of that of "cure." The function and relation
seem adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalis gets
hold of, the digitalis and the heart being facts external and, so to
speak, accidental to each other. But this popular view, Mr. Haldane's
friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the "existence"
of digitalis and heart outside of the relations of killing or curing, is
but a function in a wider system of relations, of which, _pro hac vice_,
we take no account. The larger system determines the _existence_ just
as ab