Elements of metaphysics

By A. E. Taylor

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Title: Elements of Metaphysics

Author: A. E. Taylor

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Language: English

Original publication: London: Methuen, 1903

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_Elements of Metaphysics_

========

A. E. TAYLOR

_Late Professor of Moral Philosophy
in the University of Edinburgh_

πατρὶς δὴ ἡμῖν ὅθενπερ ἤλθομεν καὶ πατὴρ ἐκεῖ

UNIVERSITY PAPERBACKS

------------------------------------

METHUEN : LONDON

First published by Methuen & Co Ltd in 1903
Printed in Great Britain by
Morrison & Gibb Ltd, Edinburgh
Catalogue No 2/6775/27

_University Paperbacks are published
by_ METHUEN & CO LTD
_36 Essex Street, Strand, London WC2
and_ BARNES & NOBLE INC
_105 Fifth Avenue, New York 3_

TO
F. H. BRADLEY

_In heartfelt acknowledgment of all that
his example and his writings have been
to the men of my generation_

Ante Ararim Parthus bibet, aut Germania Tigrim,
Quam nostro illius labatur pectore vultus.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ELEMENTS
OF METAPHYSICS

PREFACE

In acknowledging my indebtedness to recent writers for many of the ideas
contained in the following pages, I have in the first place to express
my deep and constant obligations to the various works of Mr. F. H.
Bradley. My chief debt to other recent English-speaking philosophers is
to Professor Royce and Professor Ward, and I am perhaps scarcely less
indebted to Professor Stout. My chief obligations to Continental writers
are to Avenarius and to Professor Münsterberg. I trust, however, that
there is not one of the authors with whose views I have dealt in the
course of my work from whom I have not learned something. At the same
time I ought perhaps to say here once for all that I make no claim to
represent the views of any one author or school, and I shall not be
surprised if the thinkers to whom I owe most find themselves unable to
endorse all that I have written.

With respect to the references given at the end of the several chapters,
I may note that their aim is simply to afford the reader some
preliminary guidance in the further prosecution of his studies. They
make no pretence to completeness, and are by no means exclusively drawn
from writers who support my own conclusions.

One or two important works of which I should have otherwise been glad to
make extended use have appeared too recently for me to avail myself of
them. I may mention especially the late Professor Adamson’s _Lectures on
the Development of Modern Philosophy_, Professor Ostwald’s _Vorlesungen
über Naturphilosophie_, and Mr. B. Russell’s _Principles of
Mathematics_, vol. 1.

Finally, I have to express my gratitude to my friends Professor S.
Alexander and Mr. P. J. Hartog for their kindness in reading large
portions of my proofs and offering many valuable corrections and
suggestions.

1903

--------------

The sudden demand for a re-issue of this volume prevents my making any
alterations beyond the correction of a number of misprints. Had the
opportunity offered, I should have been glad, while leaving the main
argument essentially as it stands, to have attempted certain
improvements in details. I may mention in particular, as the most
important of the changes I could have wished to make, that the treatment
of the problem of infinite regress and of the Kantian antinomies would
have been remodelled, and I trust improved, as a consequence of study of
the works of Mr. Bertrand Russell and M. Couturat.

I should like to take this opportunity of thanking all those who have
been kind enough to favour me with criticisms of the book.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

GENERAL NOTIONS

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM OF THE METAPHYSICIAN

PAGE

#§1. The generality and simplicity of the metaphysical
problem make it difficult to define the study. §2.
Problem is suggested by the presence of contradictions
in ordinary experience. §3.. By making a distinction
between reality and appearance the sciences remove some
of these contradictions, but themselves lead to further
difficulties of the same sort; hence the need for
systematic inquiry into the meaning of the distinction
between the real and the apparent, and the general
character of reality as such. §4.. Metaphysics, as an
inquiry into the ultimate meaning of “reality,” is akin
to poetry and religion, but differs from them in its
scientific character, from the mathematical and
experimental sciences in its method, from common
scepticism in the critical nature of its methods as well
as in its positive purpose. §5.. The study is difficult
(_a_) because of the generality of its problems, (_b_)
and because we cannot employ diagrams or physical
experiments. §6.. The objection that Metaphysics is an
impossibility may be shown in all its forms to rest upon
self-contradictory assumptions of a metaphysical kind.
§7.. The minor objections that, if possible, the science
is superfluous, or at least stationary, may be met with
equal ease. §8. Metaphysics is partly akin to the
mystical tendency, but differs from mysticism in virtue
of its positive interest in the world of appearances, as
well as by its scientific method. §9.. It agrees with
logic in the generality of its scope, but differs in
being concerned with the real, whereas logic is
primarily concerned with the inferrible. §10. The
problems of the so-called _Theory of Knowledge_ are
really metaphysical. 1

CHAPTER II

THE METAPHYSICAL CRITERION AND THE METAPHYSICAL METHOD

§ 1. In the principle that “Reality is not
self-contradictory” we have a universal and certain
criterion of reality which is not merely negative, but
implies the positive assertion that reality is a
consistent system. § 2. The validity of this criterion
is not affected by the suggestion that it may be merely
a _Logical_ Law; § 3. Nor by the raising of doubt
whether all our knowledge is not merely “relative,” a
doubt which is itself meaningless. § 4. As to the
material of the system, it is experience or immediate
psychical fact. § 5. It must be actual experience, not
mere “possibilities” of experience; but actual
experience must not be identified with “sensation.” § 6.
Nor must we assume that experience consists of subjects
_and_ their states; nor again, that it is a mere
succession of “states of consciousness.” § 7. The
_differentia_ of matter of experience is its
_immediacy_, _i.e._ its combination in a single whole of
the two aspects of _existence_ and _content_. §8. This
union of existence and content is broken up in
reflective knowledge or thought, but may be restored at
a higher level. § 9. Experience further always appears
to be implicitly complex in respect of its content. §
10. An adequate apprehension of reality would only be
possible in the form of a complete or “pure” experience,
at once all-inclusive, systematic, and direct. The
problem of Metaphysics is to ascertain what would be the
general or formal character of such an experience, and
how far the various provinces of our human experience
and knowledge approximate to it. The knowledge
Metaphysics can give us of the ultimate nature of
reality as it would be present in a complete experience,
though imperfect, is final as far as it goes. § 11. As
to the method of Metaphysics, it must be _analytical_,
_critical_, _non-empirical_, and _non-inductive_. It may
also be called _a priori_ if we carefully avoid
confusing the _a priori_ with the psychologically
primitive. Why our method cannot be the Hegelian
Dialectic 18

CHAPTER III

THE SUB-DIVISIONS OF METAPHYSICS

§ 1. The traditional sub-division of Metaphysics into
_Ontology_, _Cosmology_, _Rational Psychology_, common
to all the great modern constructive systems. § 2.
Precise sense in which we adopt these divisions for the
purposes of our own treatment of the subject. § 3.
Relation of _Cosmology_ and _Rational Psychology_ to the
empirical sciences 42

BOOK II

ONTOLOGY—THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF REALITY

CHAPTER I

REALITY AND EXPERIENCE

§ 1. In a sense “reality” for each of us means that of which
he must take account if his special purposes are to find
fulfilment. § 2. But ultimately the world must possess a
structure of which _all_ purposes, each in its own way,
must take account. This is the “Ultimate Reality” or
“Absolute” of Metaphysics. In Metaphysics we regard it
from the special standpoint of the scientific intellect.
There are other legitimate attitudes towards it, _e.g._,
that of practical religion. § 3. The inseparability of
reality from immediate experience involves the
recognition of it as teleological and as uniquely
individual. § 4. The experience within which all reality
falls cannot be my own, nor yet the “collective”
experience of the aggregate of conscious beings. It must
be an individual experience which apprehends the
totality of existence as the harmonious embodiment of a
single “purpose.” The nearest analogue our own life
presents to such a type of experience is to be found in
the satisfied insight of personal love. § 5. The
experience of such an “Absolute” must not be thought of
as a mere reduplication of our own, or of the scientific
hypotheses by which we co-ordinate facts for the
purposes of inference. § 6. Our conception is closely
connected with that of Berkeley, from which it differs
by the stress it lays on the purposive and selective
aspect of experience. § 7. Realism, both of the Agnostic
and of the Dogmatic type, is incompatible with the
meaning we have been led to attach to “reality.” But
Agnosticism is justified in insisting on the limitations
of our knowledge of Reality, and Dogmatic Realism in
rejecting the identification of Reality with experience
as a merely cognitive function of finite percipients. §
8. Subjectivism, according to which all that I know is
states of my own “consciousness,” is irreconcilable with
the admitted facts of life, and arises from the
psychological fallacy of “introjection” 50

CHAPTER II

THE SYSTEMATIC UNITY OF REALITY

§ 1. The problem whether Reality is ultimately One or Many is
inevitably suggested to us by the diverse aspects of our
own direct experience of the world. The different
theories may be classed, according to their solution of
this problem, as Monistic, Pluralistic, and Monadistic.
§2. Pluralism starts from the presumed fact of the
mutual independence of human selves, and teaches that
this independence of each other belongs to all real
beings. But (_a_) the independence with which experience
presents us is never complete, nor the unity of the
“selves” perfect. (_b_) The theory is inconsistent with
the systematic character of all reality as presupposed
in both knowledge and action. § 3. Monadism again makes
the systematic unity of the real either an illusion or
an inexplicable accident. § 4. Reality, because
systematic, must be the expression of a single principle
in and through a multiplicity. The unity and
multiplicity must both be real, and each must
necessarily involve the other. § 5. If both are to be
equally real, the whole system must be a single
experience, and its constituents must also be
experiences. A perfect systematic whole can be neither
an aggregate, nor a mechanical whole of parts, nor an
organism. The whole must exist for the parts, and they
for it. § 6. This may also be expressed by saying that
Reality is a subject which is the unity of subordinate
subjects, or an individual of which the constituents are
lesser individuals. § 7. The nearest familiar analogue
to such a systematic whole would be the relation between
our whole “self” and the partial mental systems or
lesser “selves.” § 8. The nearest historic parallel to
this view is to be found in Spinoza’s theory of the
relation of the human mind to the “infinite intellect of
God” 84

CHAPTER III

REALITY AND ITS APPEARANCES—THE DEGREES OF REALITY

§ 1. Reality being a single systematic whole, the nature of
its constituent elements is only finally intelligible in
the light of the whole system. Hence each of its
“appearances,” if considered as a whole in itself, must
be more or less contradictory. § 2. But some
“appearances” exhibit the structure of the whole more
adequately than others, and have therefore a higher
degree of reality. § 3. This conception of degree of
reality may be illustrated by comparison with the
successive orders of infinites and infinitesimals in
Mathematics. It would be the task of a complete
Philosophy to assign the contents of the world to their
proper place in the series of “orders” of reality. § 4.
In general any subordinate whole is real in proportion
as it is a self-contained whole. And it is a
self-contained whole in proportion as it is (_a_)
comprehensive, (_b_) systematic; that is, a thing is
real just so far as it is truly individual. § 5. The two
criteria of individuality, though ultimately coincident,
tend in particular cases to fall apart for our insight,
owing to the limitation of human knowledge. § 6.
Ultimately only the whole system of experience is
completely individual, all other individuality is
approximate. § 7. In other words, the whole system of
experience is an infinite individual, all subordinate
individuality is finite. Comparison of t“his position
with the doctrines of Leibnitz. § 8. Recapitulatory
statement of the relation of Reality to its Appearances 104

CHAPTER IV

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(1) SUBSTANCE, QUALITY, AND RELATION

§ 1. The natural or pre-scientific view of the world regards
it as a plurality of “things,” each possessing
_qualities_, standing in _relation_ to others, and
interacting with them. § 2. Hence arise four problems:
those of the Unity of the Thing, of Substance and
Quality, of Relation, of Causality. § 3. No simple
answer can be given to the question, _What is one
thing?_ The Unity of the Thing is one of teleological
structure, and this is a matter of degree, and also
largely of our own subjective point of view. § 4.
_Substance and Quality._ The identification of the
substance of things with their primary qualities, though
useful in physical science, is metaphysically
unjustifiable. § 5. Substance as an “unknowable
substratum of qualities” adds nothing to our
understanding of their connection. § 6. The thing cannot
be a mere collection of qualities without internal
unity. § 7. The conception of a thing as the law or mode
of relation of its states useful but metaphysically
unsatisfactory. Ultimately the many can be contained in
the one only by “representation”; the unity in things
must be that of an individual experience. § 8.
_Relation._ We can neither reduce qualities to relations
nor relations to qualities. § 9. Again, the attempt to
conceive Reality as qualities in relation leads to the
indefinite regress. §10. We cannot escape this
difficulty by taking all relations as “external.” And
Professor Royce’s vindication of the indefinite regress
seems to depend on the uncriticised application of the
inadequate category of whole and part to ultimate
Reality. The union of the one and the many in concrete
experience is ultra-relational. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE: Dr.
Stout’s reply to Mr. Bradley 120

CHAPTER V

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(2) CHANGE AND CAUSALITY

§ 1. The conception of things as interacting leads to the two
problems of Change and Causality. The paradoxical
character of change due to the fact that only what is
permanent can change. § 2. Change is succession within
an identity; this identity, like that of Substance, must
be teleological, _i.e._ must be an identity of plan or
end pervading the process of change. § 3. Thus all
change falls under the logical category of Ground and
Consequence, which becomes in its application to
succession in time the Principle of Sufficient Reason. §
4. _Causality._ Cause—in the modern popular and
scientific sense—means the ground of a change when taken
to be completely contained in preceding changes. That
every change has its complete ground in preceding
changes is neither an axiom nor an empirically
ascertained truth, but a postulate suggested by our
practical needs. § 5. In the last resort the postulate
cannot be true; the dependence between events cannot be
one-sided. The real justification for our use of the
postulate is its practical success. § 6. Origin of the
conception of Cause anthropomorphic. § 7. Puzzles about
Causation. (1) _Continuity_. Causation must be
continuous, and yet in a continuous process there can be
no distinction of cause from effect. Cause must be and
yet cannot be _prior_ in time to effect. § 8. (2) _The
indefinite regress_ in causation. § 9. (3) _Plurality of
Causes_. Plurality of Causes is ultimately a logical
contradiction, but in any form in which the causal
postulate is of practical use it must recognise
plurality. § 10. The “necessity” of the causal relation
psychological and subjective. § 11. Immanent and
Transeunt Causality: Consistent Pluralism must deny
transeunt Causation; but cannot do so successfully. §
12. Both transeunt and immanent Causality are ultimately
appearance 158

BOOK III

COSMOLOGY—THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

§ 1. Distinction between the experimental sciences and a
Philosophy of Nature and Mind. The former concerned with
the description, the latter with the interpretation of
facts. § 2. Cosmology is the critical examination of the
special characteristics of the physical order. Its main
problems are: (1) The problem of the nature of Material
Existence; (2) problem of the justification of the
concept of the Mechanical Uniformity of Nature; (3)
problems of Space and Time; (4) problem of the
Significance of Evolution; (5) problem of the Place of
descriptive Physical Science in the system of Human
Knowledge 191

CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF MATTER

§ 1. The physical order, because dependent for its perceived
qualities on the sense-organs of the percipient, must be
the appearance of a more ultimate reality which is
non-physical. § 2. Berkeley’s criticism is fatal to the
identification of this reality with “material
substance.” The logical consequence of Berkeley’s
doctrine that the _esse_ of sensible things is
_percipi_, would be the subjectivist view that the
physical order is _only_ a complex of presentations. §
3. But this is clearly not the case with that part of
the physical order which consists of the bodies of my
fellow-men. These have an existence, as centres of
feeling, over and above their existence as presentations
to my senses. § 4. As the bodies of my fellows are
connected in one system with the rest of the physical
order, that order as a whole must have the same kind of
reality which belongs to them. It must be the
presentation to our sense of a system or complex of
systems of experiencing subjects; the apparent absence
of life and purpose from inorganic nature must be due to
our inability to enter into a direct communion of
interest with its members. § 5. Some consequences of
this view 198

CHAPTER III

THE MEANING OF LAW

§ 1. The popular conception of the physical order as
exhibiting a rigid mechanical conformity to general
_laws_, conflicts with our metaphysical interpretation.
§ 2. Our interpretation would, however, admit of the
establishment of averages or approximately realised
uniformities by the statistical method, which deals with
occurrence _en bloc_ to the neglect of their individual
detail. § 3. “Uniformity” in nature is neither an axiom
nor an empirically verifiable fact, but a postulate. A
consideration of the methods actually employed for the
establishment of such uniformities or “laws” of nature
shows that we have no guarantee that actual concrete
cases exhibit _exact_ conformity to law. § 4. Uniformity
is a _postulate_ arising from our need of practical
rules for the control of nature. It need not for this
purpose be exact, and in point of fact our scientific
formulæ are only exact so long as they remain abstract
and hypothetical. They do not enable us to determine the
actual course of an individual process with certainty. §
5. The concept of the physical order as _mechanical_ is
the abstract expression of the postulate, and is
therefore essential to the empirical sciences which deal
with the physical order. § 6. Consideration of the
character of genuine machines suggests that the
mechanical only exists as a subordinate aspect of
processes which, in their full nature, are intelligent
and purposive 216

CHAPTER IV

SPACE AND TIME

§ 1. Are time and space ultimately real or only phenomenal? §
2. The space and time of _perception_ are limited,
sensibly continuous, and consist of a quantitative
element together with a _qualitative_ character
dependent on relation to the _here_ and _now_ of
immediate individual feeling. § 3. _Conceptual_ space
and time are created from the perceptual data by a
combined process of synthesis, analysis, and
abstraction. § 4. They are unlimited, infinitely
divisible, and there is valid positive ground for
regarding them as mathematically continuous. Thus they
form infinite continuous series of positions. They
involve abstraction from all reference to the _here_ and
_now_ of immediate feeling, and are thus homogeneous,
_i.e._ the positions in them are indistinguishable. They
are also commonly taken to be unities. § 5. Perceptual
space and time cannot be ultimately real, because they
involve reference to the _here_ and _now_ of a finite
experience; conceptual space and time cannot be
ultimately real, because they contain no principle of
internal distinction, and are thus not individual. § 6.
The attempt to take space and time as real leads to the
difficulty about qualities and relations, and so to the
indefinite regress. § 7. Space and time contain no
principle of unity; there may be many space and time
orders in the Absolute which have no spatial or temporal
connection with each other. § 8. The antinomies of the
infinite divisibility and extent of space and time arise
from the indefinite regress involved in the scheme of
qualities and relations, and are insoluble so long as
the space and time construction is taken for Reality. §
9. The space and time order is an imperfect phenomenal
manifestation of the logical relation between the inner
purposive lives of finite individuals. Time is an
inevitable aspect of finite experience. _How_ space and
time are transcended in the Absolute experience we
cannot say 241

CHAPTER V

SOME CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION

§ 1. The concept of _evolution_ an attempt to interpret
natural processes in terms of individual growth. § 2.
Evolution means change culminating in an end which is
the result of the process and is qualitatively new. The
concept is thus teleological. § 3. Evolution, being
teleological, is essentially either progress or
degeneration. If it is more than illusion, there must be
real _ends_ in the physical order. And ends can only be
real as subjective interests of sentient beings which
are actualised by the process of change. § 4. Thus all
evolution must take place within an _individual_
subject. § 5. Further, the subject of evolution must be
a _finite_ individual. All attempts to make “evolution”
a property of the whole of Reality lead to the infinite
regress. § 6. The distinction between progressive
evolution and degeneration has an “objective” basis in
the metaphysical distinction between higher and lower
degrees of individuality. § 7. In the evolutionary
process, old individuals disappear and fresh ones
originate. Hence evolution is incompatible with the view
that Reality consists of a plurality of ultimately
independent finite individuals 265

CHAPTER VI

THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE

§ 1. Scientific _description_ may be contrasted with
philosophical or teleological _interpretation_, but the
contrast is not absolute. § 2. The primary end of all
scientific description is intercommunication with a view
to active co-operation. Hence all such description is
necessarily restricted to objects capable of being
experienced in the same way by a plurality of
individuals. § 3. A second end of scientific description
is the _economising_ of intellectual labour by the
creation of _general_ rules for dealing with typical
situations in the environment. In the course of
evolution this object becomes partially independent of
the former. § 4. From the interest in formulating
_general_ rules arise the three fundamental postulates
of physical science, the postulates of _Uniformity_,
_Mechanical Law_, and _Causal Determination_. § 5. The
mechanical view of physical Nature determined by these
three postulates is systematically carried out only in
the abstract science of _Mechanics_; hence the logical
completion of the descriptive process would mean the
reduction of all descriptive science to Mechanics. That
the chemical, biological, and psychological sciences
contain elements which cannot be reduced to mechanical
terms, is due to the fact that their descriptions are
inspired by æsthetic and historical as well as by
primarily “scientific” interests. § 6. The analysis of
such leading concepts of mechanical Physics as the
Conservation of Mass and of Energy shows them to have
only _relative_ validity 279

BOOK IV

RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY—THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE

CHAPTER I

THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

§ 1. The various sciences which deal with the interpretation
of human life all avail themselves of the fundamental
categories of Psychology. Hence we must ask how the
concepts of Psychology are related to actual experience.
§ 2. Psychology is a body of abstract descriptive
formulæ, not a direct transcript of the individual
processes of real life. It presupposes the previous
construction of the physical order. § 3. The
psychological conception of conscious life as a
succession of “mental states” or “images” is a
transformation of actual experience devised primarily to
account for the experience of other subjects, and
subsequently extended to my own. The transformation is
effected by the hypothesis of “introjection.” §§ 4, 5.
The logical justification of the psychological
transformation of facts is twofold. The psychological
scheme serves partly to fill up the gaps in our theories
of physiological Mechanism, and also, in respect of the
teleological categories of Psychology, to describe the
course of human conduct in a form capable of ethical and
historical appreciation. Psychology may legitimately
employ both mechanical and teleological categories. § 6.
The objections sometimes brought against the possibility
of (_a_) psychological, (_b_) teleological description
are untenable 294

CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF SOUL AND BODY

§ 1. The problem of psychophysical connection has to do with
the correlation of scientific abstractions, not of given
facts of experience. § 2. The “consciousness” of
Psychology is thus not the same thing as the finite
individual subject of experience, and Reality must not
be said to consist of “minds” in the psychologist’s
sense. Again, we must not assume _a priori_ that there
can be only _one_ working hypothesis of psychophysical
connection. § 3. The possible hypotheses may be reduced
to three, Epiphenomenalism, Parallelism, and
Interaction. § 4. _Epiphenomenalism_ is legitimate as a
methodological principle in Physiology; it is untenable
as a basis for Psychology because it implies the
reduction of psychical facts to mechanical law. § 5.
_Parallelism._ The arguments for Parallelism as
necessarily valid to Psychophysics because of its
congruity with the postulates of mechanical Physics, are
fallacious. We cannot assume that Psychology must
necessarily conform to these postulates. § 6. As a
working hypothesis Parallelism is available for many
purposes, but breaks down when we attempt to apply it to
the case of the initiation of fresh purposive reactions.
A teleological and a mechanical series cannot ultimately
be “parallel.” § 7. We are thus thrown back on the
hypothesis of _Interaction_ as the only one which
affords a consistent scheme for the correlation of
Physiology and Psychology. We have, however, to remember
that what the hypothesis correlates is scientific
symbols, not actual facts. The actuality represented by
both sets of symbols is the same thing, though the
psychological symbolism affords a wider and more
adequate representation of it than the physiological 313

CHAPTER III

THE PLACE OF THE “SELF” IN REALITY

§ 1. The “self” is (1) a teleological concept, (2) implies a
contrasted not-self (where this contrast is absent from
an experience there is no genuine sense of self); (3)
but the limits which divide self and not-self are not
fixed but fluctuating. The not-self is not a merely
external limit, but consists of discordant elements
within the individual, which are extruded from it by a
mental construction. (4) The self is a product of
development, and has its being in the time-series. (5)
The self is never given complete in a moment of actual
experience, but is an ideal construction; probably
self-hood implies some degree of _intellectual_
development. § 2. The Absolute or Infinite Individual,
being free from all internal discord, can have no
not-self, and therefore cannot properly be called a
self. § 3. Still less can it be a person. § 4. In a
_society_ of selves we have a more genuinely
self-determined individual than in the single self.
Hence it would be nearer the truth to think of the
Absolute as a Society, though no finite whole adequately
expresses the Absolute’s full nature. We must remember,
however, (_a_) that probably the individuals in the
Absolute are not all in _direct_ relation, and (_b_)
that in thinking of it as a Society we are not denying
its real individuality. § 5. The self is not in its own
nature imperishable; as to the particular problem of its
continuance after death, no decision can be arrived at
on grounds of Metaphysics. Neither the negative
presumption drawn from our inability to understand the
conditions of continuance, nor the lack of empirical
evidence, is conclusive; on the other hand, there is not
sufficient metaphysical reason for taking immortality as
certain 334

CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL FREEDOM

§ 1. The metaphysical problem of free will has been
historically created by extra-ethical difficulties,
especially by theological considerations in the early
Christian era, and by the influence of mechanical
scientific conceptions in the modern world. §§ 2, 3. The
analysis of our moral experience shows that true
“freedom” means teleological determination. Hence to be
“free” and to “will” are ultimately the same thing.
Freedom or “self-determination” is genuine but limited,
and is capable of variations of degree. § 4.
_Determinism_ and _Indeterminism_ both arise from the
false assumption that the mechanical postulate of
_causal_ determination by antecedents is an ultimate
fact. The question then arises whether mental events are
an exception to the supposed principle. § 5.
_Determinism._ The determinist arguments stated. § 6.
They rest partly upon the false assumption that
mechanical determination is the one and only principle
of rational connection between facts; § 7. Partly upon
fallacious theories of the actual procedure of the
mental sciences. Fallacious nature of the argument that
complete knowledge of character and circumstances would
enable us to predict human conduct. The assumed data are
such as, from their own nature, could not be known
_before the event_. § 8. _Indeterminism._ The psychical
facts to which the indeterminist appeals do not warrant
his conclusion, which is, moreover, metaphysically
absurd, as involving the denial of rational connection.
§ 9. Both doctrines agree in the initial error of
confounding teleological unity with causal determination 359

CHAPTER V

SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND RELIGION

§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make
provision for the gratification of our ethical,
religious, and æsthetic interests. § 2. But we cannot
assume that ethical and religious postulates are
necessarily _true_ in the forms in which our practical
interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while
morality would become impossible unless on the whole
there is coincidence between virtue and happiness, and
unless social progress is a genuine fact, “perfect
virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite progress” are
logically self-contradictory concepts. § 4. But this
does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical
ideals. § 5. In religion we conceive of the ideal of
perfection as already existing in individual form. Hence
ultimately no part of the temporal order can be an
adequate object of religious devotion. § 6. This leads
to the _Problem of Evil_. “God” cannot be a finite being
within the Absolute, because, if so, God must contain
evil and imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus
_not_ the already existing realisation of the ideal. §
7. This difficulty disappears when we identify “God”
with the Absolute, because in the Absolute evil can be
seen to be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be
true that religious feeling, to be practically
efficient, may need to imagine its object in an
ultimately incorrect anthropomorphic form. § 8. The
existence, within the Absolute, of finite “divine”
personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on
grounds of general Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the
“being of God.” The principle of the “ontological” and
“cosmological” proofs can be defended against the
criticism of Hume and Kant only if we identify God with
the Absolute. The “physicotheological proof” could only
establish the reality of finite superhuman
intelligences, and its force depends purely upon
empirical considerations of evidence 381

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

§ 1. Can our Absolute Experience be properly called the
“union of Thought and Will”? The Absolute is certainly
the final realisation of our intellectual and our
practical ideals. But (1) it includes aspects, such as,
_e.g._, æsthetic feeling, pleasure, and pain, which are
neither Thought nor Will. (2) And it cannot possess
either Thought or Will _as such_. Both Thought and Will,
in their own nature, presuppose a Reality which
transcends _mere_ Thought and _mere_ Will. § 2. Our
conclusion may in a sense be said to involve an element
of Agnosticism, and again of Mysticism. But it is only
agnostic in holding that we do not know the precise
nature of the Absolute Experience. It implies no
distrust of the validity of knowledge, so far as it
goes, and bases its apparently agnostic result on the
witness of knowledge itself. Similarly, it is mystical
in transcending, not in refusing to recognise, the
constructions of understanding and will. § 3.
Metaphysics adds nothing to our information, and yields
no fresh springs of action. It is finally only justified
by the persistency of the impulse to speculate on the
nature of things as a whole 408

INDEX 417

ELEMENTS OF METAPHYSICS

BOOK I
GENERAL NOTIONS

CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF THE METAPHYSICIAN

§ 1. The generality and simplicity of the metaphysical problem make it
difficult to define the study. § 2. Problem is suggested by the
presence of contradictions in ordinary experience. § 3. By making a
distinction between reality and appearance the sciences remove some
of these contradictions, but themselves lead to further difficulties
of the same sort; hence the need for systematic inquiry into the
meaning of the distinction between the real and the apparent, and
the general character of reality as such. § 4. Metaphysics, as an
inquiry into the ultimate meaning of “reality,” is akin to poetry
and religion, but differs from them in its scientific character,
from the mathematical and experimental sciences in its method, from
common scepticism in the critical nature of its methods as well as
in its positive purpose. § 5. The study is difficult (_a_) because
of the generality of its problems, (_b_) and because we cannot
employ diagrams or physical experiments. § 6. The objection that
Metaphysics is an impossibility may be shown in all its forms to
rest upon self-contradictory assumptions of a metaphysical kind. §
7. The minor objections that, if possible, the science is
superfluous, or at least stationary, may be met with equal ease. §
8. Metaphysics is partly akin to the mystical tendency, but differs
from mysticism in virtue of its positive interest in the world of
appearances, as well as by its scientific method. § 9. It agrees
with logic in the generality of its scope, but differs in being
concerned with the real, whereas logic is primarily concerned with
the inferrible. §10. The problems of the so-called _Theory of
Knowledge_ are really metaphysical.

§ 1. It is always difficult, in treating of any branch of knowledge, to
put before the beginner a correct preliminary notion of the nature and
scope of the study to which he is to be introduced, but the difficulty
is exceptionally great in the case of the body of investigations
traditionally known as Metaphysics.[1] The questions which the science
seeks to answer are, indeed, in principle of the simplest and most
familiar kind, but it is their very simplicity and familiarity which
constitute the chief difficulty of the subject. We are naturally slow to
admit that there is anything we do not understand in terms and ideas
which we are constantly using, not only in the special sciences, but in
our non-systematised everyday thought and language about the course of
the world. Hence, when the metaphysician begins to ask troublesome
questions about the meaning and validity of these common and familiar
notions, ordinary practical men, and even intelligent students of the
special sciences, are apt to complain that he is wasting his time by
raising idle and uncalled-for difficulties about the self-evident.
Consequently the writer on Metaphysics is almost inevitably compelled to
begin by rebutting the natural and current prejudice which regards his
science as non-existent and its problems as illusory. The full
vindication of metaphysical inquiry from this charge of futility can
only be furnished by such a systematic examination of the actual
problems of the study as will be attempted, in outline, in the
succeeding chapters of this work. All that can be done in an
Introduction is to present such a general description of the kind of
questions to be subsequently discussed, and their relation to the more
special problems of the various sciences, as may incline the reader to
give an impartial hearing to what is to follow.

§ 2. The course of our ordinary experience, as well as our education in
the rudiments of the sciences, has made us all familiar with the
distinction between what really _is_ or _exists_ and what merely
_appears_ to be. There is no opposition more thoroughly enshrined in the
language and literature of civilised races than the contrast of
_seeming_ with _reality_, of _substance_ with _show_. We come upon it
alike in our study of the processes of nature and our experience of
human character and purpose. Thus we contrast the seeming stability of
the earth with its real motion, the seeming continuity and sameness of a
lump of solid matter with the real discontinuity and variety of its
chemical constituents, the seeming friendliness of the hypocritical
self-seeker with his real indifference to our welfare. In all these
cases the motive which leads us to make the distinction is the same,
namely, the necessity to escape from the admission of a contradiction in
experience. So long as our various direct perceptions are not felt to
conflict with one another, we readily accept them all as equally real
and valid, and no question arises as to their relative truth or
falsehood. Were all our perceptions of this kind, there would be no need
for the correction, by subsequent reflection, of our first immediate
impressions about the nature of ourselves and the world; error would be
a term of no meaning for us, and science would have no existence. But
when two immediate perceptions, both apparently equally authenticated by
our senses, stand in direct conflict with one another,[2] we cannot,
without doing violence to the fundamental law of rational thinking,
regard both as equally and in the same sense true. Unless we abandon
once for all the attempt to reconcile the course of our experience with
the demand of our intellect for consistency in thinking, we are driven
to make a momentous distinction. We have to recognise that things are
not always what they seem to be; what appears to us is, sometimes at any
rate, not real, and what really is does not always appear. Of our two
conflicting perceptions, only one at best can be a correct
representation of the real course of things; one of them at least, and
possibly both, must be mere seeming or appearance, and we are thus cast
upon the problem which every science tries, in its own sphere and its
own way, to solve: what part of our conceptions about the world gives us
reality and what part only appearance?[3] It is because of the
importance of these puzzles of immediate perception as stimulating to
such scientific reflection that Plato and Aristotle called philosophy
the child of Wonder, and it is because the processes of change present
them in a peculiarly striking form that the problem of change has always
been a central one in Metaphysics.

§ 3. The attempt to harmonise by reflection the contradictions which
beset immediate perception in all its forms is one which is not confined
to a single science; the common task of all sciences is to say what, in
some special department and for special purposes, must be taken as
reality and what as mere appearance, and, by degrading the contradictory
to the level of appearance, to satisfy the instinctive demand of our
intellect for coherency and consistency of thought. But the development
of scientific reflection itself in its turn, while it solves some of our
difficulties, is constantly giving rise to fresh perplexities of a
higher order. Our scientific principles themselves frequently seem to
present us with contradictions of a peculiarly distressing kind. Thus we
find ourselves forced in some of our geometrical reasonings to treat a
curve as absolutely continuous, in others to regard it as made up of a
number of points. Or, again, we are alternately compelled to regard the
particles of matter as inert and only capable of being moved by impact
from without, and yet again as endowed with indwelling “central forces.”
Both the opposing views, in such a case, clearly cannot be ultimately
true, and we are therefore compelled either to give up the effort to
think consistently, or to face the question, Is either view ultimately
true, and if so, which? Again, the principles of one branch of study may
appear to contradict those of another. For instance, the absolute
determination of every movement by a series of antecedent movements
which we assume as a principle in our mechanical science, appears, at
least, to conflict with the freedom of human choice and reality of human
purpose which are fundamental facts for the moralist and the historian;
and we have thus once more to ask, which of the two, mechanical
necessity or intelligent freedom, is the reality and which the mere
appearance? Finally, the results of our scientific reflection sometimes
seem to be in violent disagreement with our deepest and most
characteristic aspirations and purposes, and we cannot avoid the
question, which of the two have the better title to credit as witnesses
to the inmost nature of reality?

In all these cases of perplexity there are, short of the refusal to
think about our difficulties at all, only two courses open to us. We may
answer the question at haphazard and as it suits our momentary caprice,
or we may try to answer it on an intelligible principle. If we choose
the second course, then clearly before we formulate our principle we
must undertake a systematic and impartial inquiry as to what we really
mean by the familiar distinction between “seems” and “is,” that is to
say, a scientific inquiry into the general characteristics by which
reality or real being is distinguished from mere appearance, not in some
one special sphere of study, but universally. Now, such an inquiry into
the general character of reality, as opposed to more or less unreal
appearance, is precisely what is meant by Metaphysics. Metaphysics sets
itself, more systematically and universally than any other science, to
ask what, after all, is meant by being _real_, and to what degree our
various scientific and non-scientific theories about the world are in
harmony with the universal characteristics of real existence. Hence
Metaphysics has been called “an attempt to become aware of and to doubt
all preconceptions”; and again, “an unusually resolute effort to think
consistently.” As we cannot, so long as we allow ourselves to think at
all, avoid asking these questions as to what “is” and what only “seems,”
it is clear that the attempt to dispense with metaphysical speculation
altogether would be futile. We have really no choice whether we shall
form metaphysical hypotheses or not, only the choice whether we shall do
so consciously and in accord with some intelligible principle, or
unconsciously and at random.

§ 4. Our preliminary account of the general character of the
metaphysician’s problem will enable us to distinguish Metaphysics from
some other closely related forms of human thought, and to give it at
least a provisional place in the general scheme of knowledge. (_a_)
Clearly, Metaphysics, as an inquiry into the meaning of reality, will
have some affinity with religion as well as with imaginative literature,
both of which aim at getting behind mere appearances and interpreting
the reality which lies beneath them. In one important respect its
relation to both is closer than that of any other department of
knowledge,—inasmuch as it, like them, is directly concerned with
_ultimate_ reality, whereas the special sciences deal each with some one
particular aspect of things, and avowedly leave all ultimate questions
on one side. Where it differs from both is in its spirit and method.
Unlike religion and imaginative literature, Metaphysics deals with the
ultimate problems of existence in a purely scientific spirit; its object
is _intellectual_ satisfaction, and its method is not one of appeal to
immediate intuition or unanalysed feeling, but of the critical and
systematic analysis of our conceptions. Thus it clearly belongs, in
virtue of its spirit and method, to the realm of science. (_b_) Yet it
differs widely in method from the other types of science with which most
of us are more familiar. It differs from the mathematical sciences in
being non-quantitative and non-numerical in its methods. For we cannot
employ the numerical and quantitative methods of Mathematics except on
things and processes which admit of measurement, or, at least, of
enumeration, and it is for Metaphysics itself, in the course of its
investigations, to decide whether what is ultimately real, or any part
of it, is numerical or quantitative, and if so, in what sense. It
differs, again, from the experimental sciences in that, like Logic and
Ethics, it does nothing to increase the stock of our knowledge of
particular facts or events, but merely discusses the way in which facts
or events are to be interpreted if we wish to think consistently. Its
question is not what in detail we must regard as the reality of any
special set of processes, but what are the _general_ conditions to which
all reality, as such, conforms. (Just in the same way, it will be
remembered, Logic does not discuss the worth of the evidence for
particular scientific theories, but the general conditions to which
evidence must conform if it is to prove its conclusion.) Hence Aristotle
correctly called Metaphysics a science of being _quà_ being, ὄντα ᾖ
ὄντα, (as opposed, for instance, to Mathematics, which only studies
existence in so far as it is quantitative or numerical).

Again, as an attempt to discover and get rid of baseless preconceptions
about reality, Metaphysics may, in a sense, be said to be “sceptical.”
But it differs profoundly from vulgar scepticism both in its method and
in its moral purpose. The method of vulgar scepticism is _dogmatic_,—it
takes it for granted without inquiry that two perceptions or two
speculative principles which conflict with one another must be equally
false. Because such contradictions can be detected in all fields of
knowledge and speculation, the sceptic dogmatically assumes that there
is no means of getting behind these contradictory appearances to a
coherent reality. For the metaphysician, on the contrary, the assumption
that the puzzles of experience are insoluble and the contradictions in
our knowledge irreconcilable is itself just one of those preconceptions
which it is the business of his study to investigate and test. Until
after critical examination, he refuses to pronounce which of the
conflicting views is true, or, supposing both false, whether one may not
be nearer the truth than the other. If he does not assume that truth can
be got and reality known by our human faculties, he does at any rate
assume that it is worth our while to make the attempt, and that nothing
but the issue can decide as to its chances of success. Again, the
metaphysician differs from the sceptic in respect of moral purpose. Both
in a sense preach the duty of a “suspense of judgment” in the face of
ultimate problems. The difference is that the sceptic treats “suspense,”
and the accompanying mental indolence, as an end in itself; the
metaphysician regards it as a mere preliminary to his final object, the
attainment of determinate truth.

§ 5. We can now see some of the reasons which make the science of
Metaphysics a peculiarly difficult branch of study. It is difficult, in
the first place, from the very simplicity and generality of its
problems. There is a general conviction that every science, if it is to
be anything more than a body of disputes about mere words, must deal
with some definite subject-matter, and it is not easy to say precisely
_what_ is the subject dealt with by the metaphysician. In a certain
sense this difficulty can only be met by admitting it; it is true, as we
have already seen, that Metaphysics deals in some way with everything;
thus it is quite right to say that you cannot specify any particular
class of objects as its exclusive subject-matter. This must not,
however, be understood to mean that Metaphysics is another name for the
whole body of the sciences. What it does mean is that precisely because
the distinction between the real and the apparent affects every
department of our knowledge and enters into every one of the special
sciences, the general problem as to the meaning of this distinction and
the principle on which it rests cannot be dealt with by any one special
science, but must form the subject of an independent inquiry. The
parallel with Logic may perhaps help to make this point clearer. It is
just because the principles of reasoning and the rules of evidence are,
in the last resort, the same for all the sciences, that they have to be
made themselves the subject of a separate investigation. Logic, like
Metaphysics, deals with everything, not in the sense of being another
name for the whole of our knowledge, but in the sense that it, unlike
the special sciences, attacks a problem which confronts us in every
exercise of our thought. The question of the difference between the two
sciences will be discussed in a later section of this chapter.

There are two other minor sources of difficulty, arising out of the
universality of the metaphysical problem, which ought perhaps to be
mentioned, as they present a serious obstacle to the study of
Metaphysics by minds of a certain stamp. In Metaphysics we have no such
helps to the imagination as the figures and diagrams which are so useful
in many branches of Mathematics; and again, we are, by the nature of the
problem, entirely cut off from the aid of physical experiment. All our
results have to be reached by the unassisted efforts of thought in the
strictest sense of the word, that is, by the rigid and systematic mental
analysis of conceptions. Thus Metaphysics stands alone among the
sciences, or alone with Logic, in the demand it makes on the student’s
capacity for sheer hard continuous thought This may help to explain why
men who are capable of excellent work in the domain of mathematical or
experimental science sometimes prove incompetent in Metaphysics; and
again, why eminent metaphysical ability does not always make its
possessor a sound judge of the results and methods of the other
sciences.

§ 6. It is now time to consider one or two objections which are very
commonly urged against the prosecution of metaphysical studies. It is
often asserted, either that (1) such a science is, in its very nature,
an impossibility; or (2) that, if possible, it is useless and
superfluous, since the other sciences together with the body of our
practical experience give us all the truth we need; or, again, (3) that
at any rate the science is essentially unprogressive, and that all that
can be said about its problems has been said long ago. Now, if any of
these popular objections are really sound, it must clearly be a waste of
time to study Metaphysics, and we are therefore bound to discuss their
force before we proceed any further.

(1) To the objection that a science of Metaphysics is, from the nature
of the case, impossible, it would be in principle correct to reply that,
as the proverb says, “You never can tell till you try,” and that few, if
any, of those who urge this objection most loudly have ever seriously
made the trial. If any one thinks the task not worth his while, he is
not called on to attempt it; but his opinion gives him no special claim
to sit in judgment on those who think differently of the matter. Still,
the anti-metaphysical prejudice is so common, and appears in so many
different forms, that it is necessary to exhibit its groundlessness
rather more in detail.

(_a_) It is sometimes maintained that Metaphysics is an impossibility
because the metaphysician’s problems, in their own nature, admit of no
solution. To a meaningless question, of course, there can be no
intelligible answer, and it is occasionally asserted, and often
insinuated, that the questions of Metaphysics are of this kind. But to
call the metaphysician’s question a senseless one is as much as to say
that there is no meaning in the distinction, which we are all constantly
making, between the real and the apparent. If there is any meaning at
all in the distinction, it is clearly a necessary as well as a proper
question precisely by what marks the one may be distinguished from the
other. Our right to raise this question can in fairness only be
challenged by an opponent who is prepared to maintain that the
contradictions which lead us to make the distinction may themselves be
the ultimate truth about things. Now, whether this view is defensible or
not, it is clearly not one which we have the right to assume without
examination as self-evident; it is itself a metaphysical theory of first
principles, and would have to be defended, if at all, by an elaborate
metaphysical analysis of the meaning of the concepts “truth” and
“reality.” Again, the objection, if valid, would tell as much against
experimental and mathematical science as against Metaphysics. If the
self-contradictory can be true, there is no rational ground for
preferring a coherent scientific theory of the world to the wildest
dreams of superstition or insanity. Thus we have no escape from the
following dilemma. Either there is no rational foundation at all for the
distinction between reality and appearance, and then all science is an
illusion, or there is a rational foundation for it, and then we are
logically bound to inquire into the principle of the distinction, and
thus to face the problems of Metaphysics.[4]

(_b_) What is essentially the same objection is sometimes put in the
following form. Metaphysics, it is said, can have no place in the scheme
of human knowledge, because all intelligible questions which we can ask
about reality must fall within the province of one or other of the
“sciences.” There are no facts with which some one or other of the
sciences does not deal, and there is therefore no room for a series of
“metaphysical” inquiries over and above those inquiries which constitute
the various sciences. Where there are facts to investigate and
intelligible questions to be put, we are, it is contended, in the domain
of “science”; where there are none, there can be no knowledge. Plausible
as this argument can be made to appear, it is easy to see that it is
fallacious. From the point of view of pure Logic it manifestly contains
a flagrant fallacy of _petitio principii_. For it simply assumes that
there is no “science,” in the most universal acceptation of the
term—_i.e._ no body of reasoned truth—besides those experimental
sciences which have for their object the accumulation and
systematisation of facts, and this is the very point at issue between
the metaphysician and his critics. What the metaphysician asserts is not
that there are facts with which the various special branches of
experimental science cannot deal, but that there are questions which can
be and ought to be raised about the facts with which they do deal other
than those which experimental inquiry can solve. Leaving it entirely to
the special sciences to tell us what in particular are the true facts
about any given part of the world’s course, he contends that we still
have to ask the more general question, what we mean by “real” and
“fact,” and how in general the “real” is to be distinguished from the
unreal. To denounce the raising of this question as an attempt to
exclude certain events and processes from the “province of science,” is
simply to misrepresent the issue at stake. Incidentally it may be added,
the objection reveals a serious misunderstanding of the true principle
of distinction between different sciences. The various sciences differ
primarily, not as dealing with different _parts_ of the world of
reality, but as dealing with the whole of it so far as it can be brought
under different _aspects_. They are different, not because they deal
with different sets of facts, but because they look at the facts from
different points of view. Thus it would be quite wrong to suppose that
the difference between, _e.g._, Physics, Physiology, and Psychology, is
primarily that each studies a different group of facts. The facts
studied may in great part be the same; it is the point of view from
which they are regarded by which each of the three sciences is
distinguished from the others. Thus every voluntary movement may be
looked at either as a link in a series of displacements of
mass-particles (Physics), as a combination of muscular contractions
initiated from a centre in the cortex of the brain (Physiology), or as a
step to the satisfaction of a felt want (Psychology). So Metaphysics
does not profess to deal with a certain group of facts lying outside the
province of the “sciences,” but to deal with the same facts which form
that province from a point of view which is not that of the experimental
sciences. Its claim to do so can only be overthrown by proving what the
criticism we are considering assumes, that there is no intelligible way
of looking at the facts besides that of experimental science.

(_c_) More commonly still the intrinsic intelligibility of the
metaphysician’s problem is admitted, but our power to solve it denied.
There may be, it is said, realities which are more than mere appearance,
but at any rate with our human faculties we can know nothing of them.
All our knowledge is strictly limited to appearances, or, as they are
often called, _phenomena_.[5] What lies behind them is completely
inaccessible to us, and it is loss of time to speculate about its
nature. We must therefore content ourselves with the discovery of
general laws or uniformities of the interconnection of phenomena, and
dismiss the problem of their real ground as insoluble. This doctrine,
technically known as Phenomenalism, enjoys at the present time a
widespread popularity, which is historically very largely due to an
imperfect assimilation of the negative element in the philosophy of
Kant. Its merits as a philosophical theory we may leave for later
consideration; at present we are only concerned with it as the alleged
ground of objection against the possibility of a science of Metaphysics.
As such it has really no cogency whatever. Not only do the supporters of
the doctrine constantly contradict their own cardinal assumption (as,
for instance, when they combine with the assertion that we can know
nothing about ultimate reality, such assertions as that it is a certain
and ultimate truth that all “phenomena” are connected by general laws,
or that “the course of nature is, without exception, uniform”), but the
assumption itself is self-contradictory. The very statement that “we
know only phenomena” has no meaning unless we know at least enough about
ultimate realities to be sure that they are unknowable. The
phenomenalist is committed to the recognition of at least one
proposition as an absolute and ultimate truth, namely, the proposition,
“I know that whatever I know is mere appearance.” And this proposition
itself, whatever we may think of its value as a contribution to
Philosophy, is a positive theory as to first principles the truth or
falsity of which is a proper subject for metaphysical investigation.
Thus the arguments by which it has been sought to demonstrate the
impossibility of Metaphysics themselves afford unimpeachable evidence of
the necessity for the scientific examination of the metaphysical
problem.[6]

§ 7. With the other two anti-metaphysical contentions referred to at the
beginning of the last section we may deal much more briefly. (2) To the
objector who maintains that Metaphysics, if possible, still is useless,
because the sciences and the practical experience of life between them
already supply us with a coherent theory of the world, devoid of
contradictions, we may reply: (_a_) The fact is doubtful. For, whatever
may be said by the popularisers of science when they are engaged in
composing metaphysical theories for the multitude, the best
representatives of every special branch of mathematical and experimental
science seem absolutely agreed that ultimate questions as to first
principles are outside the scope of their sciences. The scope of every
science, they are careful to remind us, is defined by certain initial
assumptions, and what does not fall under those assumptions must be
treated by the science in question as non-existent. Thus Mathematics is
in principle restricted to dealing with the problems of number and
quantity; whether there are realities which are in their own nature
non-numerical and non-quantitative[7] or not, the mathematician, as
mathematician, is not called upon to pronounce; if there are such
realities, his science is by its initial assumptions debarred from
knowing anything of them. So again with Physics; even if reduced to pure
Kinematics, it deals only with displacements involving the dimensions of
length and time, and has no means of ascertaining whether or not these
dimensions are exhibited by all realities. The notion that the various
sciences of themselves supply us with a body of information about
ultimate reality is thus, for good reasons, rejected by their soundest
exponents, who indeed are usually so impressed with the opposite
conviction as to be prejudiced in favour of the belief that the
ultimately real is unknowable. (_b_) Again, as we have already seen, the
results of physical science, and the beliefs and aspirations which arise
in the course of practical experience and take shape in the teachings of
poetry and religion, often appear to be in sharp antagonism. “Science”
frequently seems to point in one direction, our deepest ethical and
religious experience in another. We cannot avoid asking whether the
contradiction is only apparent or, supposing it real, what degree of
authority belongs to each of the conflicting influences. And, apart from
a serious study of Metaphysics, this question cannot be answered. (_c_)
Even on the most favourable supposition, that there is no such
contradiction, but that science and practical experience together afford
a single ultimately coherent theory of the world, it is only after we
have ascertained the general characteristics of ultimate reality, and
satisfied ourselves by careful analysis that reality, as conceived in
our sciences, possesses those characteristics, that we have the right to
pronounce our theory finally true. If Metaphysics should tum out in the
end to present no fresh view as to the nature of the real, but only to
confirm an old one, we should still, as metaphysicians, have the
advantage of knowing where we were previously only entitled to
conjecture.

(3) The charge of unprogressiveness often brought against our science is
easily disproved by careful study of the History of Philosophy. The
problems of the metaphysician are no doubt, in a sense, always the same;
but this is equally true of the problems of any other science. The
methods by which the problems are attacked and the adequacy of the
solutions they receive vary, from age to age, in close correspondence
with the general development of science. Every great metaphysical
conception has exercised its influence on the general history of
science, and, in return, every important movement in science has
affected the development of Metaphysics. Thus the revived interest in
mechanical science, and the great progress made in that branch of
knowledge which is so characteristic of the seventeenth century, more
than anything else determined the philosophical method and results of
Descartes; the Metaphysics of Leibnitz were profoundly affected by such
scientific influences as the invention of the calculus, the recognition
of the importance of _vis viva_ in dynamics, the contemporary
discoveries of Leuwenhoeck in embryology; while, to come to our own
time, the metaphysical speculation of the last half-century has
constantly been revolving round the two great scientific ideas of the
conservation of energy and the origin of species by gradual
differentiation. The metaphysician could not if he would, and would not
if he could, escape the duty of estimating the bearing of the great
scientific theories of his time upon our ultimate conceptions of the
nature of the world as a whole. Every fundamental advance in science
thus calls for a restatement and reconsideration of the old metaphysical
problems in the light of the new discovery.[8]

§ 8. This introductory chapter is perhaps the proper place for a word on
the relation of Metaphysics to the widely diffused mental tendency known
as Mysticism.[9] Inasmuch as the fundamental aim of the mystic is to
penetrate behind the veil of appearance to some ultimate and abiding
reality, there is manifestly a close community of purpose between him
and the metaphysician. But their diversity of method is no less marked
than their partial community of purpose. Once in touch with his reality,
wherever he may find it, the mere mystic has no longer any interest in
the world of appearance. Appearance as such is for him merely the untrue
and ultimately non-existent, and the peculiar emotion which he derives
from his contemplation of the real depends for its special quality on an
ever-present sense of the contrast between the abiding being of the
reality and the non-entity of the appearances. Thus the merely mystical
attitude towards appearance is purely negative. The metaphysician, on
the contrary, has only half completed his task when he has, by whatever
method, ascertained the general character of the real as opposed to the
merely apparent. It still remains for him to re-examine the realm of
appearance itself in the light of his theory of reality, to ascertain
the relative truth which partial and imperfect conceptions of the
world’s nature contain, and to arrange the various appearances in the
order of their varying approximation to truth. He must show not only
what are the marks of reality, and why certain things which are
popularly accepted as real must, for Philosophy be degraded to the rank
of appearance, but also how far each appearance succeeds in revealing
the character of the reality which is its ground. Equally marked is the
difference between the mystic’s and the metaphysician’s attitude towards
ultimate reality itself. The mystic’s object is primarily emotional
rather than intellectual. What he wants is a feeling of satisfaction
which he can only get from immediate contact with something taken to be
finally and abidingly real. Hence, when he comes to put his emotions
into words, he is always prone to use the language of vague imaginative
symbolism, the only language suitable to suggest feelings which, because
immediate and unanalysed, cannot be the subject of logical description
in general terms. For the metaphysician, whose object is the attainment
of intellectual consistency, such a method of symbolism is radically
unsuitable.

A symbol is always a source of danger to the intellect. If you employ it
for what you already understand, and might, if you chose, describe in
scientific language, it is a mere substitution of the obscure for the
clear. If you use it, as the mystic commonly does, for what you do not
understand, its apparent precision, by blinding you to the vagueness of
its interpretation, is positively mischievous. Hence, though some of the
greatest metaphysicians, such as Plotinus and Spinoza, and to a certain
extent Hegel, have been personally mystics, their philosophical method
has invariably been scientific and rationalistic. At the same time, it
is probably true that, apart from the mystic’s need for the satisfaction
of emotion by the contemplation of the eternal and abiding, the
intellect would be prone to exercise itself in less arid and more
attractive fields than those of abstract Metaphysics. The philosopher
seeks, in the end, the same goal as the mystic; his peculiarity is that
he is so constituted as to reach his goal only by the route of
intellectual speculation.

§ 9. We have compared Metaphysics more than once with Logic in respect
of the universality of its scope and the analytical character of its
methods. It remains briefly to indicate the difference between the two
sciences. There is, indeed, a theory, famous in the history of
Philosophy, and not even yet quite obsolete, according to which no
distinction can be drawn. Hegel held that the successive steps by which
the human mind gradually passes from less adequate to more adequate, and
ultimately to a fully adequate, conception of the nature of reality
necessarily correspond, step for step, with the stages of a process by
which the reality itself is manifested with ever-increasing adequacy in
an ascending order of phenomena. Hence in his system the discussion of
the general characteristics of reality and the general forms of
inference constitutes a single department of Philosophy under the name
of _Logic_. Our motive in dissenting from this view cannot be made fully
intelligible at the present stage of our inquiry, but we may at least
follow Lotze in giving a preliminary reason for the separation of the
two sciences. Logic is clearly in a sense a more general inquiry than
Metaphysics. For in Logic we are concerned with the universal conditions
under which thinking, or, to speak more accurately, inference, is
possible. Now these conditions may be fulfilled by a combination of
propositions which are materially false. The same relations which give
rise to an inference materially true from true premisses may yield a
false inference where the premisses are materially false. Valid
reasoning thus does not always lead to true conclusions. Hence we may
say that, whereas Metaphysics deals exclusively with the characteristics
of reality, Logic deals with the characteristics of the validly
inferrible, whether real or unreal. The distinction thus established,
however, though real as far as it goes, is not necessarily absolute. For
it may very well be that in the end the conditions upon which the
possibility of inference depends are identical with or consequent upon
the structure of reality. Even the fact that, under certain conditions,
we can imagine an unreal state of things and then proceed to reason
validly as to the results which would follow if this imaginary state
were actual, may itself be a consequence of the actual nature of things.
And, as a matter of fact, logicians have always found it impossible to
inquire very deeply into the foundations and first principles of their
own science without being led to face fundamental issues of Metaphysics.
The distinction between the two studies must thus, according to the
well-known simile of Bacon, be compared rather with a vein in a
continuous block of marble than with an actual line of cleavage. Still
it is at least so far effectual, that while many metaphysical questions
have no direct bearing on Logic, the details of the theory of evidence
are likewise best studied as an independent branch of knowledge.

§ 10. In recent years considerable prominence has been attained by a
branch of study known as _Epistemology_, or the _Theory of Knowledge_.
The _Theory of Knowledge_, like Logic, is primarily concerned with the
question of the conditions upon which the validity of our thinking, as a
body of knowledge about reality, depends. It differs from ordinary Logic
in not inquiring into the details of the various processes of proof, but
confining its attention to the most general and ultimate conditions
under which valid thinking is possible, and discussing these general
principles more thoroughly and systematically than common Logic usually
does. Since the conditions under which truth is obtainable depend, in
the last resort, on the character of that reality which knowledge
apprehends, it is clear that the problems of the _Theory of Knowledge_,
so far as they do not come under the scope of ordinary Logic (the theory
of the estimation of evidence), are metaphysical in their nature. As
actually treated by the writers who give this name to their discussions,
the study appears to consist of a mixture of Metaphysics and Logic, the
metaphysical element predominating. There is perhaps no serious harm in
our giving, if we choose, the name _Epistemology_ or _Theory of
Knowledge_ to our discussions of ultimate principles, but the older
title Metaphysics seems on the whole preferable for two reasons. The
discussion of the implications of knowledge is only one part of the
metaphysician’s task. The truly real is not only the knowable, it is
also that which, if we can obtain it, realises our aspirations and
satisfies our emotions. Hence the theory of the real must deal with the
ultimate implications of practical conduct and æsthetic feeling as well
as those of knowledge. The Good and the Beautiful, no less than the
True, are the objects of our study.

Again, if the name _Theory of Knowledge_ is understood, as it sometimes
has been, to suggest that it is possible to study the nature and
capabilities of the knowing faculty apart from the study of the contents
of knowledge, it becomes a source of positive and dangerous mistake. The
capabilities and limitations of the knowing faculty can only be
ascertained by inquiring into the truth of its knowledge, regarded as an
apprehension of reality; there is no possible way of severing the
faculty, as it were, by abstraction from the results of its exercise,
and examining its structure, as we might that of a mechanical appliance,
before investigating the value of its achievements. The instrument can
only be studied in its work, and we have to judge of its possibilities
by the nature of its products. It is therefore advisable to indicate, by
our choice of a name for our subject, that the theory of Knowing is
necessarily also a theory of Being.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_,
Introduction; L. T. Hobhouse, _The Theory of Knowledge_, Introduction;
H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, Introduction (Eng. trans., vol. i. pp. 1-30)

-----

Footnote 1:

The name simply means “what comes after Physics,” and probably owes
its origin to the fact that early editors of Aristotle placed his
writings on ultimate philosophical questions immediately after his
physical treatises.

Footnote 2:

For an example of these puzzles, compare the passage (_Republic_, 524)
where Plato refers to cases in which an apparent contradiction in our
sensations is corrected by _counting_.

Footnote 3:

Of course we must not assume that “_every_ appearance is _only_
appearance,” or that “nothing is both reality and appearance.” This is
just the uncritical kind of preconception which it is the business of
Metaphysics to test. Whether “every appearance is only appearance” is
a point we shall have to discuss later.

Footnote 4:

Cf. F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 1-4.

Footnote 5:

I may be pardoned for reminding the reader who may be new to our
subject, that “facts” and “processes” are only properly called
_phenomena_ when it is intended to imply that as they stand they are
_not_ genuine realities but only the partially misleading appearance
of reality which is non-phenomenal or ultra-phenomenal. (We shall do
well to avoid the pretentious error of calling the ultra-phenomenal,
_as such_, “_noumenal_.”)

Footnote 6:

_Appearance and Reality_, chap. 12, p. 129 (ed. 1).

Footnote 7:

As, for instance, all mental states are, according to certain
psychologists, non-quantitative.

Footnote 8:

The student will find Höffding’s _History of Modern Philosophy_
(English translation in 2 vols., Macmillan) particularly valuable for
the way in which the author brings out the intimate historical
connection between the development of Metaphysics and the general
progress of science.

Footnote 9:

For further discussion the reader may be referred to Royce, _The World
and the Individual_, First Series, Lects. 2 and 4. See also _infra_,
Bk. IV. chap. 6, § 2.

-----

CHAPTER II

THE METAPHYSICAL CRITERION AND THE
METAPHYSICAL METHOD

§ 1. In the principle that “Reality is not self-contradictory” we have a
universal and certain criterion of reality which is not merely
negative, but implies the positive assertion that reality is a
consistent system. § 2. The validity of this criterion is not
affected by the suggestion that it may be merely a _Logical_ Law. §
3. Nor by the raising of doubt whether all our knowledge is not
merely “relative,” a doubt which is itself meaningless. § 4. As to
the material of the system, it is experience or immediate psychical
fact. § 5. It must be actual experience, not mere “possibilities” of
experience; but actual experience must not be identified with
“sensation.” § 6. Nor must we assume that experience consists of
subjects _and_ their states; nor, again, that it is a mere
succession of “states of consciousness.” § 7. The _differentia_ of
matter of experience is its _immediacy_, _i.e_, its combination in a
single whole of the two aspects of _existence_ and _content_. § 8.
This union of existence and content is broken up in reflective
knowledge or thought, but may be restored at a higher level. § 9.
Experience further always appears to be implicitly complex in
respect of its content. §10. An adequate apprehension of reality
would only be possible in the form of a complete or “pure”
experience, at once all-inclusive, systematic, and direct. The
problem of Metaphysics is to ascertain what would be the general or
formal character of such an experience, and how far the various
provinces of our human experience and knowledge approximate to it.
The knowledge Metaphysics can give us of the ultimate nature of
reality as it would be present in a complete experience, though
imperfect, is final as far as it goes. §11. As to the method of
Metaphysics, it must be _analytical_, _critical_, _non-empirical_,
and _non-inductive_. It may also be called _a priori_ if we
carefully avoid confusing the _a priori_ with the psychologically
primitive. Why our method cannot be the Hegelian Dialectic.

§ 1. If we are, in the end, to attach any definite intelligible meaning
to the distinction between things as they really are and things as they
merely appear to be, we must clearly have some universal criterion or
test by which the distinction may be made. This criterion must be, in
the first place, infallible; that is, must be such that we cannot doubt
its validity without falling into a contradiction in our thought; and,
in the next, it must be a characteristic belonging to all reality, as
such, and to nothing else. Thus our criterion must, in the technical
language of Logic, be the predicate of an exclusive proposition of which
reality is the subject; we must be able to say, “Only the real possesses
the quality or mark _X_.” The argument of our last chapter should
already have suggested that we have such a criterion in the principle
that “what is real is not self-contradictory, and what is
self-contradictory is not real.” Freedom from contradiction is a
characteristic which belongs to everything that is real and ultimately
to nothing else, and we may therefore use it as our test or criterion of
reality. For, as we have seen in the last chapter, it is precisely our
inability, without doing violence to the fundamental structure of our
intellect, to accept the self-contradictory as real which first leads to
the drawing of a distinction between the real and the merely apparent;
on the other hand, where we find no contradiction in thought or
experience, we have no valid ground for doubting that the contents of
our experience and thinking are truly real. In every application, even
the most simple and rudimentary, of the distinction between what really
is and what only seems, we are proceeding upon the assumption that, if
things as we find them are self-contradictory, we are not yet in
possession of the truth about them; while, on the other hand, we may
legitimately treat the results of our thinking and experience as fully
true until they are shown to involve contradiction. Thus, in setting up
the proposition “What is real is never self-contradictory” as a
universal criterion, we are only putting into explicit form, and
proposing to apply universally, a principle involved in all rational
reflection on the course of things. Audacious as the attempt to make
such a general statement about the whole universe of being appears, it
is an audacity to which we are fully committed from the first moment of
our refusing to accept both sides of a contradiction as true.

The principle that “Reality is not self-contradictory” at first sight
might appear to be merely negative; we might object that it only tells
us what reality is _not_, and still leaves us quite in the dark as to
what it _is_. This would, however, be a serious misconception. As we
learn from modern scientific Logic, no true and significant negative
judgment is merely negative; all significant negation is really
exclusion resting upon a positive basis. I can never, that is, truly
declare that _A is not B_, except on the strength of some piece of
positive knowledge which is inconsistent with, or excludes, the
possibility of A being B.[10] My own ignorance or failure to find
sufficient ground for the assertion _A is B_ is never of itself logical
warrant for the judgment _A is not B_; that _A is not B_ I can never
truly assert, except on the ground of some other truth which would be
contradicted if A were affirmed to be B. Hence to say “Reality is not
self-contradictory” is as much as to say that we have true and certain
knowledge that reality is positively self-consistent or coherent; that
is to say that, whatever else it may be, it is at least a systematic
whole of some kind or other. How much further our knowledge about
reality goes, what kind of a whole we can certainly know it to be, it
will be the business of succeeding portions of this work to discuss; but
even at the present stage of the inquiry we can confidently say that
unless the distinction between the real and the apparent is purely
meaningless, it is positively certain that Reality,[11] or the universe,
is a self-consistent systematic whole.

§ 2. Our declaration that the principle of the self-consistency of the
real affords a certain and infallible criterion of reality, may probably
provoke a sceptical doubt which is of such importance that we must give
it full consideration before making any further advance. I state the
difficulty in what appears to me its most reasonable and telling form.
“Your alleged criterion,” it will be said, “is simply the logical Law of
Contradiction expressed in a novel and misleading way. Now, the Law of
Contradiction, like all purely logical laws, is concerned not with real
things, but exclusively with the concepts by which we think of them.
When the logician lays it down as a fundamental truth of his science
that _A cannot be both B and not B_, his A and B stand not for things
“in the real world to which our thoughts have reference,” but for
concepts which we frame about the things. His law is thus purely what he
calls it, a Law of Thought; he says, and says truly, “you cannot, at the
same time, and in the same sense, _think_ both that A is B, and that it
is not B”; as to whether such a state of things, though unthinkable to
us, may be real “as a fact,” he makes no assertion. You take this law of
our thinking, silently assume that it is also a law of the things about
which we think, and go on to set it up as an infallible criterion of
their reality. Your procedure is thus illegitimate, and your pretended
criterion a thing of nought.”[12]

Our reply to this common sceptical objection will incidentally throw an
interesting light on what was said in the last chapter of the close
connection between the problems of Logic and those of Metaphysics. In
the first place, we may at least meet the sceptic with an effective _tu
quoque_. It is you yourself, we may say, who are most open to the charge
of illegitimate assumption. Your whole contention rests upon the
assumption, for which you offer no justification, that because the Law
of Contradiction is admittedly a law of thought, it is therefore _only_
a law of thought; if you wish us to accept such a momentous conclusion,
you ought at least to offer us something in the nature of a reason for
it. Nor shall we stop here; we shall go on to argue that the sceptic’s
interpretation of the Law of Contradiction rests on a positive
confusion. By a Law of Thought may be meant either (_a_) a
_psychological_ law, a true general statement as to the way in which we
actually do think, or (_b_) a _logical_ law, a true general statement as
to the conditions under which our thinking is valid; the plausibility of
the sceptical argument arises from an unconscious confusion between
these two very different senses of the term. Now, in the first place, it
seems doubtful whether the principle of contradiction is even true, if
it is put forward as a psychological law. It would be, at least, very
hard to say whether a human being is capable or not of holding at once
and with equal conviction the truth of two contradictory propositions.
Certainly it is not uncommon to meet persons who do fervently profess
equal belief in propositions which _we_ can see to be inconsistent; on
the other hand, they are usually themselves unaware of the
inconsistency. Whether, in all cases, they would, if made aware of the
inconsistency, revise their belief, is a question which it is easier to
ask than to answer. But it is at any rate certain that the logician does
not intend his Law of Contradiction to be taken as a psychological
proposition as to what I can or cannot succeed in believing. He means it
to be understood in a purely logical sense, as a statement about the
conditions under which any thought is valid. What he says is not that I
cannot at once think that A is B and that it is not B, but that, if I
think so, my thinking cannot be _true_. Now, to think truly about things
is to think in accord with their real nature, to think of them as they
really are, not as they merely appear to an imperfect apprehension to
be; hence to say that non-contradiction is a fundamental condition of
true thinking is as much as to say that it is a fundamental
characteristic of real existence. Just because the Law of Contradiction
is a logical law, it cannot be _only_ a logical law, but must be a
metaphysical law as well. If the sceptic is to retain his sceptical
position, he must include Logic along with Metaphysics in the compass of
his doubts, as the thorough-going sceptics of antiquity had the courage
to do.

§ 3. But now suppose the sceptic takes this line. All our truth, he may
say, is only relatively truth, and even the fundamental conditions of
true thought are only valid _relatively_ and for us. What right have you
to assume their _absolute_ validity, and to argue from it to the real
constitution of things? Now, what does such a doubt mean, and is it
rational? The answer to this question follows easily from what we have
already learnt about the logical character of denial. Doubt, which is
tentative denial, like negation, which is completed denial, logically
presupposes positive knowledge of some kind or other. It is never
rational to doubt the truth of a specific proposition except on the
strength of your possession of positive truth with which the suggested
judgment appears to be in conflict. This is, of course, obvious in cases
where we hesitate to accept a statement as true on the ground that we do
not see how to reconcile it with another specific statement already
known, or believed, to be true. It is less obvious, but equally clear on
reflection, in the cases where we suspend our judgment on the plea of
insufficient evidence. Apart from positive knowledge, however defective,
as to the kind and amount of evidence which _would_, if forthcoming, be
sufficient to prove the proposition, expressions of doubt and of belief
are equally impertinent; unless I know, to some extent at least, what
evidence is wanted, how indeed am I to judge whether the evidence
produced is sufficient or not?[13] Thus we see that the paradox of Mr.
Bradley, that rational doubt itself logically implies infallibility in
respect of some part of our knowledge, is no more than the simple truth.
We see also that the doubt whether the ultimate presuppositions of valid
thinking may not be merely “relatively” valid, has no meaning. If the
sceptic’s doubt whether Reality is ultimately the self-consistent system
that it must be if any of our thinking can be true is to lay any claim
to rationality, it must take the form of the assertion, “I positively
know something about the nature of Reality which makes it reasonable to
think that Reality is incoherent,” or “Self-consistency is inconsistent
with what I positively know of the nature of Reality.” Thus the sceptic
is forced, not merely to lay claim to absolute and certain knowledge,
but to use the test of consistency itself for the purpose of disproving
or questioning its own validity. Our criterion of Reality, then, has
been proved infallible by the surest of methods; we have shown that its
truth has to be assumed in the very process of calling it in question.

§ 4. Reality, then, in spite of the sceptic’s objections, is truly known
to be a connected and self-consistent, or internally coherent, system;
can we with equal confidence say anything of the data of which the
system is composed? Reflection should convince us that we can at least
say as much as this: all the materials or data of reality consist of
_experience_, experience being provisionally taken to mean psychical
matter of fact, what is given in immediate feeling. In other words,
whatever forms part of presentation, will, or emotion, must in some
sense and to some degree possess reality and be a part of the material
of which reality, as a systematic whole, is composed; whatever does not
include, as part of its nature, this indissoluble relation to immediate
feeling, and therefore does not enter into the presentation, will, and
emotion of which psychical life is composed, is not real. The real is
experience, and nothing but experience, and experience consists of
“psychical matter of fact.”[14]

Proof of this proposition can only be given in the same way as of any
other ultimate truth, by making trial of it; if you doubt it you may be
challenged to perform the experiment of thinking of anything whatever,
no matter what, as real, and then explaining what you mean by its
reality. Thus suppose you say “I can think of A as real,” A being any
thing in the universe; now think, as you always can, of an imaginary or
unreal A, and then try to state the difference between the A which is
thought of as real and the A which is thought of as merely imaginary. As
Kant proved, in the famous case of the real and the imagined hundred
dollars, the difference does not lie in any of the qualities or
properties of the two A’s; the qualities of the imagined hundred dollars
are precisely the same as those of the real sum, only that they are
“imaginary.” Like the real dollars, the imagined dollars are thought of
as possessing such and such a size, shape, and weight; stamped with such
and such an effigy and inscription; containing such and such a
proportion of silver to alloy; having such and such a purchasing power
in the present condition of the market, and so forth. The only
difference is that the real dollars are, or under specified and known
conditions may be, the objects of direct perception, while the imaginary
ones, because imaginary, cannot be given in direct perception. You
cannot see or handle them; you can only imagine yourself doing so. It is
in this connection with immediate psychical fact that the reality of the
real coins lies. So with any other instance of the same experiment. Show
me, we might say, anything which you regard as real,—no matter what it
is, a stone wall, an æsthetic effect, a moral virtue,—and I will ask you
to think of an unreal and imaginary counterpart of that same thing, and
will undertake to prove to you that what makes the difference between
the reality and the imagination is always that the real thing is
indissolubly connected with the psychical life of a sentient subject,
and, as so connected, is psychical matter of fact.

§ 5. Two points should be carefully noted if we wish to avoid serious
misapprehension. It might be objected, by a disciple of Kant or of Mill,
that a thing may be real without ever being given as actual psychical
fact in immediate apprehension, so long as its nature is such that it
_would_ be psychical fact under known and specified conditions. Many, if
not most, of the objects of scientific knowledge, it may be said, are of
this kind; they have never entered, possibly never will enter, into the
contents of any man’s direct apprehension, yet we rightly call them
real, in the sense that they would be apprehended under certain known
conditions. Thus I have never seen, and do not expect that any one ever
will see, the centre of the earth, or, to take a still stronger case, no
one has ever seen his own brain. Yet I call the centre of the earth or
my own brain real, in the sense that _if_ I could, without ceasing to
live, penetrate to a certain depth below the soil, I _should_ find the
centre of the earth; _if_ an opening were made in my skull, and a
suitable arrangement of mirrors devised, I _should_ see the reflection
of my own brain. A comet may be rushing through unpeopled space entirely
unbeheld; yet it does not cease for all that to be real, for _if_ I were
there I _should_ see it, and so forth. Hence the Kantian will tell us
that reality is constituted by relation to _possible_ experience; the
follower of Mill, that it means “a permanent _possibility_ of
sensation.”

Now, there is, of course, an element of truth in these arguments. It is
true that what immediately enters into the course of my own direct
perception is but a fragment of the full reality of the universe. It is
true, again, that there is much which in its own nature is capable of
being perceived by human beings, but will, as far as we can judge, never
be perceived, owing to the physical impossibility of placing ourselves
under the conditions requisite for perception; there are other things
which could only be perceived if some modification could be effected in
the structure of our perceptive organs. And it may therefore be quite
sufficient for the purposes of some sciences to define these unperceived
realities as “possibilities of sensation,” processes which we do not
perceive but might perceive under known or knowable conditions. But the
definition, it will be seen, is a purely negative one; it takes note of
the fact that we do not actually perceive certain things, without
telling us anything positive as to their nature. In Metaphysics, where
we are concerned to discover the very meaning of reality, we cannot
avoid asking whether such a purely negative account of the reality of
the greater part of the universe is finally satisfactory. And we can
easily see that it is not. For what do we mean when we talk of the
“possible”? Not simply “that which is not actual,” for this includes the
merely imaginary and the demonstrably impossible. The events of next
week, the constitution of Utopia, and the squaring of the circle are all
alike in not being actual. Shall we say, then, that the possible differs
from the imaginary in being what would, under known conditions, be
actual? But again, we may make correct inferences as to what would be
actual under conditions suspected, or even known, to be merely
imaginary, and no one will maintain that such consequences are
realities. If I were at the South Pole I should see the Polar ice, and
it is therefore real, you say, though no one actually sees it; but if
wishes were horses, beggars would ride, yet you do not say that the
riding of beggars is real. Considerations of this kind lead us to modify
our first definition of the “possible” which is to be also real. We are
driven to say that, in the case of the unperceived real thing, all the
conditions of perception except the presence of a percipient with
suitable perceptive organs, _really exist_. Thus the ice at the South
Pole really exists, because the only unfulfilled condition for its
perception is the presence at the Pole of a being with sense-organs of a
certain type. But once more, what do we mean by the distinction between
conditions of perception which are imaginary and conditions which really
exist? We come back once more to our original experiment, and once more,
try as we will, we shall find that by the real condition as
distinguished from the imaginary we can mean nothing but a state of
things which is, in the last resort, guaranteed by the evidence of
immediate apprehension. If we take the term “actual” to denote that
which is thus indissoluble from immediate apprehension, or is psychical
matter of fact, we may sum up our result by saying we have found that
the real is also actual, or that there is no reality which is not at the
same time an actuality. We shall thus be standing on the same ground as
the modern logicians who tell us that there is no possibility outside
actual existence, and that statements about the possible, when they have
any meaning at all, are always an indirect way of imparting information
about actualities.[15] Thus “There really exists ice at the South Pole,
though no human eye beholds it,” if it is to mean anything, must mean
_either_ that the ice itself, as we should perceive it if we were there,
or that certain unknown conditions which, combined with the presence of
a human spectator, would yield the perception of the ice, actually exist
as part of the contents of an experience which is not our own.[16]

The second point to which we must be careful to attend may be dismissed
more briefly. In defining experience as “immediate feeling” or “the
content of immediate feeling” or “apprehension,”[17] we must not be
understood to mean that it is in particular _sensation_. Sensation is
only one feature of immediate feeling or apprehension, a feature which
we only distinguish from others by means of a laborious psychological
analysis. A pleasure or pain, an emotion of any kind, the satisfaction
of a craving while actually present, are felt or apprehended no less
immediately than a sense-perception. I am aware of the difference
between actually feeling pleasure or pain, actually being moved by love
or anger, actually getting the satisfaction of a want, and merely
thinking of these processes, in precisely the same way in which I am
aware of the difference between actually seeing a blue expanse and
merely thinking of seeing it. A real emotion or wish differs from an
imagined one precisely as a real sensation differs from an imaginary
sensation. How exactly the difference is to be described is a question,
and unfortunately at present an unduly neglected question, for
Psychology; for our present purpose we must be content to indicate it as
one which can be experienced at will by any reader who will take the
trouble to compare an actual state of mind with the mere thought of the
same state. Of the epistemological or metaphysical interpretation of the
distinction more will be said in the course of the next few paragraphs.
As an instance of its applicability to other aspects of mind than the
purely sensational, we may take Kant’s own example of the hundred
dollars. The real hundred dollars may be distinguished from the
imaginary, if we please, by the fact that they can be actually touched
and seen; but we might equally make the distinction turn on the fact
that the real coins will enable us to satisfy our desires, while the
imaginary will not.[18]

§ 6. In the present state of philosophical opinion, the proposition that
“whatever is real consists of experience,” or again, “of psychical
matter of fact,” is in danger not so much of being rejected, as of being
accepted in a fundamentally false sense. If we are to avoid the danger
of such misunderstanding, we must be careful to insist that our
principle does not assert that _mere_ actuality is a complete and
sufficient account of the nature of reality. When we say that there is
nothing real outside the world of psychical fact, we are not saying that
reality is _merely_ psychical fact as such. What we do say is that,
however much more it may be, it is at least that. How much more we can
say of reality, beyond the bare statement that it is made up of
experiences or psychical matters of fact, it is the task of our
metaphysical science to determine; at present our problem, though given
to us in its general elements, still awaits solution. In particular, we
must take care not to fall into the error of so-called “Subjective
Idealism.” We must not say that reality consists of “_the states of
consciousness of sentient subjects_” or of “_subjects, and their
states_.” We must not falsify our data as metaphysicians by starting
with the assumption that the psychical facts of which reality is made up
are directly experienced as “states” or “modifications” of “subjects”
which are their possessors. Such a theory would in fact contradict
itself, for the “subject” or “I,” who am by the hypothesis the owner of
the “states,” is never itself given as a “state of consciousness.” Hence
Hume was perfectly correct when he argued from the principle that
nothing exists but states of consciousness, to the conclusion that the
thinker or “subject,” not being himself a state of consciousness, is an
illusion. Yet, on the other hand, if there is no thinker or subject to
“own” the passing states, they are not properly “states” or
“modifications” of anything. Apart from this explicit contradiction in
the formulation of the theory that all things are “states of
consciousness,” we must also object that the theory itself is not a
statement of the data of experience, but a hypothesis about their
connection. The division of experience into the self or the subject on
the one side and its states on the other is not given in our immediate
apprehension, but made in the progress of reflection on the contents of
apprehension. Sensible things and their properties never appear to us in
our direct apprehension of them to be states or modifications of
ourselves; that they really are this and nothing more is simply one
hypothesis among others which we devise to meet certain difficulties in
our thought. Reality comes to us from the first in the guise of pieces
of psychical fact; we feel certain, again, that these pieces must
somehow form part of a coherent whole or system. We try to understand
and account for this systematic character of the real on the supposition
that the matters of fact of which it consists are connected with one
another through the permanent character of the “subjects” to which they
belong as temporary “states” or “modifications.” But this special
interpretation of the way in which the facts of experience form a system
is no part of our initial postulate as to the general nature of the
real; it is simply one among other theories of the concrete character of
the universe, and it is for Metaphysics itself to test its merits.

Similarly, we should be making an unwarranted addition to our initial
postulate about Reality if we identified it with the doctrine of Hume
and his followers, according to whom what really exists is _merely_ a
series of “impressions and ideas” connected by certain psychological
laws of succession, any profounder structural unity of experience being
dismissed as a “fiction of the mind.” The secret of the fallacy here
lies in the _petitio principii_ committed by the introduction of the
word “merely” into our statement. From the identification of reality
with psychical facts which somehow form a systematic unity, it does not
in the least follow that the _only_ unity possessed by the facts is that
of conformity to a certain law or laws of sequence. _That_ all reality
consists of psychical facts, and _that_ these facts must form a system,
we are, as we have already seen, entitled to assert as a fundamental
metaphysical principle which cannot be doubted without falling into
contradiction; _how_ they do so we have yet to discover, if we can.

The merits of the Humian solution of the problem will come before us for
consideration at a later stage; the impossibility of assuming it without
inquiry as a principle, may perhaps be brought home to the mind of the
reader by a simple illustration. Take the case of any æsthetic whole,
such as, for instance, the play of _Hamlet_. The play of _Hamlet_
consists, for the student who reads it in his closet, of a succession of
printed words. These words form the whole material of the play; it is
composed of them all and of nothing else. Again, the words which are the
material of the play are connected by the grammatical and euphonic laws
which regulate the construction of English sentences, and the metrical
laws of English dramatic versification. Thus it would be a true
description of the play, as far as it goes, to say that it is a series
of words put together in accordance with grammatical and metrical laws.
It would, however, be positively false to say that _Hamlet_ is nothing
more than such a succession of words; its character as a work of art
depends entirely on the fact that it possesses, as a whole, a further
unity of structure and aim, that the words and sentences which are its
material embody an internally coherent representation of human character
and purpose. Apart from this inner unity of meaning, mere uniformity of
grammatical and metrical construction would not of themselves constitute
a work of art. It will be one object of our later discussions to show
that what is thus obviously true of an æsthetic whole is universally
true of every genuine system or totality.

§ 7. The data or material of reality, then, are facts of experience, and
nothing but facts of experience.[19] And experience, we have said, means
for our purposes _immediate_ feeling or apprehension. What _immediacy_
means, as we have already seen, we cannot further explain in
psychological terms, except by saying that it is what distinguishes an
actual mental state from the mere thought of that state. The reason why,
in Psychology, we have to be content with such an account is manifest.
To characterise immediate feeling further, we should have to identify
the _qualities_ by which it is universally marked off from what is not
immediate. We should, in fact, have to describe it in general terms, and
before we can do this we must cease to feel or apprehend directly, and
go on to reflect upon and analyse the contents of our apprehension. What
our psychological description depicts is never the experience as it
actually was while we were having it, but the experience as it appears
from the point of view of subsequent reflection, interpreted in the
light of all sorts of conscious or unconscious hypotheses about its
conditions and its constituents. Thus our psychological descriptions
depend for their very possibility upon the recognition of distinctions
which are not present, as such, in the experience itself as directly
presented to us but created by later reflection about it From the point
of view of Metaphysics, however, it is possible to specify one universal
characteristic of immediate feeling, which is of the utmost importance
for our theories of reality and of knowledge. When we reflect upon any
psychical fact whatever, we may distinguish within it two very different
aspects. There is, in the first place, the fact that it _does_ happen,
that it is a genuine psychical occurrence,—the existence or _that_, as
we may call it, of the piece of psychical fact in question; and there is
also the peculiar character or quality which gives _this_ mental
occurrence its unique nature as distinguished from any other which might
conceivably have been presented in its stead,—the content or _what_ of
the psychical fact. Thus a simple colour-sensation, say that of green,
has its _that_,—it is actually present, and is thus distinguished from a
merely remembered or anticipated sensation; it has also its _what_,—the
peculiar quality by which it is distinguished, for example, from a
sensation of blue. So again with an imagined sensation; it is actually
imagined, the imagining of it is an actual occurrence with its
particular place in the course of the occurrences which together make up
my mental life; and again, it is the imagination of some content with
qualities of its own by which it is distinguished from any other
content.

The most striking illustration of the presence of these distinguishable
aspects in all psychical occurrences is, of course, afforded by the case
of error or illusion, the essence of which is the false apprehension of
the _what_. Thus, when an ignorant villager sees a ghost, or a
hypochondriac is tormented by “imaginary” symptoms of disease, the ghost
or the malady is not simply non-existent; something is actually seen or
felt, but the error consists in a mistake as to the nature of what is
seen or felt. Now, the peculiarity by which direct and immediate
apprehension is distinguished, for the metaphysician, from subsequent
reflection about the contents of apprehension, is that in immediate
apprehension itself we are not conscious of the distinction between
these two aspects of psychical fact. The immediately experienced is
always a _this-what_ or process-content[20] in which the distinction of
the _this_ from the _what_ does not enter into consciousness. In any act
of reflection, on the other hand, the _what_ is explicitly distinguished
from the _that_, and then ascribed to it as something which can be truly
said about it. The judgment or proposition, which is the characteristic
form in which the result of reflection finds its expression, consists,
in its most rudimentary shape, of the embodiment of this distinction in
the separation of predicate from subject, and the subsequent affirmation
of the first about the second. The work of thought or knowledge in
making our world more intelligible to us essentially consists in the
progressive analysis of a content or _what_, considered in abstraction
from the _this_ to which it belongs. The _this_ may, as in the singular
judgment or the particular judgment of perception, actually appear in
our propositions as the subject to which the _what_ is explicitly
ascribed; or again, as in the true universals of science, both the
predicate and the ostensible subject of the proposition may belong to
the content analysed, and the _this_, or directly apprehended reality of
which the content forms an attribute, may not appear in the proposition
at all. This is why the true universal judgment has long been seen by
logicians to be essentially hypothetical, and why, again, thought or
knowledge always appears to the common-sense man to be dealing with
realities which have previously been given independently of the “work of
the mind.” He is only wrong in this view because he forgets that what is
given in this way is merely the _that_ or existence of the world of real
being, not its _what_ or content in its true character as ultimately
ascertained by scientific thought.[21]

§ 8. The fundamental characteristic of experience, then, for the
metaphysician, is its immediacy: the fact that in experience as such the
existence and the content of what is apprehended are not mentally
separated. This immediacy may be due, as in the case of mere
uninterpreted sensation, to the absence of reflective analysis of the
given into its constituent aspects or elements. But it may also be due,
as we shall have opportunities to see more fully later on, to the fusion
at a higher level into a single directly apprehended whole of results
originally won by the process of abstraction and reflection. There is an
immediacy of experience which is below mediate reflective knowledge but
there is also a higher immediacy which is above it. To explain and
justify this statement will be the work of subsequent chapters; for the
present we may be content to illustrate it by a simple example. A work
of art with an intricate internal structure, such, for instance, as a
musical composition or a chess problem, as directly presented to the
artistically uncultivated man, is little more than a mere succession of
immediately given data in which the aspects of existence and content are
as yet hardly separated; it has no significance or meaning, but merely
_is_. As education in the perception of artistic form proceeds, the
separation becomes at first more and more prominent. Each subordinate
part of the structure now acquires a meaning or significance in virtue
of its place in the whole, and this meaning is at first something over
and above the directly presented character of the part, something which
has to be grasped by reflective analysis and comparison of part with
part. The individual part has now, through analysis of its content, come
to mean or stand for something outside itself, namely, its relation to
all the other parts. But with the completion of our æsthetic education
the immediacy thus destroyed is once more restored. To the fully trained
perception the meaning of the composition or the problem, its structure
as an artistic whole, is no longer something which has to be pieced
together and inferred by reflective comparison: it is now directly
apprehended as a structural unity. The composition has a meaning, and
thus the results of the intermediate stage of reflection and comparison
are not lost, but taken up into the completed experience. But the
meaning is no longer external to the existence of the composition; it is
what it means, and it means what it is.[22] We may subsequently see that
what is thus strikingly illustrated by the case of artistic perception
holds good, to a greater or less degree, of all advance in the
understanding of reality. It is perhaps the fundamental philosophical
defect of what is popularly called Mysticism that it ignores this
difference between a higher and a lower immediacy, and thus attempts to
restore the direct contact with felt reality which scientific reflection
inevitably loosens by simply undoing the work of analytic thought and
reverting to the standpoint of mere uninterpreted feeling.[23]

§ 9. We may perhaps specify one further characteristic which seems, at
least, to belong to every datum of immediate experience. Every
experience seems to be implicitly complex, that is, its aspect of
_content_ appears never to be absolutely simple, but always to contain a
plurality of aspects, which, as directly felt, are not distinct, but are
at the same time distinguishable as soon as we begin by reflection to
describe and analyse it. From the nature of the case this complexity
cannot be directly ascertained by inspection, for the inspection itself
presupposes that we are dealing with the experience not as immediately
felt, but as already sufficiently analysed and reflected upon to be
described in general terms. Indirectly, however, our result seems to be
established by the consideration that, as soon as we reflect upon the
given at all, we find these distinguishable aspects within its content,
and that, unless they were there implicitly from the first, it is hard
to see how the mere process of reflection could have given birth to
them. Thus, for instance, in even the most rudimentary experience there
would appear to be something answering to the distinction between the
presentational quality of a sensation and its accompanying tone of
pleasure or pain. It is difficult, again, not to think that in any
sentient experience there must be some difference between elements which
correspond to more or less stable conditions of the sentient organism
itself (“organic sensation”) and those which correspond to relatively
novel and infrequent features of the environment. Some philosophers
would indeed be prepared to go further, and to maintain that a more or
less explicit consciousness of distinction between self and not-self, or
again between subject and object, is logically involved in the very
possibility of an experience. The question, as a psychological one, need
not be raised here; it must, however, be carefully remarked that
whatever view we may adopt as to the number and character of the aspects
which analysis reveals within the contents of the simplest experience,
those aspects, as directly apprehended, originally constitute an
unanalysed whole. Our various subsequent analyses all presuppose
theories as to the ultimate _what_ of experience which it is the
business of Metaphysics to test.

§ 10. Our foregoing discussion of the metaphysical criterion will
suggest a fairly definite ideal of what a completely adequate
apprehension of the whole of reality would be. A completely adequate
apprehension of reality would be one which contained all reality and
nothing but reality, and thus involved no element whatever of deceptive
appearance. As such it would, in the first place, be all-embracing; it
would include in itself every datum of direct experience, and, since
nothing but data of experience, or, as we have also called them, matters
of psychical fact, are the materials of reality, it would contain
nothing else. In the second place, it would contain all its data without
contradiction or discrepancy as part of a single system with a
harmonious internal structure of its own. For wherever there is
discrepancy, as we have already seen, there is imperfect and therefore
partially false appearance. And, in the third place, such an
all-embracing harmonious apprehension of the whole data of experience
would clearly transcend that separation of existence from content which
is temporarily effected by our own efforts to restate _our_ experience
in a consistent form. It would, because complete in itself, involve at a
higher level that immediacy which, at a lower level, we know as
characteristic of feeling. It would thus experience the whole of real
existence directly as a system with internal consistency and structure,
but without any reference to anything beyond itself. As we said of the
artistic whole, so we may say of the whole of existence as it might be
apprehended by a completed insight, it would be what it meant, and mean
what it was. To such an ideally complete experience of reality as a
single system, by way of marking its exclusively experiential nature, we
may give the name, introduced into Philosophy by Avenarius, of a “pure”
experience, that is, an experience which is in all its parts experience
and nothing else. Of course, in adopting the name, we are not
necessarily identifying ourselves with the further views of Avenarius as
to what in particular the structure of such an experience would be.

Our own human experience clearly falls far short of such an ideal, and
that for two reasons. To begin with, our experience is incomplete in
respect of its data: there is much in reality which never directly
enters into the structure of our experience at all. Of much of what
falls within the scope of our knowledge we can only say, in a general
way, how it would appear to ourselves supposing certain conditions of
its perceptibility to be realised, and even these conditions are usually
only most imperfectly known. What the actual matters of psychical fact
corresponding to these conditions and to the appearance which they would
determine for us are, we are totally unable to say. Again, there may
well be much in the real world which never, even in this indirect way,
enters into the structure of human knowledge at all. Hence our human
experience and the intellectual constructions by which we seek to
interpret it have always the character of being piecemeal and
fragmentary. Perfect apprehension of systematic reality as a whole would
be able to deduce from any one fact in the universe the nature of every
other fact. Or rather, as the whole would be presented at once in its
entirety, there would be no need for the deduction; every fact would be
directly seen as linked with every other by the directly intuited nature
of the system to which all facts belong. But in our imperfect human
apprehension of the world our facts appear to be largely given us in
isolation and independence of one another as bare “casual conjunctions”
or “collocations,” and the hypotheses by which we seek to weld them into
a system, however largely determined by the character of our data, never
quite get rid of an element of arbitrary “free” construction. They are
never fully necessitated as to their entirety by the nature of the facts
they serve to connect. Hence we can never be certain that our
hypothetical constructions themselves are true in the sense of
consisting of statements of what for a completed experience would be
matters of fact. Our ideal is to connect our presented facts by
constructions in which each link is itself matter of fact, or
experience, in the sense that it would under known conditions form the
content of a direct apprehension. But it is an ideal which, owing to the
fragmentary character of our own experience, we are never able
adequately to realise. In all our sciences we are constantly compelled
to use hypothetical constructions, which often are, and for all we know
always may be, merely “symbolic,” in the sense that, though useful in
the co-ordination of experienced data, they could never themselves
become objects of direct experience, because they conflict either with
the general nature of experience as such, or with the special nature of
the particular experiences in which they would have to be presented. Our
scientific hypotheses thus present a close analogy with the
uninterpretable stages in the application of an algebraical calculus to
a numerical or geometrical subject-matter. Their usefulness in enabling
us to co-ordinate and predict facts of direct experience need no more
guarantee their own reality, than the usefulness of such a calculus
guarantees our ability to find an intelligible interpretation for all
the symbolic operations it involves.[24] In a pure or completed
experience, at once all-comprehending and systematic, where existence
and content, fact and construction, were no longer separated, there
could of course be no place for such ultimately uninterpretable
symbolism.

Our fundamental metaphysical problem, then, is that of discovering, if
we can, the general or formal characteristics of such a complete or
“pure” experience, _i.e._ those characteristics which belong to it
simply in virtue of its all-containing and completely systematic nature.
Further, it would be the work of a completed Metaphysic to ascertain
which among the universal characteristics of our own human experience of
the world are such as must belong to any coherent experience in virtue
of its nature, and are thus identifiable with the formal characteristics
of a “pure” experience. Also, our science would have to decide what
features of human experience, among those which do not possess this
character, approximate most nearly to it, and would thus require least
modification in order to enable them to take their place in an
absolutely complete and harmonious experience of reality. If we could
completely carry out our programme, we should, in the first place, have
a general conception of what in outline the constitution of experienced
reality as a systematic whole is; and, in the second, we should be able
to arrange the various concepts and categories by which we seek, alike
in everyday thinking and in the various sciences, to interpret the world
of our experience, in an ascending order of degrees of truth and
reality, according to the extent to which they would require to be
modified before they could become adequate to express the nature of a
systematic experienced reality. The knowledge conveyed by such a science
would, of course, not be itself the pure or all-embracing experience of
Reality, but merely mediate knowledge about the general nature of such
an experience, and would therefore, so far, be like all mere knowledge
about an object, abstract and imperfect. It would still refer to
something beyond itself, and thus have a meaning other than its own
existence. But, unlike all other knowledge, our metaphysical knowledge
of the formal character of an all-inclusive experienced whole would be
_final_, in the sense that no addition of fresh knowledge could modify
it in principle. Fresh knowledge, which in all other cases involves at
least the possibility of a transformation of existing theories, would
here do no more than fill in and make more concrete our conception of
the system of Reality, without affecting our insight into its general
structure.

We may perhaps illustrate this conception of a knowledge which, though
imperfect, is yet final, by an instance borrowed from elementary
Mathematics. We know absolutely and precisely, _e. g._, what the symbol
π stands for. π is completely determined for us by the definition that
it is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. And
again, we can define unequivocally both the terms, circumference and
diameter of the circle, which we have employed in our definition of π.
Thus our knowledge of the meaning of the symbol is clearly final; no
fresh accretion to our knowledge will make any modification in it. At
the same time, our knowledge of π, though final, is imperfect. For the
quantity π is incommensurable, and thus we can never precisely evaluate
it. All we can do is to assign its value correctly within any desired
degree of approximation. Again, while no approximation gives an
absolutely correct value for the quantity, one approximation is, of
course, closer than another. Because no approximation is more than
approximately the truth, it by no means follows that all are equally
wide of the mark. Similarly, it may well be that, though we can say with
finality what the general nature of experience and experienced Reality
as a systematic whole is, yet, when we come to ask after the character
of the system in detail, we have to depend on sciences which are merely
approximate in their results; it will not follow, as is sometimes
assumed, that the categories of one science do not present us with a
nearer approximation to the absolute truth than those of another.[25]

§ 11. We may end this chapter with some general reflections on the
_method_ required for such a science of Metaphysics as we have described
in the preceding paragraphs. The true character of any scientific method
can, of course, only be discovered by the actual use of it; a
preliminary disquisition on the nature of a method not previously
exhibited in actual use is apt to be at best sterile, and at worst a
positive source of prejudices which may subsequently seriously hamper
the process of investigation. Still, there are certain general
characteristics of the method imposed on us by our conception of the
problems to be solved which may conveniently be pointed out at this
stage of our inquiry. Our method will, in the first place, clearly be
_analytical_ and _critical_ in its character. We analyse experience with
a view to discovering its implications, and we analyse our various
scientific and unscientific theories of the contents of the world-system
for the same purpose. Also, once having determined what are the formal
characteristics of an all-embracing, systematic whole of experienced
fact, we criticise our various concepts and theories by reference to
these characteristics as an ultimate standard of reality and truth.
Negatively, we may add that our method is _non-empirical_, and also
_non-inductive_, in the same sense in which pure Mathematics, for
instance, may be called non-inductive. It is non-empirical inasmuch as
we are called upon to analyse all our data and criticise all our
pre-conceived theories. We are not allowed to accept any fact without
analysis, or any concept without criticism, as an unchallenged datum
upon which we may build without preliminary justification. Hence our
method is non-empirical. Also, as our analysis is concerned entirely
with the internal character and self-consistency of the data analysed,
it is, like the reasonings of pure Mathematics, independent of external
confirmation outside the analysed data themselves, and is therefore
non-inductive.[26] In precisely the same sense our method and its
results may be called, if we please, _a priori_; that is to say, we
proceed entirely by internal analysis of certain data, and are, alike in
procedure and result, independent of experience outside the experience
we are concerned with analysing. We can, of course, add that our method
is _constructive_, that is, if successfully carried out it would
culminate in an intellectual attitude towards the world which, as an
intellectual attitude, we did not possess before entering on our study
of Metaphysics; but as construction, in this sense, is characteristic of
all scientific method, it does not seem necessary to specify it as a
peculiarity of metaphysical procedure in particular.

Historically, our conception of metaphysical method as fundamentally
analytical and directed to the detection and removal of internal
contradictions in the categories of ordinary thought, is perhaps
nearer to the view of Herbart than to that of any other great
philosopher of the past. In our insistence upon the non-empirical and,
in a sense, _a priori_ character of Metaphysics, we are again, of
course, largely in agreement with the position of Kant. There is,
however, a most important difference between our own and the Kantian
conception of the _a priori_ upon which it is essential to insist.
A-priority, as we have used the term, stands merely for a peculiarity
of the _method_ of Metaphysics; by an _a priori_ method we understood
one which is confined to the internal analysis of a datum and
independent of external reference to outside facts. With Kant the _a
priori_ is a name for certain forms of perception and thought which,
because revealed by analysis as present in every experience, are
supposed to be given _independently of all experience_ whatsoever, and
so come to be identified by him as “the work of the mind,” in
opposition to the empirical factor in experience, which is held to be
the product of an external system of “things-in-themselves.” Hence
Kant’s whole discussion of the _a priori_ is vitiated by a constant
confusion between what is metaphysically _necessary_ (_i.e._ implied
in the existence of knowledge) and what is psychologically
_primitive_. This confusion, perplexing enough in Kant, reaches a
climax in the works of writers like Mr. Spencer, who appear to think
that the whole question of the presence of a non-empirical factor in
knowledge can be decided by an appeal to genetic Psychology. It is
clear that, from our point of view, the identification of the _a
priori_ with the “work of the mind” would involve a metaphysical
theory as to the constitution of experience which we are not entitled
to adopt without proof.[27]

A word ought perhaps to be said about our attitude towards the
“dialectical” method as employed by Hegel and his followers. It was
Hegel’s conviction that the whole series of concepts or categories by
which the mind attempts to grasp the nature of experienced Reality as a
whole, from the most rudimentary to the most adequate, can be exhibited
in a fixed order which arises from the very nature of thought itself. We
begin, he held, by the affirmation of some rude and one-sided conception
of the character of what is; the very imperfection of our concept then
forces us on to affirm its opposite as equally true. But the opposite,
in its turn, is no less one-sided and inadequate to express the full
character of concrete reality. Hence we are driven to negate our first
negation by affirming a concept which includes both the original
affirmation and its opposite as subordinate aspects. The same process
repeats itself again at a higher stage with our new category, and thus
we gradually pass by a series of successive triads of categories, each
consisting of the three stages of affirmation, negation, and negation of
the negation, from the beginning of an intellectual interpretation of
the world of experience, the thought of it as mere a “Being,” not
further defined, to the apprehension of it as the “Absolute Idea,” or
concrete system of spiritual experience. It was the task of abstract
Metaphysics (called by Hegel, Logic) to exhibit the successive stages of
this process as a systematic orderly advance, in which the nature of
each stage is determined by its place in the whole. As Hegel also held
that this “dialectic” process is somehow not confined to the
“subjective” or private intelligence of the student of Philosophy, but
also realised in the structure of the “objective” universe, it followed
that its successive stages could be detected in physical nature and in
History in the same order in which they occur in “Logic,” and many of
Hegel’s best-known works are devoted to exhibiting the facts of Physics,
Ethics, Religion, and History in the light of this doctrine. The
subsequent advances of the various sciences have so completely proved
the arbitrariness and untrustworthiness of the results obtained by these
“deductions” that some of the best exponents of the Hegelian type of
Philosophy are now agreed to abandon the claim of the Dialectic to be
more than a systematisation of the stages through which the individual
mind must pass in its advance towards a finally satisfactory conception
of Reality. But even within these limits its pretensions are probably
exaggerated. No satisfactory proof can be produced that, even in
abstract Metaphysics, the succession of categories must be precisely
that adopted by Hegel. There are some categories of the first
importance, _e.g._, that of _order_ in Mathematics, which hardly get any
recognition at all in his system, and others, such as those of
“Mechanism” and “Chemism,” which play a prominent part, are obviously
largely dependent for their position upon the actual development of the
various sciences in Hegel’s own time. Hence the method seems unsuitable
for the original attainment of philosophical truth. At best it might
serve, as Lotze has remarked, as a convenient method for the arrangement
of truth already obtained by other means, and even for this purpose it
seems clear that the succession of categories actually adopted by Hegel
would require constant modification to adapt the general scheme to later
developments of the various special sciences.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 13,
14; B. Bosanquet, _Essentials of Logic_, Lect. 2; Shadworth Hodgson,
_Metaphysic of Experience_, bk. i. chap. 1; J. S. Mackenzie, _Outlines
of Metaphysics_, bk. i. chaps. 2 and 4. And for criticism of the
Hegelian dialectic: J. E. M‘Taggart, _Studies in Hegelian Dialectic_,
chaps. 1-3; J. B. Baillie, _The Origin and Significance of Hegel’s
Logic_, chaps. 8-12, especially chap. 12; and also Adamson, _Development
of Modern Philosophy_, bk. i. pp. 271 ff.

-----

Footnote 10:

See Bosanquet, _Essentials of Logic_, Lect. 8. As an illustration we
may take an extreme case: “The Jabberwock was not killed yesterday.”
What is the ground of this denial? At first sight it appears to be
merely negative, “there are no such things as Jabberwocks to kill.”
But before I can say “there are no such things as Jabberwocks” with
confidence, I must have enough positive information about the
structure and habits of animals to be aware that the qualities
ascribed to the Jabberwock conflict with the laws of animal life. Or,
if I deny the existence of Jabberwocks simply on the ground that I
have never come across a specimen, this involves a positive judgment
as to the relation between the animal world and the part of it I have
examined, such as, “if there were Jabberwocks, I should have come
across one”; or, “my acquaintance with the varieties of animals is
sufficiently exhaustive to afford ground for a valid generalisation.”
The fact that symbolic Logic finds it _convenient_ to treat the
universal affirmative as a double negative must not mislead us as to
its actual priority in thought.

Footnote 11:

To meet the kind of criticism which finds it humorous to jest at the
expense of those who “take consolation from spelling Reality with a
big R,” may I once for all say that when I spell Reality thus it is
simply as a convenient way of distinguishing the ultimately from the
merely relatively real?

Footnote 12:

We shall meet this same difficulty again later on as the principle of
the famous Kantian objection to the “ontological proof” of God’s
existence. _Infra_, Bk. IV. chap. 5. § 8.

Footnote 13:

Take a concrete example. A theory as to the early religious history of
the Hebrews, let us say, is put forward upon grounds derived from
Semitic philology. Though unacquainted with Semitic philology in
particular, I may be able to form some sort of estimate of the cogency
of the professed reasoning if I already have an adequate acquaintance
with the use and value of philological evidence in parallel cases,
say, in the study of Greek antiquities. But if I have no positive
acquaintance at all with the use of philology in antiquarian research,
it would be the merest impertinence for me to offer any opinion
whatever.

Footnote 14:

What follows must be regarded as a mere outline which awaits
subsequent filling up by the more concrete results of Bk II. chap. 1.

Footnote 15:

For the modern logical doctrine of possibility consult Bradley,
_Principles of Logic_, 192-201; Bosanquet, _Logic_, i. chap. 9.

Footnote 16:

This is—apart from non-essential theological accretions—the principle
of Berkeley’s argument for the existence of God (_Principles of Human
Knowledge_, §§ 146, 147).

Footnote 17:

I should explain that I use “feeling” and “apprehension” indifferently
for immediate and non-reflective awareness of any psychical content.
The exclusive restriction of the term to awareness of pleasure and
pain seems to me to rest on a serious mistake in psychology, and I
therefore avoid it.

Footnote 18:

In fact, we shall see in Bk. II. chap. 1 that in virtue of its unity
with immediate _feeling_, all experience is essentially connected with
purpose.

Footnote 19:

I take “fact” as equivalent to “what is directly apprehended in a
single moment of consciousness.” In a previous work (_The Problem of
Conduct_, chap. 1) I used the word in a different sense for “the
contents of a _true_ description of experience.” This employment of
the word, however, seems at variance with established philosophical
usage, and I therefore abandon it as likely to lead to
misapprehension.

Footnote 20:

Of course, the apprehended “content” may itself be a “process,” as is
the case in all instances of the apprehension of _change_; but the
apprehended process is always distinguishable from the process of
apprehension.

Footnote 21:

We shall see in Bk. II. chap. 1 that the “that” of an experience
implies relation to a unique individual interest or purpose.

Footnote 22:

Of course this is only partly true. As we shall see in the sequel, to
“be what it means and mean what it is” is an ideal never _fully_
realised in the structure of any finite piece of reality, precisely
because the finite, as its name implies, is never a completely
systematic whole.

Footnote 23:

On the psychological processes by which meaning is acquired, see
Stout, _Manual of Psychology_^3, bk. i. chap. 3; and on the
apprehension of form, the same author’s _Analytic Psychology_, bk. i.
chap. 3. Much interesting discussion of the difference between
“external” and “internal” meaning will be found in Royce, _The World
and the Individual_, First Series.

Footnote 24:

For some good observations on the fallacy of assuming that
mathematical symbolism must always be interpretable, see B. Russell,
_Foundations of Geometry_, p. 45-46; or Whitehead, _Universal
Algebra_, vol. i p. 10 ff. For a further elaboration of the argument
of the foregoing section I may refer to my _Problem of Conduct_, pp.
14-21. I need hardly warn the reader against confusing a “symbolic”
concept in my sense of the word, _i.e._ one which cannot be fully
interpreted in terms of direct experience, with a “symbolic” idea in
Mr. Spencer’s sense, _i.e._ one which is not, psychologically, a copy
of the presentations for which it stands. Our use of the word is, of
course, purely logical, and has nothing to do with the psychological
character of mental images, but only with their meaning.

Footnote 25:

Compare my _Problem of Conduct_, pp. 22-39.

Footnote 26:

The fundamental peculiarity of “inductive” procedure, in fact, is
that, while its object is the internal analysis of its data, which, if
completed, would permit of a universal conclusion being drawn from the
single case, it is never able to effect the analysis, and is driven to
reinforce it by external comparison with “similar” cases.

Footnote 27:

On the confusion between the metaphysical and psychological standpoint
in Kant’s own treatment of the _a priori_, see B. Russell,
_Foundations of Geometry_, pp. 1-4, and Adamson, _Development of
Modern Philosophy_, bk. i. pp. 244-247.

-----

CHAPTER III

THE SUB-DIVISIONS OF METAPHYSICS

§ 1. The traditional sub-division of Metaphysics into _Ontology_,
_Cosmology_, _Rational Psychology_, common to all the great modern
constructive systems. § 2. Precise sense in which we adopt these
divisions for the purposes of our own treatment of the subject. § 3.
Relation of _Cosmology_ and _Rational Psychology_ to the empirical
sciences.

§ 1. English philosophers, who have usually been imbued with a wholesome
distrust of deliberate system-making, have commonly paid comparatively
little attention to the question of the number and character of the
sub-divisions of metaphysical philosophy. They have been content to
raise the questions which interested them in the order of their
occurrence to their own minds, and have gladly left it to the systematic
historians of Philosophy, who have rarely been Englishmen, to discuss
the proper arrangement of the parts of the subject. Continental
thinkers, who are naturally more prone to conscious systematisation,
have bestowed more thought on the problem of method and order, with the
result that each great independent philosopher has tended to make his
own special arrangement of the parts of his subject. The different
arrangements, however, seem all to agree in conforming to a general
type, which was most clearly exhibited by the otherwise rather arid
Wolffian dogmatism of the eighteenth century. All the constructive
systems (those, _e.g._, of Hegel, Herbart, Lotze,) feel the necessity of
giving the first place to a general discussion of the most universal
characteristics which we find ourselves constrained to ascribe in
thought to any reality which is to be an intelligible and coherent
system and not a mere chaos. This division of the subject is commonly
known by the title it bears alike in the Wolffian Metaphysic and the
systems of Herbart and Lotze, as _Ontology_,[28] or the general doctrine
of Being; with Hegel it constitutes, as a whole, the contents of the
science of _Logic_, as distinguished from the other two great
departments of speculative thought, the Philosophies of _Nature_ and
_Mind_; and its most formal and general parts, again, compose, within
the Hegelian Logic itself, the special first section entitled “Doctrine
of Being.”

Further, every system of metaphysical philosophy is bound to deal with
more special problems, which readily fall into two principal classes. It
has to consider the meaning and validity of the most universal
conceptions of which we seek to understand the nature of the individual
objects which make up the experienced physical world, “extension,”
“succession,” “space,” “time,” “number,” “magnitude,” “motion,”
“change,” “quality,” and the more complex categories of “matter,”
“force,” “causality,” “interaction,” “thinghood,” and so forth. Again,
Metaphysics has to deal with the meaning and validity of the universal
predicates by which we seek to interpret the nature of the experiencing
mind itself, and its relation both to other minds and to the objects of
the physical world, “the soul,” “the self,” “the subject,”
“self-consciousness,” “ethical purpose,” and so forth. Hence it has been
customary to recognise a second and third part of Metaphysics, dealing
respectively with the most general characteristics of external Nature
and of conscious Mind. These sections of the subject are commonly known
as _Cosmology_ and _Rational Psychology_. In Hegel’s system they appear
in a double form: in their most abstract generality they constitute the
“Doctrine of Essence,” and the “Doctrine of the Notion” in the Hegelian
_Logic_; in their more concrete detail they form the second and third
parts of his complete system or “Encyclopædia” of the philosophical
sciences, the previously mentioned Philosophies of _Nature_ and _Mind_.

In the pre-Kantian eighteenth century it was not unusual to add yet a
fourth division to Metaphysics, _Rational Theology_, the doctrine of the
existence and attributes of God, so far as they can be deduced from
general philosophical principles apart from the appeal to specific
revelation. Kant’s onslaught on the whole Wolffian scheme in the
“Dialectic of Pure Reason,” while profoundly modifying for the future
the view taken by metaphysicians of Cosmology and Rational Psychology,
proved annihilating so far as eighteenth-century Deism and its
philosophical offspring, Rational Theology, were concerned, and that
sub-division may fairly be said to have disappeared from subsequent
philosophical systems.[29]

§ 2. There are good and obvious reasons why we should adhere, in the
form of our inquiry, to the main outlines of this traditional scheme. It
is true that it is largely a question of simple convenience what order
we adopt in a systematic metaphysical investigation. A genuinely
philosophical survey of the general character of knowledge and
experience would exhibit so complete a systematic unity, that you might
start from any point in it and reach the same results, much as you may
go round a circle equally well from any point of the periphery. But for
the beginner, at any rate, it is advantageous to start with the general
question what we mean by Being or Reality, and what character is to be
ascribed to the whole of Being as such, before attacking the problem of
the particular kind of Being which belongs to the various “realities” of
common life and the special sciences. Thus we have to discuss in the
first part of our programme such questions as the relation of Being in
general to experience, the sense in which Being may be said to be
inseparable from, and yet again to transcend, experience; the problem of
the existence of different kinds or degrees of Being; the question
whether Being is ultimately one or many; the relation between Real Being
and its appearances. All these problems correspond with reasonable
closeness to the contents of what was traditionally known as Ontology.

It is only when we have reached some definite conclusion on these most
fundamental questions that we shall be in a position to deal with the
more special problems suggested by the various departments of science
and common life; hence we shall do well to acquiesce in the arrangement
by which Ontology was made to precede the other divisions of the
subject. Again, in dealing with the more complex special problems of
Metaphysics, it is natural to recognise a distinction corresponding to
the separation of Cosmology from Rational Psychology. Common language
shows that for most of the purposes of human thought and action the
contents of the world of experience tend to fall into the two groups of
mere things and things which are sentient and purposive—Physical Nature
on the one hand, and Minds or Spirits on the other. We must, of course,
be careful not to confuse this division of the objects of experience
with the distinction between an experienced object as such and the
subject of experience. We are to start, in our critical investigation,
not with the artificial point of view of Psychology, which sets the
“subject” of presentations over-against the presentations considered as
conveying information about “objects of knowledge,” but with the
standpoint of practical life, in which the individual agent is opposed
to an environment itself consisting largely of similar individual
agents. It is not “Nature” on the one side and a “perceiving mind” on
the other, but an environment composed partly of physical things, partly
of other human and animal minds, that furnishes the antithesis on which
the distinction of Cosmology from Rational Psychology is founded. There
is no confusion against which we shall need to be more on our guard than
this fallacious identification of Mind or Spirit with the abstract
subject of psychological states, and of the “environment” of the
individual with Physical Nature. Of course, it is true that we
necessarily interpret the inner life of other minds in terms of our own
incommunicably individual experience, but it is equally true that our
own direct experience of ourselves is throughout determined by
interaction with other agents of the same type as ourselves. It is a
pure delusion to suppose that we begin by finding ourselves in a world
of mere physical things to some of which we afterwards come by an
after-thought, based on “analogy,” to ascribe “consciousness” akin to
our own. Hence, to avoid possible misunderstandings, it would be better
to drop the traditional appellations “Cosmology” and “Rational
Psychology,” and to call the divisions of applied Metaphysics, as Hegel
does, the _Philosophy_ of _Nature_ and of _Spirit_ or _Mind_
respectively.[30]

In recognising this sub-division of applied Metaphysics into two
sections, dealing respectively with Physical Nature and with Mind or
Spirit, we do not mean to suggest that there is an absolute disparity
between these two classes of things. It is, of course, a matter for
philosophical criticism itself to decide whether this difference may not
in the end turn out to be merely apparent. This will clearly be the case
if either minds can be shown, as the materialist holds, to be simply a
peculiar class of highly complex physical things, or physical things to
be, as the idealist contends, really minds of an unfamiliar and
non-human type. It is sufficient for us that the difference, whether
ultimate or not, is marked enough to give rise to distinct classes of
problems, which have to be treated separately and on their own merits.
We may feel convinced on general philosophical grounds that minds and
physical things are ultimately existences of the same general type,
whether we conceive that type after the fashion of the materialist or of
the idealist, but this conviction does not in the least affect the fact
that the special metaphysical problems suggested by our experience of
physical things are largely different from those which are forced on us
by our interest in the minds of our fellows. In the one connection we
have, for instance, to discuss the questions connected with such
categories as those of uniform spatial extension, uniform obedience to
general law, the constitution of a whole which is an aggregate of parts;
in the other, those connected with the meaning and value of ethical,
artistic, and religious aspiration, the concept of moral freedom, the
nature of personal identity. Even the categories which seem at first
sight most readily applicable both to physical things and to minds, such
as those of quality and number, lead to special difficulties in the two
contrasted cases. This consideration seems to justify us in separating
the metaphysics of Mind from the metaphysics of Nature, and the superior
difficulty of many of the problems which belong to the former is a
further reason for following the traditional order of the two
sub-divisions, and placing Rational Psychology after Cosmology. In so
far as the problems of Rational Theology can be separated from those of
general Ontology, the proper place for them seems to be that section of
Rational Psychology which deals with the meaning and worth of our
religious experiences.

§ 3. It remains, in concluding the present chapter, to utter a word of
caution as to the relation between the two divisions of applied
Metaphysics and the body of the empirical sciences. It is perhaps hardly
necessary to warn the student that Rational Cosmology and Psychology
would become worse than useless if conceived of as furnishing in any
sense a substitute for the experimental study of the physical,
psychological, and social sciences. They are essentially departments of
Metaphysics, and for that very reason are incapable of adding a single
fact to the sum of our knowledge of ascertained fact. No doubt the
discredit into which Metaphysics—except in the form of tacit and
unconscious assumption—has fallen among students of positive science, is
largely due to the unfortunate presumption with which Schelling, and to
a less degree Hegel, attempted to put metaphysical discussion in the
place of the experimental investigation of the facts of nature and of
mind. At the present day this mistake is less likely to be committed;
the danger is rather that applied Metaphysics may be declared purely
valueless because it is incapable of adding to our store of facts. The
truth is, that it has a real value, but a value of a different kind from
that which has sometimes been ascribed to it. It is concerned not with
the accumulation of facts, but with the interpretation of previously
ascertained facts, looked at broadly and as a whole. When the facts of
physical Nature and of Mind and the special laws of their connection
have been discovered and systematised by the most adequate methods of
experiment, observation, and mathematical calculation at our disposal,
the question still remains, how we are to conceive of the whole realm of
such facts consistently with the general conditions of logical and
coherent thought. If we choose to define positive science as the
systematic establishment of the special laws of connection between
facts, we may say that over and above the _scientific_ problem of the
systematisation of facts there is the further _philosophical_ problem of
their interpretation. This latter problem does not cease to be
legitimate because it has been illegitimately confounded by certain
thinkers with the former.

Or we may put the case in another way. The whole process of scientific
systematisation involves certain assumptions as to the ultimate nature
of the facts which are systematised. Thus the very performance of an
experiment for the purpose of verifying a suggested hypothesis involves
the assumption that the facts with which the hypothesis is concerned
conform to general laws, and that these laws are such as to be capable
of formulation by human intelligence. If “nature” is not in some sense
“uniform,” the conclusive force of a successful experiment is logically
_nil_. Hence the necessity for an inquiry into the character of the
presuppositions involved in scientific procedure, and the amount of
justification which can be found for them. For practical purposes, no
doubt, the presuppositions of inductive science are sufficiently
justified by its actual successes. But the question for us as
metaphysicians, as we have already seen, is that not of their usefulness
but of their truth.

It may be said that the inquiry ought in any case to be left to the
special student of the physical and psychological sciences themselves.
This, however, would involve serious neglect of the great principle of
division of labour. It is true, of course, that, other things being
equal, the better stored the mind of the philosopher with scientific
facts, the sounder will be his judgment on the interpretation and
implications of the whole body of facts. But, at the same time, the
gifts which make a successful experimentalist and investigator of facts
are not altogether the same which are required for the philosophical
analysis of the implications of facts, nor are both always conjoined in
the same man. There is no reason, on the one hand, why the able
experimenter should be compelled to desist from the discovery of facts
of nature until he can solve the philosophical problems presented by the
very existence of a world of physical facts, nor, on the other, why the
thinker endowed by nature with powers of philosophical analysis should
be forbidden to exercise them until he has mastered all the facts which
are known by the specialists. What the philosopher needs to know, as the
starting-point for his investigation, is not the specialist’s facts as
such, but the general principles which the specialist uses for their
discovery and correlation. His study is a “science of sciences,” not in
the sense that it is a sort of universal encyclopædia of instructive and
entertaining knowledge, but in the more modest sense of being a
systematised reflection upon the concepts and methods with which the
sciences, and the less methodical thought of everyday practical life
work, and an attempt to try them by the standard of ultimate coherence
and intelligibility.

_Note._—If we retain _Psychology_, as is done, _e.g._, by Lotze, as the
title of our Metaphysic of Mind, we ought in consistency to give the
word a greatly extended sense. The facts which the Metaphysic of Mind
attempt to interpret, comprise not only those of Psychology in the
stricter sense (the abstract study of the laws of mental process), but
those of all the various sciences which deal with the concrete
manifestation of mind in human life (Ethics, Æsthetics, Sociology, the
study of Religion, etc.). This is one reason for preferring the Hegelian
designation “Philosophy of Mind” to the traditional one of _Rational
Psychology_. The associations of the word Philosophy in English are,
however, so vague that the adoption of the Hegelian title might perhaps
be understood as identifying this division of Metaphysics with the whole
content of the mental sciences. But for the unfamiliarity of the
expression, I should recommend some such phrase as Metaphysics of Human
Society as the most adequate description of this branch of our science.

-----

Footnote 28:

The name is ultimately derived from Aristotle’s definition of “First
Philosophy”—which along with Mathematics and Physics constitutes
according to his system, the whole of Theoretical Science—as the
knowledge of ὄντα ᾖ ὄντα, _i.e._ of the general character of the real
_as_ real, as distinguished from the knowledge of the mathematician
and the physicist, who only deal with the real in so far as it
exhibits number and magnitude, and sensible change respectively.

Footnote 29:

Less effective in immediate results, but no less thorough and acute
than the Kantian “Critique of Speculative Theology,” were Hume’s
posthumous _Dialogues on Natural Religion_, a work which has hardly
received its full meed of consideration from the professional
historians of Philosophy.

Footnote 30:

The fallacy of the assumption that our environment is directly given
in experience as merely physical is best brought out by Avenarius in
his masterly little work _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_, which should
be familiar to all students of Philosophy who are able to read German.
The purely English reader will find many fruitful suggestions in Ward,
_Naturalism and Agnosticism_, pt. iv., “Refutation of Dualism.” Much
confusion is caused in philosophical discussion by the unscholarly use
of the epistemological term “object” (which properly signifies “object
of _cognition_”) instead of the more familiar “thing” to denote the
constituent elements of our environment as it is actually experienced
in practical life. In strictness the elements of the environment are
“objects” only for an imaginary consciousness which is thought of as
merely cognisant of presented fact, a point which Prof. Münsterberg
has emphasised. For practical life the essential character of the
environment is not merely that it is “presented,” but that it
interacts with our own purposive activity; it thus consists not of
“objects,” but of “things.”

In including the minds of our fellows among the things which
constitute our environment, we must not commit the mistake of
supposing “minds” as factors in immediate experience to be
“incorporeal realities,” or “complexes of states of consciousness.”
The distinction between mind and body, and the concept of mind as
“within the body,” or again as a “function” of the body, are
psychological hypotheses which only arise in the course of subsequent
reflective analysis of experience. Of the worth of these hypotheses we
shall have to speak later. At present it is enough to note that for
direct experience a “mind” means simply a thing with individual
purpose. What for my direct experience distinguishes my fellow-man
from a stock or stone, is not the presence within him of an
incorporeal “soul” or “consciousness,” but the fact that I must take
account of his individual purposes and adapt myself to them if I wish
to achieve my own. Here again the reader of German will do well to
consult Prof. Münsterberg (_Grundzüge der Psychologie_, vol. i. chaps.
1-3). See also a paper on “Mind and Nature” by the present writer in
_International Journal of Ethics_ for October 1902.

-----

BOOK II
ONTOLOGY—THE GENERAL
STRUCTURE OF REALITY

CHAPTER I

REALITY AND EXPERIENCE

§ 1. In a sense “reality” for each of us means that of which he must
take account if his special purposes are to find fulfilment. § 2.
But ultimately the world must possess a structure of which _all_
purposes, each in its own way, must take account. This is the
“Ultimate Reality” or “Absolute” of Metaphysics. In Metaphysics we
regard it from the special standpoint of the scientific intellect.
There are other legitimate attitudes towards it, _e.g._, that of
practical religion. § 3. The inseparability of reality from
immediate experience involves the recognition of it as teleological
and as uniquely individual. § 4. The experience within which all
reality falls cannot be my own, nor yet the “collective” experience
of the aggregate of conscious beings. It must be an individual
experience which apprehends the totality of existence as the
harmonious embodiment of a single “purpose.” The nearest analogue
our own life presents to such a type of experience is to be found in
the satisfied insight of personal love. § 5. The experience of such
an “Absolute” must not be thought of as a mere reduplication of our
own, or of the scientific hypotheses by which we co-ordinate facts
for the purposes of inference. § 6. Our conception is closely
connected with that of Berkeley, from which it differs by the stress
it lays on the purposive and selective aspect of experience. § 7.
Realism, both of the Agnostic and of the Dogmatic type, is
incompatible with the meaning we have been led to attach to
“Reality.” But Agnosticism is justified in insisting on the
limitations of our knowledge of Reality, and Dogmatic Realism in
rejecting the identification of Reality with experience as a merely
cognitive function of finite percipients. § 8. Subjectivism,
according to which all that I know is states of my own
“consciousness,” is irreconcilable with the admitted facts of life,
and arises from the psychological fallacy of “introjection.”

§ 1. In the preceding book we have seen that the very nature of the
metaphysical problem predetermines the general character of the answer
we are to give to it. What our intellect can accept as finally real, we
saw, must be indissolubly one with actual experience, and it must be an
internally coherent system. In the present book we have to discuss more
in detail the structure which must belong to any reality possessing
these general characteristics. The present chapter, then, will be
devoted to an examination of the implications of the experiential
character of real Being; in the next, we shall deal with the nature of
its unity as a single system.

We may perhaps most conveniently begin our discussion with a
re-definition of some of our principal terms. We have hitherto spoken of
the object of metaphysical knowledge indifferently as “Being,” “What
is,” “What truly exists,” and as “Reality,” “the ultimately real.” So
far as it is possible to draw a distinction between these two sets of
names for the same thing, we may say that each series lays special
stress on a somewhat different aspect of our object. When we say that a
thing “is” or “has Being,” we seem primarily to mean that it is an
_object_ for the knowing consciousness, that it has its place in the
system of objects which coherent thought recognises. When we call the
same object “real” or a “reality,” we lay the emphasis rather on the
consideration that it is something of which we categorically _must_ take
account, whether we like it or not, if some purpose of our own is to get
its fulfilment.[31] Thus again the “non-existent” primarily means that
which finds no place in the scheme of objects contemplated by consistent
scientific thought; the “unreal,” that with which we have not, for any
human purpose, to reckon.

This is what is often expressed by saying that reality means what is
independent of our own will, what exercises resistance, what constrains
or compels our recognition, whether we like it or not. Philosophers have
pointed out that this way of putting the case is only half the truth.
The “stubborn” facts or realities which, as we commonly say, force us to
recognise them, only do so in consequence of the presence in us of
definite interests and purposes which we cannot effect without adapting
ourselves to the situation expressed by our statement of the “facts.”
What lies entirely outside my interests and plans gets no kind of
recognition from me; it is “unreal” for me precisely because I have no
need to take account of it as a factor to be reckoned with in the
pursuit of my special ends. Thus, so long as we use the term in a
relative sense and with reference to the special ends of this or that
particular agent, there may be as many different orders of “reality” as
there are special purposes, and what is “real” for the agent inspired by
one purpose may be unreal for his fellows whose purposes are different.
Thus, for example, to an English Christian living at home in England the
rules of “caste” in India are usually for all practical purposes unreal;
he has no need to take their existence into account as a condition of
the successful prosecution of any of his aims and interests; for him
they have no more significance than the rules of legal procedure adopted
in Wonderland. But for the historian of Indian society, the native Hindu
Christian, and the devout worshipper of Shiva, the rules of caste are a
true reality. Not one of the three can execute _his_ special purposes
without taking them into account and allowing them to operate in
determining his way of proceeding to his goal. Again, the kind of
reality which the rules of caste possess for each of our three men is
different, in accord with the differences in their characteristic
purposes. For the historian, they are real as a system of ideas which
have influenced and do influence the conduct of the society of which he
is writing the history, in such a way that without understanding them he
cannot get a clear insight into the social structure of Hinduism. To the
native Christian, they are real as a standing source of difficulty and a
standing temptation to be false to his highest ideals of conduct. To the
Shivaite, they are real as the divinely appointed means to bodily and
spiritual purification from the evil that is in the world.

§ 2. So far, then, it might seem that “reality” is a purely relative
term, and that our previous choice of ultimate freedom from
contradiction as our standard of reality was an arbitrary one, due to
the mere accident that _our_ special purpose in sitting down to study
Metaphysics is to think consistently. Of course, it might be said,
whatever game you choose to play at, the rules of that particular game
must be your supreme reality, so long as you are engaged in it. But it
depends on your own choice what game you will play and how long you will
keep at it. There is no game at which we all, irrespective of personal
choice, have to play, and there is therefore no such thing as an
ultimate reality which we must all recognise as such; there are only the
special realities which correspond to our special individual purposes.
You have no right to set up the particular rules of the game of
scientific thought as a reality unconditionally demanding recognition
from those who do not choose to play that particular game.[32]

Such an argument would, however, be beside the point. It is true that
the special nature of the facts which any one of us recognises as real
depends on the special nature of his individual purposes. And it is true
that, precisely because we are, to some extent, genuine individuals, no
two men’s abiding purposes are identically the same. It is therefore
true, so far as it goes, that Reality wears a different and an
individual aspect for each of us. But it is emphatically not true that
there is no identical character at all about the purposes and interests
of different individuals. The very recognition of the fact that any one
individual purpose or interest can only get expression by accommodating
itself to a definite set of conditions, which constitute the reality
corresponding to that purpose, carries with it the implication that the
world is ultimately a system and not a chaos, or, in other words, that
there is ultimately a certain constitution of things which, under one
aspect or another, is of moment for all individuals, and must be taken
into account by every kind of purpose that is to get fulfilment. If the
world is systematic at all,—and unless it is so there is no place in it
for definite purpose of any kind,—it must finally have a structure of
such a kind that any purpose which ignores it will be defeated. All
coherent pursuit of purpose, of whatever type, must therefore in the end
rest on the recognition of some characteristics of the world-order which
are unconditionally and absolutely to be taken into account by all
individual agents, no matter what the special nature of their particular
purposes. This is all that is meant when it is said that the reality
investigated by Metaphysics is absolute, or when the object of
metaphysical study is spoken of as the Absolute.

We may, in fact, conveniently define the Absolute as that structure of
the world-system which any and every internally consistent purpose must
recognise as the condition of its own fulfilment To deny the existence
of an Absolute, thus defined, is in principle to reduce the world and
life to a mere chaos. It is important, however, to bear in mind that in
Metaphysics, though we are certainly concerned with the ultimate or
absolute Reality, we are concerned with it from a special point of view.
Our special purpose is to _know_, or to think coherently, about the
conditions which all intelligent purpose has to recognise. Now this
attitude of scientific investigation is clearly not the only one which
we can take up towards the ultimately real. We may, for instance, seek
to gain emotional harmony and peace of mind by yielding up the conduct
of our practical life to the unquestioned guidance of what we directly
feel to be the deepest and most abiding elements in the structure of the
universe. This is the well-known attitude of practical religion. _Primâ
facie_, while it seems to be just as permissible as the purely
scientific attitude of the seeker after truth, the perennial “conflict
of religion and science” is sufficient to show that the two are not
identical. How they are related is a problem which we shall have, in
outline, to consider towards the end of our inquiry; at present it is
enough for our purpose to recognise them as divergent but _primâ facie_
equally justified attitudes towards what must in the end be thought of
as the same ultimate reality. As Mr. Bradley well says, there is no sin
which is metaphysically less justifiable than the metaphysician’s own
besetting sin of treating his special way of regarding the “Absolute” as
the only legitimate one.

§ 3. To return to our detailed investigation of the connection between
Reality as now defined for the metaphysician, and Experience. We can now
see more completely than before why it is only in _immediate_ experience
that reality is to be found. Our reason for identifying reality with
immediate experience has nothing to do with the theory according to
which “sensations,” being the product of a something “without the mind,”
are supposed to carry with them a direct certificate of the independent
existence of their “external” cause. For we have seen: (1) that
immediacy means simply indissoluble union with a whole of feeling, and
that this immediacy belongs to every mental state as actually lived
through; (2) that the dependence of sensations in particular on an
“external” cause, is in no sense an immediate datum of experience, but a
reflective hypothesis which, like all such hypotheses, demands
examination and justification before it can be pronounced legitimate;
(3) that it is a philosophical blunder to identify the real with the
merely “independent” of ourselves. What is merely independent, as we
have now seen, would for us be the merely unreal. Presence in immediate
experience is a universal character of all that is real, because it is
only in so far as anything is thus presented in immediate unity with the
concrete life of feeling that it can be given as a condition or fact of
which an individual interest must take account, on pain of not reaching
accomplishment. Actual life, as we have already learned, is always a
concrete unity of feeling in which the two distinguishable aspects of a
psychical fact, its existence and its content, the that and the what,
though distinguishable, are inseparable. Scientific reflection on the
given we found to be always abstract, in the sense that its very essence
is the mental separation of the content from the process. By such
separation we mediately get to know the character of the separated
content better, but our knowledge, with all its fulness, still remains
abstract; it is still knowledge referring to and about an object outside
itself. It is only when, as a result of the reflective process, we find
fresh meaning in the individual process-content on its recurrence that
we return once more to the concrete actuality of real existence.

Now, we may express this same result in another and an even more
significant way. To say that reality is essentially one with immediate
feeling, is only another way of saying that the real is essentially that
which is of significance for the attainment of purpose. For feeling is
essentially teleological, as we may see even in the case of simple
pleasure and pain. Amid all the confusion and complexity of the
psychological problems which can be raised about these most simple forms
of feeling, one thing seems clear, that pleasure is essentially
connected with unimpeded, pain with impeded, discharge of nervous
activity. Pleasure seems to be inseparable from successful, pain from
thwarted or baffled, tendency.[33] And if we consider not so much the
abstractions “pleasure in general,” “pain in general,” as a specific
pleasure or pain, or again a complex emotional state, the case seems
even clearer. Only a being whose behaviour is consciously or
unconsciously determined by ends or purposes seems capable of finding
existence, according as those purposes are advanced or hindered,
pleasant or painful, glad or wretched, good or bad. Hence our original
decision that reality is to be found in what is immediately experienced,
as opposed to what is severed by subsequent reflective analysis from its
union with feeling, and our later statement that that is real of which
we are constrained to take account for the fulfilment of our purposes,
fully coincide.

This point may perhaps be made clearer by a concrete example. Suppose
that some purpose of more or less importance requires my immediate
presence in the next town. Then the various routes by which I may reach
that town become at once circumstances of which I have to take note and
to which I must adapt my conduct, if my important purpose is not to be
frustrated. It may be that there are alternative routes, or it may be
that there is only one. In any case, and this is fundamental for us, the
number of alternatives which my purpose leaves open to me will be
strictly limited. I can, as a matter of mere mathematical possibility,
go from A to B in an indefinite number of ways. If I have to make the
journey in actual fact on a given day, and with existing means of
transit, the theoretical infinity of possible ways is speedily reduced
to, at the outside, two or three. For simplicity’s sake we will consider
the case in which there happens to be only one available way. This one
available way is “real” to me, as contrasted with the infinity of
mathematically possible routes, precisely because the execution of my
purpose restricts me to it and no other. The mathematically possible
infinity of routes remain unreal just because they are thought of as all
alike mere possibilities; no actual purpose limits me to some one or
some definite number out of the infinity, and compels me to adapt myself
to their peculiarities or fail of my end. They are “imaginary” or
“merely possible” just for want of specific relation to an experience
which is the expression of a definite purpose.

This illustration may lead us on to a further point of the utmost
importance, for it illustrates the principle that the real as opposed to
the merely “possible” or “merely thought of” is always individual. There
was an indefinite number of mathematically conceivable ways from A to B;
there was only one, or at least a precisely determinate number, by which
I could fulfil a concrete individual purpose. (Thus, if I have to make
the journey to B in a given time, I _must_ take the route followed by
the railway.) So universally it is a current common-place that while
thought is general, the reality about which we think and of which we
predicate the results of our thought is always individual. Now, what is
the source or principle of this individuality of the real as opposed to
the generality of the merely conceivable? It is precisely that
connection of reality with actual purpose of which we have spoken. The
results of thought are general because for the purposes of scientific
thinking we isolate the _what_ of experience from its _that_; we
consider the character of what is presented to us apart from the unique
purpose expressed in the experience in which it comes to us. In other
words, the problems of scientific thought are all of the form, “How must
our general purpose to make our thought and action coherent be carried
out under such and such typical conditions?” never of the form, “Of what
must I take account for the execution of this one definite purpose?” The
reason for this difference is at once apparent. In making “this definite
purpose” a topic for reflection, I have _ipso facto_ abstracted its what
from its that and converted it into a mere instance or example of a
certain type. It was only while it remained this purpose as actually
immanent in and determining the immediate experience of actual life that
it was a completely determinate unique _this_; as reflected on it
becomes a type of an indefinite number of similar possibilities.

Now, it is necessary here to observe very carefully that it is from the
unique individuality of the purpose expressed in an actual experience
that the objects or facts of immediate experience derive the
individuality in virtue of which we contrast them with the generalities
or abstract possibilities of science. It is the more necessary to dwell
explicitly on this point, because there is a common but erroneous
doctrine that the individuality of actual existence is derived from its
occupying a particular place in the space and time orders. Scientific
truth is general, it is often said, because it refers alike to all
places and times; actual “fact” is individual because it is what is
_here_ and _now_. But we should be able to see that such an account
directly inverts the real order of logical dependence. Mere position in
space and time can never be a true “principle of individuation,” for the
simple reason that one point in space and one moment in time, considered
apart from the things and events which fill them, are, at any rate for
our perception,[34] indistinguishable from all other points and moments.
It is, on the other hand, precisely by their correlation with unique
stages in lives which are the embodiment of unique and individual
purpose, that places and times and the things and events which occupy
them become for us themselves unique and individual. _Here_, for me,
means where I now am, and _now_, this unique and determinate stage in
the execution of the purposes which, by their uniqueness, make me unique
in the world. Thus we seem to have reached the significant conclusion
that to say “Reality is experience” involves the further propositions,
“Reality is through and through purposive” and “Reality is uniquely
individual.”

§ 4. We have already seen that to identify reality with experience does
not mean identifying it with my own experience just as it comes to me in
actual life, still less with my own experience as I mentally reconstruct
it in the light of some conscious or unconscious philosophical theory.
My own experience, in fact, is very far from satisfying the conditions
of completeness and harmony which we found in our last book to be
essential to a “pure” or perfect experience. Its defectiveness is
principally manifested in three ways. (1) As we have already seen, its
contents are always fragmentary. It never contains more than the poorest
fragment of the whole wealth of existence. The purposes or interests
which make up my conscious life are narrowly limited. The major portion
of the facts of the universe, _i.e._ of the conditions of which note has
to be taken by its inhabitants if their aims are to be fulfilled, lie
outside the range of my individual interests—at least, of those which I
ever become explicitly aware. Hence, being without significance for my
individual purposes, they do not directly enter into my special
experience. I either know nothing of them at all, or know of them only
indirectly and through the testimony of others for whose lives they have
real and direct significance. And these others again are, in virtue of
the individual interests which differentiate them from me, only
partially cognisant of the same factual reality as I am.

(2) Again, my insight even into my own aims and interests is of a very
limited kind. For one thing, it is only a fragment of them which is ever
given in the form of what is immediately felt in an actual moment of
experience. I have largely to interpret the actually felt by theoretical
intellectual constructions which reach, in the form of memory, into the
past, and, in the form of anticipation, into the future. And both these
types of intellectual construction, though indispensable, are
notoriously vitiated by fallacies. For another, even with the fullest
aid of such intellectual construction, I never succeed in completely
grasping the whole meaning of my life as the embodiment of a single
coherent purpose. Many of my purposes never rise sufficiently into clear
consciousness to be distinctly realised, and those that do often wear
the appearance of having no systematic connection with one another.
Small wonder, then, that the realities or “facts” of which I learn to
take note for the execution of my aims more often than not appear to
belong to a chaos rather than to the orderly system which we cannot help
believing the world to be, could we see it as it truly is.

(3) Finally, I have the gravest grounds for the conviction that even of
the realities of which I do take note I never perceive more than just
those aspects which attract my attention just because they happen to be
significant for my special interests. What startling experiences teach
us in the case of our fellow-men may be true everywhere, namely, that
everything that is has an infinity of sides to it, over and above those
of which we become aware because of their special importance for our own
purposes; there may be an infinite wealth of character in the most
familiar things, to which we are blind only because, so to speak, it has
no “economic value” for the human market. For all these reasons we are
absolutely forbidden to identify our own limited experience with the
experience of which we have said, that to be real is to be bound up with
it, and to be bound up with it is to be real. Neither, again, can we
identify this experience with the “collective experience” of the
aggregate of human or other finite sentient beings in the universe. This
is obvious for more reasons than one. To begin with, “collective
experience,” if it has any meaning at all, is a contradictory
expression. For experience, as we have seen, is essentially
characterised by unique individuality of aim and interest; in this sense
at least, a true experience must be that of an individual subject, and
no collection or aggregate can be an individual subject. The so-called
“collective experience” is not one experience at all, but simply an
indefinite multiplicity of experience, thrown together under a single
designation. And even if we could get over this difficulty, there
remains a still more formidable one. The various experiences of finite
individuals are all, we have said, fragmentary and more or less
incoherent. You cannot, therefore, get an experience which is
all-comprehensive and all-harmonious by adding them together. If their
defect were merely their fragmentariness, it would be conceivable that,
given an outside observer who could see all the fragments at once, they
might constitute a whole by merely supplementing one another’s
deficiencies. But our finite experiences are not only fragmentary, but
also largely contradictory and internally chaotic. We may indeed believe
that the contradictions are only apparent, and that _if_ we could become
fully conscious of our own inmost aims and purposes we should at the
same moment be aware of all Reality as a harmonious system; but we never
do, and we shall see later that just because of our finitude we never
can, attain this completed insight into the significance of our own
lives. Hence the experience for which all reality is present as a
harmonious whole cannot be any mere duplicate of the partial and
imperfect experiences which we possess.

We thus seem driven to assert the necessary existence of a superhuman
experience to which the whole universe of being is directly present as a
complete and harmonious system. For “reality” has been seen to have no
meaning apart from presence in a sentient experience or whole of
feeling, while it has also been seen infinitely to transcend all that
can be given as directly present to any limited experience. If this
conclusion is sound, our “Absolute” can now be said to be a conscious
life which embraces the totality of existence, all at once, and in a
perfect systematic unity, as the contents of its experience. Such a
conception clearly has its difficulties; how such an all-containing
experience must be thought to be related to the realm of physical
nature, and again to our own finite experiences, are problems which we
shall have to take up in our two succeeding books. We shall find them
far from simple, and it is as well for us from the first to face the
possibility that our knowledge of the character of the absolute
experience may prove to be very limited and very tentative. That it is
we seem compelled to assert by the very effort to give a coherent
meaning to our notion of reality, but of what it is we may have to
confess ourselves largely ignorant.

But we may at least go so far as this, at the present stage of our
argument. However different an all-containing coherent experience may be
in its detailed structure from our own piecemeal and largely incoherent
experience, if it is to be experience at all, it must apprehend its
contents in the general way which is characteristic of direct experience
as such. It must take note or be aware of them, and it must—if it is to
be a direct experience at all—be aware of them as exhibiting a
structural unity which is the embodiment of a consistent plan or
purpose. We have to think of it as containing in a systematic unity not
only all the “facts” of which our various experiences have to take note,
but all the purposes which they express. Hence it is natural for us,
when we attempt to form some approximate concept of such an ultimate
experience in terms of our own conscious life, to conceive it as the
union of perfected knowledge in an indivisible whole with supreme will.
We must, however, remember that, for such an experience, precisely
because of its all-comprising character, the what and the that are
inseparable. Hence its knowledge must be of the nature of direct insight
into the individual structure of the world of fact, not of
generalisation about possibilities, and its will must have the form of a
purpose which, unlike our own, is always consciously expressed with
perfect harmony and completeness in the “facts” of which it is
aware.[35] Hence knowledge and will, involving as they do for us
discrepancy between the what and the that of experience, are not wholly
satisfactory terms by which to characterise the life of the
Absolute.[36] The most adequate analogue to such a life will probably be
found in the combination of direct insight with satisfied feeling which
we experience in the relation of intimate and intelligent love between
persons. The insight of love may be called “knowledge,” but it is
knowledge of a quite other type than the hypothetical universals of
science. I know my friend, not as one case of this or that general class
about which certain propositions in Physiology, Psychology, or Ethics
can be made, but as—for me at least—a unique individual centre of
personal interest. Again, in my relations with my friend, so far as they
remain those of satisfied love, my individual interests find their
fullest embodiment. But the will to love is not first there in an
unsatisfied form, and the embodiment afterwards added as the result of a
process through means to an end. The purpose and its embodiment are
throughout present together in an unbroken unity, and where this is not
so, true mutual friendship does not as yet exist.[37] After some such
general fashion we shall best represent to ourselves the kind of
consciousness which we must attribute to an all-embracing
world-experience. Only, we must bear in mind that, owing to the
fragmentariness of our own lives, the identity of purpose on which human
friendship rests can never be close and intimate enough to be an
adequate representative of the ultimate unity of all experience in the
Absolute.[38]

§ 5. It may be well to add a word of caution against a plausible fallacy
here. If there is such an Absolute Experience as we have demanded, all
the realities that we know as the contents of our environment must be
present to it, and present to it as they really are in their
completeness. But we must be careful not to suppose that “our”
environment, as it appears to an experience which apprehends it as it
really is, is a mere replica or reduplication of the way in which it
appears to us. For example, I must not assume that what I perceive as a
physical thing, made up of separable parts external to one another and
apparently combined in a mechanical way into a whole which is a mere
collection or aggregate of parts, is necessarily apprehended by the
Absolute Experience as an aggregate of similar or corresponding parts.
The thing as it appears to my limited insight may be no less different
from the thing as apprehended in its true nature by such an experience,
than your body, as it exists for my perception from your body as you
apprehend it in organic sensation. In particular, we must not assume
that things exist for the Absolute Experience in the form into which we
analyse them for the purpose of general scientific theory, for instance,
that physical things are for it assemblages of atoms or individual minds
successions of “mental states.” In fact, without anticipating the
results of succeeding books, we may safely say at once that this would
be in principle impossible. For all scientific analysis is in its very
nature general and hypothetical. It deals solely with types and abstract
possibilities, never with the actual constitution of individual things.
But all real existence is individual.

To put the same thing in a different way, scientific theory deals always
with those features of the _what_ of things of which we take note
because of their significance for our human purposes. And in dealing
with these features of things, it seeks to establish general laws of
linkage between them of which we may avail ourselves, for the practical
purpose of realising our various human interests. This practical motive,
though often not apparent, implicitly controls our whole scientific
procedure from first to last. Hence the one test of a scientific
hypothesis is its success in enabling us to infer one set of facts from
another set, Whether the intermediate links by which we pass from the
one set to the other have any counterpart in the world of real
experience or are mere creations of theory, like the “uninterpretable”
symbols in a mathematical calculus, is from this point of view a matter
of indifference. All we require of our hypothesis is that when you start
with facts capable of experimental verification, the application of it
shall lead to other facts capable of experimental verification. For this
reason we may justifiably conclude that to any experience which is aware
of things in their concrete individuality they must present aspects
which are not represented in our scientific hypotheses, and again cannot
appear to it as the precise counterpart of the schemes according to
which we quite legitimately reconstruct them for the purpose of
scientific investigation. We shall need to bear this in mind in future
when we come to discuss the real character of what appears to us as the
world of physical nature.[39]

§ 6. The conclusion we have reached so far is largely identical with
that of the anti-materialistic argument of Berkeley’s well-known
_Principles of Human Knowledge_ and _Three Dialogues between Hylas and
Philonous_. But there is one important difference between the two
results which will lead to momentous consequences. Berkeley’s argument
against the independent existence of unperceived matter proceeds
throughout on the principle that to be means to be present in an
experience, and his exhibition of the contradictions into which the
denial of this principle leads the supporter of scientific materialism
remains the classic demonstration of the truth of the opposing or
“idealistic” view. But it is to be noted that he works throughout with
an inadequate conception of “experience” and “presence in experience.”
He treats experience as equivalent to mere passive “awareness” of a
quality presented to perception. To experience with him means simply to
be conscious of a presented quality; experience is treated as having, in
psychological terminology, a merely presentational character. Hence he
is led to infer that the things with which experience confronts us are
nothing more than complexes of presented qualities, or, as he phrases
it, that their whole being consists in being perceived.

The full extent of the paradox which this identification of the _esse_
of material things with _percipi_ involves, will be more apparent when
we come to deal in our next book with the problem of matter. At present
I merely wish to call attention to one of its many aspects. On the
theory that experience is purely passive and presentational, consisting
merely in the reception of certain sensations, the question at once
arises, What determines what in particular the sensations we at any
given moment receive shall be? On the Berkeleian view, their order must
be determined altogether from without by a principle foreign to the
experience which, he assumes, has nothing to do but to cognise the
qualities put before it. Hence he is led to appeal to the agency of God,
whom he supposes directly and immediately to cause perceptions to
succeed one another in my experience in a certain definite order. Now,
apart from further difficulties of detail, this doctrine at once leads
to the result that the attitude of God to the world of things is totally
different from that of us who experience it. Experience is to me a
purely passive receptivity of presentations; God’s relation to the
presented objects, on the other hand, is one of active production. There
is no common element in these fundamentally contrasted relations; hence
it is really a paralogism when Berkeley allows himself to bring God
under the same categories which he applies to the interpretation of
human experience, and to attribute to Him a consciousness of the things
which have been declared to be only the presentations His agency raises
in the human mind.[40]

Berkeley is, in fact, inconsistently combining two conflicting lines of
thought. He argues, on the one hand, that since there must be some
reason for the order in which presentations succeed one another in my
mental life, that reason is to be found in a source independent of
myself. This source he identifies with God, but, as far as the argument
goes, it might equally well have been found, as by Locke, in the
original constitution of matter; all that the argument requires is that
it shall be placed in something outside the succession of presentations
themselves. On the other hand, he also argues that since the existence
of the physical world means simply the fact of its being presented to
consciousness, when its contents cease to be present to my consciousness
they must be present to that of God. And here again the objection might
be suggested, that if presence to my own experience, while it lasts, is
an adequate account of the _esse_ of a thing, it does not appear why I
should recognise the reality of any other experience. If I am to hold
that disappearance from my experience does not destroy the reality of
anything, I must logically also hold that its being, while I perceive
it, is not exhausted by _my_ awareness of it. Its _esse_ cannot be
merely _percipi_.

The complete solution of Berkeley’s difficulty would be premature at
this point of our discussion. But we may at once point out its principal
source. It arises from his failure to take adequate account of the
purposive aspect of experience. Experience, as we have seen, is not mere
awareness of a succession of presented objects, it is awareness of a
succession determined by a controlling interest or purpose. The order of
my experiences is not something simply given me from without, it is
controlled and determined by subjective interest from within. Berkeley,
in fact, omits selective attention from his psychological estimate of
the contents of the human mind. He forgets that it is the interests for
which I take note of facts that in the main determine which facts I
shall take note of, an oversight which is the more remarkable, since he
expressly lays stress on “activity” as the distinguishing property of
“spirits.”[41] When we make good the omission by emphasising the
teleological aspect of experience, we see at once that the radical
disparity between the relation of the supreme and the subordinate mind
to the world of facts disappears. I do not simply receive my presented
facts passively in an order determined for me from without by the
supreme mind; in virtue of my power of selective attention, on a limited
scale, and very imperfectly, I recreate the order of their succession
for myself.

Again, recognition of the teleological aspect of all experience goes far
to remove the dissatisfaction which we may reasonably feel with the
other half of Berkeley’s argument. When I conceive of the “facts” of
experience as merely objects presented to my apprehension, there seems
no sufficient reason for holding that they exist except as so presented.
But the moment I think of the succession of presented facts as itself
determined by the subjective interests expressed in selective attention,
the case becomes different. The very expression “selective attention”
itself carries with it a reminder that the facts which respond to my
interests are but a selection out of a larger whole. And my practical
experience of the way in which my own most clearly defined and conscious
purposes depend for their fulfilment upon connection with the interests
and purposes of a wider social whole possessed of an organic unity,
should help me to understand how the totality of interests and purposes
determining the selective attention of different percipients can form,
as we have held that it must, the harmonious and systematic unity of the
absolute experience. The fuller working out of this line of thought must
be left for later chapters, but it is hardly too much to say that the
teleological character which experience possesses in virtue of its unity
with feeling is the key to the idealistic interpretation of the
universe.[42]

Idealism, _i.e._ the doctrine that all reality is mental, as we shall
have repeated opportunities of learning, becomes unintelligible when
mental life is conceived of as a mere awareness of “given”
presentations.

§ 7. We may now, before attempting to carry out in detail our general
view of what is involved in being real, enumerate one or two
philosophical doctrines about the nature of real existence which our
conclusion as to the connection of reality with experience justifies us
in setting aside. And, first of all, we can at once see that our
previous result, if sound, proves fatal to all forms of what is commonly
known as _Realism_. By Realism is meant the doctrine that the
fundamental character of that which really is, as distinguished from
that which is only imagined to be, is to be found in its independence of
all relation to the experience of a subject. What exists at all, the
realist holds, exists equally whether it is experienced or not. Neither
the fact of its existence nor the kind of existence it possesses depends
in any way upon its presence to an experience. Before it was experienced
at all it had just the same kind of being that it has now you are
experiencing it, and it will still be the same when it has passed out of
experience. In a word, the circumstance that a mind—whether yours or
mine or God’s is indifferent to the argument—is aware of it as one of
the constituents of its experience, makes no difference to the reality
of the real thing; experience is what is technically called a relation
of one-sided dependence. That there may be experience at all, and that
it may have this or that character, there must be real things of
determinate character, but that there may be real things, it is not
necessary that there should be experience. This is, in brief, the
essence of the realist contention, and any philosophy which accepts it
as valid is in its spirit a realist philosophy.

As to the number and nature of the supposed independent real things,
very different views may be held and have been held by different
representatives of Realism. Thus some realists have maintained the
existence of a single ultimate reality, others of an indefinite
plurality of independent “reals.” Parmenides, with his doctrine that the
real world is a single uniform unchanging material sphere, is an
instance in the ancient, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, with his Unknowable,
an instance in the modern world of a realist of the former or “monistic”
type. The ancient atomists, and in more recent times Leibnitz with his
infinite plurality of independent and disconnected monads, and Herbart
with his world of simple “reals,” afford the best known instances of a
doctrine of pluralistic Realism. So again, the most diverse theories
have been propounded as to the nature of the “reals.” Ancient and modern
atomists have thought of them as material, and this is perhaps the form
of realistic doctrine which appeals most readily to the ordinary
imagination. But though a materialistic metaphysician is necessarily a
realist, a realist need not be a materialist. Herbart thought of the
independent “reals” as qualitatively simple beings of a nature not
capable of further definition, Leibnitz as minds, while Agnostic
philosophers of the type of Spencer conceive their ultimate reality as a
sort of neutral _tertium quid_, neither mental nor material. The only
point on which all the theories agree is that the reality of that which
they recognise as true Being consists in its not depending for its
existence or its character on relation to an experience. The differences
of detail as to the number and nature of independent “reals,” though of
great importance for our complete estimate of an individual realist’s
philosophical position, do not affect our general verdict on the
tenability of the first principle of Realism.

The one point of divergence among realists which may be considered as of
more than secondary importance for our present purpose, is the
difference between what we may call Agnostic and Dogmatic Realism.
Agnostic Realism, while asserting the ultimate dependence of our
experience upon a reality which exists independently of experience,
denies that we can have any knowledge of the nature of this independent
reality. The independent reality by which all experience is conditioned
is, on this view, an Unknowable or Thing-in-itself,[43] of which we are
only logically entitled to say _that_ it certainly is, but that we do
not in the least know _what_ it is. The doctrine of Agnostic Realism has
probably never been carried out by any thinker with rigid consistency,
but it forms a leading feature of the philosophy of Kant as expounded in
his First Critique, and through Kant has passed into English thought as
the foundation of the systems of Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Herbert
Spencer.[44]

Dogmatic Realism, of which Leibnitz and, at a later date, Herbart are
the most important representatives in modern philosophy, on the
contrary, while maintaining that real being is independent of
experience, at the same time holds that it is possible to have positive
knowledge not only of its existence but of its nature. In principle,
both these forms of Realism have been already excluded by the argument
of Book I. chap. 2, § 4. The supreme importance of the principle on
which the argument rests may perhaps warrant us in once more briefly
recurring to it. Our reasoning, it will be remembered, took the form of
a challenge. Produce any instance you please, we said to the realist,
whom we had not then learned to know by that name, of what you
personally regard as reality, and we will undertake to show that it
derives its reality for you from the very fact that it is not ultimately
separable from the experience of a subject. A thing is real for you, and
not merely imaginary, precisely because in some aspect of its character
it enters into and affects your own experience. Or, what is the same
thing in other words, it is real for you because it affects favourably
or otherwise some subjective interest of your own. To be sure, the thing
as it enters into your experience, as it affects your own subjective
interests, is not the thing as it is in its fulness; it only touches
your life through some one of its many sides. And this may lead you to
argue that the real thing is the unexperienced “condition” of a
modification of your experience. But then we had again to ask what you
mean by saying that facts which you do not experience are real as
“conditions” of what you do experience. And we saw that the only meaning
we could attach to the reality of the “condition” was presence to an
experience which transcends your own.

To this general argument we may add two corollaries or supplementary
considerations, which, without introducing anything fresh, may help to
make its full force more apparent.

(1) The argument, as originally presented, was concerned directly with
the _that_ of reality, the mere fact of its existence. But we may also
state it, if we please, from the side of the _what_, the nature
possessed by the real. You cannot affirm any doctrine about the real
existence of anything without at the same time implying a doctrine about
its nature. Even if you say “Reality is unknowable,” you are attributing
something beyond mere independence of experience to your reality; you
are asserting that what is thus independent possesses the further
positive quality of transcending cognition. Now what, in logic, must be
your ground for attributing this rather than any other quality to your
independent reality? It can only be the fact or supposed fact—which is
indeed regularly appealed to by the Agnostic as the foundation of his
belief—that our experiences themselves are all found to be
self-contradictory. There is no ground for taking the unknowability of
Reality to be true unless you mean by it a character which belongs not
to something which stands outside all experience, but to experience
itself. The same contention applies to any other predicate which the
realist affirms as true of his ultimate reality.

(2) Again, we may with effect present our argument in a negative form.
Try, we may say, to think of the utterly unreal, and see how you will
have to conceive it. Can you think of sheer unreality otherwise than as
that of which no mind is ever aware, of which no purpose has ever to
take account as a condition of its fulfilment? But to think of it thus
is to attribute to it, as its definition, precisely that independence in
which the realist finds the mark of ultimate reality. And if
“independence” constitutes unreality, presence to and union with
experience must be what constitutes reality.

Yet, however fatal this line of argument may be to the principle of the
realistic contention, we ought not to be satisfied with such a mere
general refutation. We must try to see what is the element of truth in
the realistic views to which they owe the plausibility they have always
possessed for minds of a certain type. In Philosophy we are never really
rid of an error until we have learned how it arises and what modicum of
truth it contains.

(1) _Agnostic Realism._ We may begin with Agnosticism, with which we
ought now to have no serious difficulty. Agnostic Realism, as we have
seen, is in principle a doubly self-contradictory theory. For it
combines in one breath the irreconcilable declarations that the reality
of things is unknowable and that it knows it to be so.[45] Further, as
we have just said, it makes alleged contradictions which only exist in
and for experience, its sole ground for affirming that something, of
which we can only specify that it is _outside_ all experience,
transcends cognition. To have grasped these two points is to have
disposed of Agnosticism as a metaphysical theory.

Yet with all its defects Agnosticism still enshrines one piece of truth
which the metaphysician is peculiarly prone to forget. Of all men the
metaphysician, just because his special interest is to know something
final and certain about Reality, is the most apt to exaggerate the
amount of his certain knowledge. It is well to be reminded that the
certainty with which we may say that Reality is experience is compatible
with a very imperfect and limited theoretical insight into experience
itself. In actual life this is a far from unfamiliar fact; the
literature of common sense is full of observations to the effect that we
never really know our own hearts, that the most difficult task of the
sage is to understand himself, and so forth,—complaints which all turn
on the point that even our own limited direct experience of our own
meanings and purposes goes far beyond what we can at any moment express
in the form of reflective knowledge. Yet it is easy, when we come to
deal in Metaphysics with the nature of ultimate Reality, to forget this,
and to suppose that the certainty with which we can say that the
ultimately Real is an experience justifies us in wholesale dogmatising
about the special character of that experience. As a protest against
such exaggerated estimates of the extent of our theoretical knowledge of
the nature of Reality, Agnosticism thus contains a germ of genuine and
important truth, and arises from a justifiable reaction against the
undue emphasising of the merely intellectual side of our experience, of
which we have already seen, and shall hereafter still more fully see,
ground to complain as a besetting weakness of the metaphysically minded.

(2) _Dogmatic Realism_, that is, Realism with admittedly knowable
independent “reals,” is a much more workable doctrine, and in one of its
forms, that of the so-called “naïve realism” which supposes the world of
experienced things with all its perceived qualities to exist
independently of any relation to an experiencing subject in precisely
the same form in which we experience it, fairly represents the ordinary
views of unphilosophical “common-sense” men. Nothing seems more obvious
to “common sense” than that my perception of a thing does not bring it
out of nothing into existence, and again does not create for it new
qualities which it had not before. It is because the thing is already
there, and has already such and such a nature, says “common sense,” that
I perceive it as I do. Therefore the whole world of perceived things
must exist independently in the same form in which they are perceived,
as a condition of my perception of them.

When this view comes to be worked out as a philosophical theory, it
usually undergoes some transformation. The fact of illusion, and the
experimentally ascertained subjective differences between individual
percipients,[46] or between different states of the same percipient,
make it hard for the realist who wishes to be scientific to maintain
that _all_ the perceived qualities of experienced things are equally
independent of the experiencing subject. Reflection usually substitutes
for the “naïve” realism of everyday life, a theory of “scientific”
realism according to which the existence and some of the known
properties of the experienced world are independent of the experiencing
subject, while others are regarded as mere secondary effects arising
from the action of an independent reality on the subject’s
consciousness. With the further differences between the various types of
scientific realism, according to the special properties which are held
to belong to things independently of the percipient subject, we are not
at present concerned.[47]

It is, of course, clear that our general argument against the existence
of any reality except as in an experience tells just as much against
“naïve” realism and its more reflective outgrowth “scientific” realism
as against Agnosticism. But the very plausibility and wide diffusion of
realistic views of this type make it all the more necessary to reinforce
our contention by showing what the truth Realism contains is, and just
where it diverges from truth into fallacy. Nor is it specially difficult
to do this. The important elements of truth contained in Realism seem to
be in the main two. (i) It is certain that a thing may be real without
being consciously present as a distinguishable aspect in my experience.
Things do not begin to exist when I begin to be aware of them, or cease
to exist when I cease to be aware of them. And again, the fact that I
make mistakes and am subject to illusion shows that the qualities of
things are not necessarily in reality what I take them to be. (2)
Further, as is shown by the fact of my imperfect understanding of my own
feelings and purposes, something may actually be an integral part of my
own life as an experiencing subject without my clearly and consciously
recognising it as such when I reflect on the contents of my experience.

But precisely how much do these two considerations prove? All that is
established by the first is the point on which we have already insisted,
that it is not _my_ experience which constitutes Reality; and all that
is established by the second, that experience, as we have already
repeatedly seen, is not merely cognitive. But the admission of both
these positions brings us not one step nearer the conclusion which the
realist draws from them, that real existence is independent of all
experience. Because it is easy to show that the reality of a thing does
not depend on its being explicitly recognised by any one finite
percipient or any aggregate of finite percipients, and again, that there
is more in any experience of finite percipients than those percipients
know, the realist thinks he may infer that there are realities which
would still be real though they entered into no experience at all. But
there is really no logical connection whatever between the premisses of
this inference and the conclusion which is drawn from them.

This may be made clearer by a couple of examples. Take, to begin with,
the case of the mental life of my fellow human beings. And, to state the
case in the form in which it appears most favourable to the realist
conclusion, let us imagine an Alexander Selkirk stranded on a barren
rock in the midst of the ocean. The hopes and fears of our Selkirk are
independent of my knowledge of them just as completely and in just the
same sense in which the existence and conformation of the rock on which
he is stranded are so. I and all other inhabitants of the earth may be
just as ignorant of Selkirk’s existence and of what is passing in his
mind as we are of the existence and geological structure of his rock.
And again, what Selkirk explicitly cognises of his own inner life may
bear as small a proportion to the whole as what he explicitly cognises
of the properties of his rock to the whole nature of the rock. Yet all
this in no wise shows that Selkirk’s hopes and fears and the rest of his
mental life are not experience or have a reality “independent of
experience.” Hopes and fears which are not experience, not psychical
matter of fact, would indeed be a contradiction in set terms. And what
the argument fails to prove of Selkirk’s mental life, it fails, for the
same reason, to prove of Selkirk’s rock.

We may pass from the case of the mental life of a fellow-man to the case
of unperceived physical reality. A recent realist philosopher, Mr. L. T.
Hobhouse, has brought forward as a clear instance of an independent
physical reality, the case of a railway train just emerging from a
tunnel. I do not perceive the train, he says, until it issues from the
tunnel, but it was just as real while it was running through the tunnel.
Its reality is therefore independent of the question whether it is
perceived or not. But, in the first place, the argument requires that
the train shall be empty; it must be a runaway train without driver,
guard, or passengers, if the conditions presumed in the premisses are to
be fulfilled. And, in the second place, we may retort that even an empty
runaway train must have been despatched from somewhere by somebody. It
must stand in some relation to the general scheme of purposes and
interests expressed in our system of railway traffic, and it is
precisely this connection, with a scheme of purposes and interests,
which makes the runaway train a reality and not a mere fiction of an
ingenious philosopher’s imagination. If Mr. Hobhouse’s argument proves
the independent reality of the train in the tunnel, it ought equally to
prove, and does equally prove, the independent existence of Selkirk’s
fluctuations from hope to despair and back again on his isolated rock.
And precisely because it proves both conclusions equally, the sort of
independence it establishes cannot be independence of experience. Like
all realist arguments, it turns on the identification of experience with
the cognitive aspect of experience, an identification too often
suggested by the language of the “idealists” themselves.[48]

§ 8. The persistent vitality of Realism is due to its protest against
the fallacies of an opposing theory which has of late especially found
favour with some distinguished students of natural science, and which we
may conveniently call Subjectivism.[49] Realism, as we saw, started from
the true premisses, that there are real facts of which my experience
does not make me explicitly aware, and that my cognition even of my own
experience is incomplete, and argued to the false conclusion that there
are therefore realities independent of any experience. Subjectivism
reasons in the opposite way. It asserts truly that there is no reality
outside experience, and then falsely concludes that I can know of no
reality except my own cognitive states. Its favourite formula are
expressions such as, “We know only the modifications of our own
consciousness,” “All we know is our own perceptions,” “Nothing exists
but states of consciousness.” These formulæ are not all obviously
identical in meaning, but the exponents of Subjectivism seem to use them
without any conscious distinction, and we shall probably do the theory
no injustice if we criticise it on the assumption that the expressions
are meant to be of identical signification.

Now it is clear that the logical consequences of the subjectivist
doctrine are so subversive of all the practical assumptions upon which
daily life is based, that they should require the most stringent proof
before we give our assent to them. If Subjectivism is true, it follows
immediately that not merely the “whole choir of heaven and furniture of
earth,” but the whole of humanity, so far as I have any knowledge of its
existence, is a mere subjective affection of my own “consciousness,” or,
as the scientific subjectivist usually, for some not very obvious
reason, prefers to say, of my own brain. Every argument which the
subjectivist can produce to show that “things” are, for my knowledge at
any rate, “modifications of my own consciousness,” applies to the case
of my fellow-men with as much force as to the case of the inorganic
world. The logical inference from the subjectivist’s premisses, an
inference which he is rarely or never willing to draw, would be that he
is himself the sole real being in a world of phantoms, not one of which
can with any certainty be said to correspond to a real object. And
conversely, any valid ground for recognising the existence of my
fellow-men as more than “states of my own consciousness,” must equally
afford ground for admitting the reality, in the same general sense, of
the rest of the world of things familiar to us from the experiences of
everyday life.[50] For if any one of the things composing the world of
practical life has a reality which is not dependent upon its presence to
my particular experience, then there is the same reason for believing
that every other such thing has a like reality, unless there happen to
be special grounds for regarding the perception to which it is present
as an hallucination.

We must not, however, simply dismiss the subjectivist theory in this
summary way. We must examine the doctrine in detail sufficiently to
discover where the fallacy comes in, how it arises, and what modicum of
sound philosophic insight it may possibly contain. To take these three
points in logical order—

(_a_) The current arguments for Subjectivism are often so stated as to
confuse together two quite distinct positions. When it is said that what
we perceive is “our own subjective states,” the meaning intended may be
either that there is, at least so far as I am able to know, no real
existence in the universe except that of my “states of consciousness”;
or again, that there are such realities, but that the _properties_ which
I perceive do not belong to them in their own nature but are only
subjective effects of their action upon my “consciousness,” or, if you
prefer to speak in physiological language upon my nervous system. Now,
many of the arguments commonly urged by the subjectivist would at most
only prove the second conclusion, in which the subjectivist agrees to a
large extent with the scientific realist. Thus it is an _ignoratio
elenchi_ to reason as if the facts of hallucination, illusion, and
discrepancy between the reports of different percipients or different
sense-organs of the same percipient gave any support to the special
doctrine of Subjectivism. These facts, which, as we have seen, are
equally appealed to by scientific realists, prove no more than that we
do not always perceive the world of things as it is, and as it must be
thought of if we would think truly,—in other words, that there is such a
thing as error.

Now the problem “How is it possible for us to think or perceive
falsely?” is, as the student of Greek philosophy knows, both difficult
and important. But the existence of error in no way shows that the
things which I perceive are “states of my own consciousness”; on the
contrary, error is harder to explain on the subjectivist theory than on
any other. For if what I perceive has some kind of existence distinct
from the mere fact of my perceiving it, there is at least a possibility
of understanding how the reality and my perception of it may be
discrepant; but if the existence of a thing is only another name for the
fact that I perceive it, it seems impossible that I should perceive
anything except as it is. On the subjectivist theory, as Plato showed in
the _Theaetetus_, every percipient being ought, at every moment of his
existence, to be infallible.

We may confine our attention, then, to the grounds which the
subjectivist alleges for the former conclusion, that nothing can be
known to exist except my own “states of consciousness,” and may dismiss
the whole problem of erroneous perception as irrelevant to the question.
Now the general argument for Subjectivism, however differently it may be
stated by different writers, consists, in principle, of a single
allegation. It is alleged as a fact in the Psychology of cognition, that
things are immediately perceived by us as modifications of our own
sensibility, or “states of our own consciousness,” and that it is
therefore impossible to get behind this ultimate condition of all
perception. Against this psychological doctrine we have to urge (1) that
it is in flagrant contradiction with the certain facts of actual life;
and (2) that, as a doctrine in Psychology, it is demonstrably false.

(1) There are certain realities, admitted by the subjectivist himself,
which are manifestly _not_ “states of my consciousness,” and of which I
yet, as the subjectivist himself admits, have a genuine though imperfect
knowledge; such realities are, _e.g._, the ends and purposes of my
fellow-men, and again many of my own ends and purposes. It is allowed on
all hands that I can know not only the fact of the existence of other
men, but also, to some extent at least, the character of their various
purposes and interests. This is involved, for instance, in the simple
fact that when I read a letter it is normally possible for me to
understand the writer’s meaning. It is equally involved in the fact that
I can know the truth of any ordinary historical matter of fact, _e.g._,
the date of the great fire of London. Neither the date of the fire of
London nor the meaning of my correspondent’s sentences is a “state of my
consciousness” in any intelligible sense of the words, yet both are
typical instances of the kind of facts of which our ordinary knowledge
of the world of everyday life and practice wholly consists. And what is
true of facts relating to the deeds and purposes of others is equally
true of my own deeds and purposes. The facts which make up my own life
cannot, without violence to language, be reduced to “states of my
consciousness.” For instance, I may know that I have a certain
temperament or disposition, _e.g._, that I am irascible by temperament
or of a sentimental disposition; but though my knowing these truths
about myself may in a sense be called a state of my consciousness, the
truths themselves cannot be called “states of my consciousness” without
a serious logical fallacy of equivocal middle term.

(2) This will be made clearer by a consideration of the psychological
principle invoked by the subjectivist. What the subjectivist means when
he says that in perception I am aware only of the states, or subjective
modifications, of my own consciousness, is that the object of which each
perceptive state is aware is simply itself as a perceptive state; the
perception perceives itself and nothing else. _E.g._, when I say I see
red, what I am really aware of is that I am in a state of perceiving
red; when I say I hear a noise, what I am aware of is that I am in a
state of hearing a noise, and so universally. Now this is so far from
being a truth, that it is absolutely and demonstrably false. We may, in
fact, definitely lay it down that the one thing of which no one, except
the introspective psychologist, is ever aware is his own perceptive
state in the act of perceiving, and that, even in the case of the
psychologist who sets himself purposely to study his own states, no
perceptive state ever perceives itself. What I am aware of when I look
at a red surface is not “myself-as-perceiving-red,” but the splash
of red colour itself. When I see a man, I do not perceive
“myself-as-seeing-a-man,” but I perceive the other man. So when I
take a resolution to act in a certain way or realise that I
am in a certain mood, what I am directly aware of is not
“myself-as-forming-the-resolution” or “myself-as-in-the-mood,” but the
resolution or the mood. Even when, as an introspective psychologist, I
sit down to study the formation of resolutions or the peculiarities of
emotional moods by reflection on my own experience, the state in which I
study the formation of a resolution or the nature of a mood is not
itself the state of resolving or of experiencing the mood in question.
We cannot too strongly insist that, if by “self-consciousness” is meant
a cognitive state which is its own object, _there is no such thing, and
it is a psychological impossibility that there should be any such thing,
as self-consciousness. No cognitive state ever has itself for its own
object. Every cognitive state has for its object something other than
itself._[51]

Even where I make an assertion about my subjective condition, as when I
say “I know I am very angry,” the state of knowing about my feeling is
as distinct from the feeling itself as the state of knowing that I see
red is from the red colour that I see. What the subjectivist does is to
confuse the two. Because the act of knowing is itself a state of the
knowing subject, and because in some cases the knowledge may again have
reference to some other state of the same subject, he infers that what I
know at any moment is my own subjective condition in the act of knowing.
In other and more technical words, he confuses the cognitive act or
state with its own object. To what absurd results this confusion would
lead him, if he were logical in the inferences he makes from it, we have
already seen. We can now see that psychologically the confusion is a
double one. (1) The subjectivist confuses experience with mere awareness
of a presented content. He ignores the presence of the true “subjective”
factor of selective attention throughout experience, and is thus led to
forget that all experiences imply an element which is in the
experiencing mind but not _presented to it_. (2) And in confining his
attention to the presentational aspect of experience, he goes on to
confound the presented content with the fact of its presentation. As
against this second confusion it is essential to a true theory of
knowledge to emphasise three points of distinction between the presented
content or object of a cognitive state and the state itself, considered
as a process in the history of an experiencing subject. (1) The
cognitive state is never its own object, it _refers_ to or _cognises_ an
object distinct from its own existence as a psychical occurrence. This
is the truth which Realism distorts into the doctrine that the object of
knowledge must have a reality of “independent of” experience. (2) The
object of knowledge is never created by the occurrence of the psychical
state in which a particular percipient becomes aware of its existence.
This is just as true of so-called “merely ideal” objects as of physical
things. The properties of the natural logarithms or of the circular
functions in trigonometry are just as independent of my knowledge of
them as the qualities of the trees and animals I should see if I turned
from my writing desk and looked out at the window. (3) The object of
knowledge has always a character of which only a fragment is ever
presented to my perception or reflection in any cognitive state. Every
cognitive state _refers to_ or _stands for_ a great deal more than it
directly means to me.

(3) The origin of the subjectivist fallacy, as has been brilliantly
shown by Avenarius,[52] is to be found in the “intrasubjective
intercourse” of a plurality of percipients capable of communicating
their experience to each other. So long as I am dealing solely with
myself as an experiencing being and my relation to my own environment,
there is no possibility of a subjectivist interpretation. In my own
direct experience I have to do neither with “mental states” nor with
mere “objects of cognition,” but with _things_ which in various ways by
their interference assist or hinder the accomplishment of my various
purposes, and of which I have therefore to take note, so as to adapt my
ways of reaching my ends to their ways of behaviour. Hence the “natural”
view of the world, for a single experiencing being, would be that of
“naïve realism,” to which the things forming my environment are real in
precisely the same sense in which I am real myself. But as soon as I
have to take account of the experiences of other percipients, there
arises an inevitable fallacy which leads to philosophical consequences
of the gravest kind. Starting with the assumption that the things I
perceive are the real things, I feel a difficulty as to how the same
things can be perceived by the other percipients around me. _E.g._, if
the sun I see is the real sun, what about the sun seen by some one else?
Instead of finding the true explanation, that all the percipients are in
relation to a common environment which is independent of its presence to
any one percipient’s experience, I very naturally fall into the mistake
of thinking the things perceived by other men to be “ideas” or
“percepts” of the real things perceived by me. These perceptual copies
of the real things I, for obvious reasons, locate somewhere “in” the
organisms of my fellow-percipients. Then I go on to interpret my own
experience in terms of the theory I originally devised to meet the case
of my fellow-men, and infer that what I myself perceive is a set of
“percepts” or “ideas” produced “in” my organism by a reality “outside”
all experience. And it is then an easy step to the final conclusion
that, inasmuch as all known and knowable things are mere “ideas in some
one’s head,” nothing else exists. Subjectivism is thus the last step in
the development of the fallacy which begins with what Avenarius calls
“introjection.” Just as we learned that the existence of our fellow-men
is the cardinal fact of experience which affords the most immediate
refutation of the subjectivist theory, so the original source of the
subjectivist fallacy is failure to recognise their experience as being
on the same level of reality as our own.

(4) We need not say much on the element of truth which Subjectivism
preserves in a distorted form. We have seen that, as against Realism,
Subjectivism is right in maintaining the indissoluble unity of real
being with experience, though it twists this truth into an absurdity by
first identifying experience with my own limited and imperfect
experience and then giving a false psychological interpretation of the
nature of that experience itself. How a reality can be independent of
presentation in _my_ experience and yet be in its very nature dependent
upon experience for its existence and character, has already been
sufficiently illustrated. But we may perhaps say that even in the
identification of experience with my own experience there is an
underlying substratum of genuine philosophic truth. For, as we have more
than once insisted, there is manifestly a great deal more in my own
experience than what is at any time present as the object of conscious
cognition. Or, as Mr. Bradley is fond of putting it, there is always
more _in_ my mind than _before_ it. I am never fully aware at any moment
even of the full nature of my own purposes and feelings. This is why the
deceitfulness of my own heart has become a common-place of religious
self-examination as well as of worldly wisdom.

Again, every increase of insight into our own real feelings and purposes
involves increased insight into the feelings and purposes of the other
feeling beings with whom we stand in the various relations of social
intercourse.[53] Hence it might fairly be contended that fully to know
your own meaning, fully to understand what you want, would imply
complete insight into the structure of the whole world of reality,—in
fact, that self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe must ultimately
be the same thing. The systematic unity of the whole world of experience
may be so complete that there is nothing in it anywhere which does not
correspond to some element in the experience of every one of its
members. Each member may, like the monads of Leibnitz, represent the
whole system though at very different levels of coherency and from very
different points of view. But such a conception, though it would concede
to Subjectivism that whatever forms a part of the system of real being
somehow falls within my individual experience, would take as the
foundation of its assertion that very distinction between what is
implicitly present _in_ my experience and what is explicitly _before_ it
which Subjectivism consistently ignores. Whether the doctrine as thus
re-stated can be affirmed as more than a fascinating possibility, we
shall be better able to judge when we have discussed in our next chapter
the systematic unity of Reality.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 13,
14; T. Case, _Physical Realism_, pt. 1; L. T. Hobhouse, _The Theory of
Knowledge_, pt. 3, chap. 3, _The Conception of External Reality_; H.
Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i. chap. 7 (pp. 207-231 of vol. i. in Eng.
trans.); J. S. Mackenzie, _Outlines of Metaphysics_, bk. i. chap. 3,
_Theories of Metaphysics_; J. Royce, _The World and the Individual_,
First Series (Lecture on the First Conception of Being).

-----

Footnote 31:

See, in particular, Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second
Series, Lecture 1, for a telling elaboration of this thought. I should
note that I do not myself use the term “existence,” as is sometimes
done, with special restriction to the sense of presence as a sensible
event at a particular point of space and time. When so used, it is, of
course, much narrower in scope than the term “Being.”

Footnote 32:

Compare the brilliant but not altogether convincing argument of
Professor James, in _The Will to Believe_.

Footnote 33:

See the whole treatment of question of feeling in Dr. Stout’s _Manual
of Psychology_. I do not, of course, mean that “consciousness of
activity” successful or thwarted as a fact precedes and conditions
pleasure-pain. On the contrary, it is a familiar fact of experience
that we often learn what our purposes are for the first time by the
pain which attends their defeat. _E.g._, a man may first realise that
he is, and has been, in love by his pain at his mistress’s preference
of a rival suitor. And nothing seems more certain than that many
pleasures are quite independent of “actual conation,” as Plato long
ago recognised.

I must take this opportunity to guard once for all against some
plausible misconceptions. (_a_) When I speak of feeling as “purposive”
or “teleological,” I do not mean to make what, to my own mind, would
be the monstrous assumption, that it necessarily presupposes
_conscious_ anticipation of its guiding end or purpose. All that I
mean is that the processes of conscious life are as a matter of fact
only intelligible with reference to the results in which they
culminate and which they serve to maintain; or again, that they all
involve the kind of continuity of interest which belong to attention.
(_b_) If attentive interest is not necessarily actual conation, actual
conscious effort, still less is it necessarily actual _will_. For me,
as for Mr. Bradley (see his article in _Mind_ for October 1902), where
there is no ideal anticipation of the result of a process there is
neither actual desire nor actual will. And since I cannot see that all
attention implies ideal anticpation, I certainly could not agree with
Prof. Royce that ultimate Reality is simply the “internal meaning of
an _idea_.”

My own meaning will be made clearer by reference to the illustration
given at the beginning of this note. A man first realises that he has
been in love because he feels pained at a rival’s success. So far as
this is so, I should say, there has been no actual conation, and _a
fortiori_, no actual will or desire. But—and this is my point—he would
not feel the pain unless the success of the rival thwarted the
successful issue of a specific psychophysical tendency of an
essentially forward-reaching or teleological kind. The failure may for
the first time make him aware of the presence of the tendency, but it
must previously have been there as a condition of its own failure.

Footnote 34:

This qualification has to be added to avoid prejudging the very
difficult question whether “position” itself is “relative” or
“absolute.” Fortunately our argument is independent of the
determination of the problem. Even if there should be differences
between points as “absolute” as the difference between red and blue,
our contention would retain its force.

Footnote 35:

For otherwise the facts which lay outside the purposes or interests of
the Absolute would be “foreign” facts “given” from without and not in
systematic harmony with its experience as a whole. The complete
systematic unity of all facts would thus fall outside what was to be,
_ex hypothesi_, an all-containing experience. _Q.E.A._

Footnote 36:

For further reflections upon the unsatisfactoriness of such a
conception of the Absolute as the “union of Thought and Will,” see Bk.
IV. chap. 6, § 1, where it is shown that knowledge and will alike, as
actual knowledge and actual will, belong only to finite beings.

Footnote 37:

_I.e._ if _will_ be taken strictly to mean an actual volition, love
and a “will to love” cannot co-exist; if we take will improperly to
mean a “standing” interest of purpose, the case is different.

Footnote 38:

The student of the history of Philosophy will be reminded of the
grounds on which Spinoza objects to ascribe “intellect” and “will” in
the proper sense of the terms to his God, as well as of the “knowledge
of the third or intuitive kind” and the “infinite intellectual love”
of God for Himself which are so prominent in the fifth part of the
_Ethics_. Similar considerations have sometimes led to a preference
for the term “organic” rather than “purposive” or “teleological,” as
expressive of the ultimate unity of experience. The word “organic,”
however, might suggest biological conceptions of growth, dependence on
an external environment, etc., which would be out of place. But the
student may compare with what has been said of the “purposive”
character of individuality Spinoza’s conception of the being of a
thing as a _conatus in suo esse perseverandi_.

Footnote 39:

For a full examination of the relation between reality and scientific
symbolism, consult Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, part 1. The
more clearly it is realised that scientific hypotheses are essentially
a system of mathematical symbolism, the more impossible it becomes to
suppose that they deal directly with the concrete nature of things.

Footnote 40:

In _Principles of Human Knowledge_, §§ 70-75, Berkeley indeed seems on
the very verge of denying that God Himself “perceives” the “ideas”
which by His action He excites in us. But at § 139 we find that a
“spirit” means “that which perceives ideas, and wills and reasons
about them,” and in the third Dialogue it is expressly stated that
sensible things are “perceived by God” [Works, Edit. in Bohn’s
Libraries, vol. i. p. 368]. In fact, from the psychological standpoint
of Berkeleian sensationalism, to deny God’s possession of “ideas”
(_i.e._ sense-contents) would have been tantamount to denying His
spirituality.

Footnote 41:

Unfortunately Berkeley, like so many philosophers, thought of
“activity” as primarily an external relation between a “cause” and the
material on which it “works.” This is probably why he failed to
realise the “active” character of the perceptual process.

Footnote 42:

The reader will do well to compare with the whole of the foregoing
section the treatment of perception as essentially teleological in Dr.
Stout’s _Manual of Psychology_,^3 bk. iii. pt. 1, chap. 2.

I need hardly observe that recognition of the fundamental significance
of purpose and selection for mental life does not of itself entail the
adoption of “voluntarist” views in Psychology. What is fundamental for
real mental life may perfectly well admit of analysis into
hypothetical simpler elements for the purpose of the psychologist.
Thus the admission that all mental life is teleological and selective
need not involve the adoption of such metaphysical theories of
activity as are adversely criticised by Mr. Bradley in his _Appearance
and Reality_, chap. 7, or the introduction of a peculiar
“consciousness of activity” as an unanalysable datum into Psychology.
The antithesis between the actualities of life and the data of
Psychology maintained by Prof. Münsterberg in his _Psychology and
Life_, and _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, if untenable in the extreme
form in which he states it, is important as a corrective of the
opposite tendency to treat as ultimate for psychological analysis
whatever is of supreme importance for life.

Footnote 43:

Thing-_in-itself_, _i.e._ not affected by the—according to this
doctrine—extraneous conditions imposed upon it by relation to an
experiencing mind.

Footnote 44:

The inconsistencies of both Kant and Spencer will illustrate the
reluctance of the human mind to acquiesce in a genuine Agnosticism. In
the _Critique of Pure Reason_ itself Kant so far contradicts himself
as to treat the Thing-in-itself as the cause of sensation, though it
is a fundamental doctrine of his system that the concept of causal
relation can only be legitimately applied to connect facts inside
experience; and in a later work, the _Critique of Judgment_, he
tentatively suggests its identity with Will. Of Mr. Spencer it has
been truly said (I believe by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller in _Riddles of the
Sphinx_) that in the course of his ten volumes of Synthetic Philosophy
he speaks much more positively about the nature of the Unknowable than
dogmatic theology ventures to speak about the nature of God.

Footnote 45:

The sceptics of antiquity, who were more alive to this contradiction
than most of our modern Agnostics, tried to evade the difficulty by
saying that they maintained the unknowability of things not as a
demonstrated certainty, but as a “probable opinion.” But this
distinction is itself illogical, for unless some propositions are
certain there is no ground for considering any one proposition more
probable than another. _E.g._ if I know that a die with six faces has
four pips on each of two faces, and five pips on only one, I can
logically say “it is probable that with this die four will be thrown
oftener than five.” If I am totally uncertain what number of pips is
marked on the various faces, I cannot regard one throw as more
probable than another.

Footnote 46:

_E.g._, peculiarities of the individual’s colour-spectrum, total and
partial colour-blindness, variations in sensibility to musical pitch,
etc., etc.

Footnote 47:

The best known and most popular version of the theory is that of Locke
and of a great deal of our popular science, according to which the
“primary” qualities of matter, _i.e._ those which have to be treated
as fundamental in the physical sciences, are independently real, while
the rest are mere effects produced by their action on our
sense-organs. The more thorough-going metaphysical doctrines of
realists like Leibnitz and Herbart, being much further removed from
the “naïve realism” of unreflective common sense, have never enjoyed
the same currency.

Footnote 48:

Compare Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. p. 178 ff., and
Royce, _World and Individual_, First Series, Lect. 3. Prof. Royce’s
treatment of Realism, though interesting and suggestive, is perhaps a
little too much of a “short and easy way” with the antagonist to be
quite convincing. Mr. Hobhouse’s anti-idealistic argument (_Theory of
Knowledge_, 517-539) seems to me only to hold good against the
“Subjectivism” discussed in our next section, but the reader will do
well to examine it thoroughly for himself.

Footnote 49:

We might also suitably call it Presentationism, if the name were not
already appropriated in a different sense as distinctive of certain
psychological theories. The English reader will find a confused but
typical exposition of Subjectivism in the opening chapters of Prof.
Karl Pearson’s _Grammar of Science_. Subjectivist writers usually call
themselves “idealists,” and regard themselves as disciples of Berkeley
and Hume. Berkeley was, however, a subjectivist, if at all, only in
respect to the physical world, while Hume’s conclusions are purely
sceptical. The reader of Prof. Pearson must carefully observe that the
“descriptive” theory of physical science has no special connection
with Subjectivism, and is, in fact, held by philosophers like Profs.
Ward and Royce, who are not subjectivists.

Footnote 50:

On the existence of my fellow-men as the one real proof of the
objective existence of the physical world, see Royce, _Studies in Good
and Evil_, essay on “Nature, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness,”
and “Mind and Nature,” by the present writer, in _International
Journal of Ethics_ for October 1902. In the latter essay I have, I
think, sufficiently exposed the flimsy reasoning by which
subjectivists attempt to justify belief in the existence of other
human beings from the subjectivist point of view.

Footnote 51:

The self-knowledge which is a fact in real life, as distinguished from
the fictitious self-consciousness of some psychologists, is quite a
different thing and involves two distinct acts of cognition: (1) the
awareness of certain objects of cognition, and (2) the recognition of
those objects as in some way qualifying my “self.” And the “self”
which I recognise as thus qualified is again no immediate datum of
experience, but a largely hypothetical intellectual construction, as
we shall have opportunity to see later on.

This is perhaps the place to add the further remark, that if we would
be rigidly accurate in psychological terminology, we ought to banish
the very expression “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” from
our language. What are really given in experience are attentive
processes with a certain common character. We abstract this character
and give it the name of “consciousness,” and then fall into the
blunder of calling the concrete processes “states” or “modifications”
of this abstraction, just as in dealing with physical things we first
make abstraction of their common properties, under the name of
“matter,” and then talk as if the things themselves were “forms” of
“matter”. _Properly speaking, there are physical things and there are
minds, but there are no such things in the actual world as “matter”
and “consciousness,”_ and we do well to avoid using the words where we
can help it.

Footnote 52:

See _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_, pp. 21-62; and, for the merely
English reader, Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii p. 168 ff.

Footnote 53:

This is true even in what seems at first the the exceptional case of
advance in mere theoretical insight. The more clearly you realise the
character of the problems which your own intellectual pursuits lead up
to and the nature of their solution, the clearer becomes your insight
into the problems and purposes of other workers in the same field.

-----

CHAPTER II

THE SYSTEMATIC UNITY OF REALITY

§ 1. The problem whether Reality is ultimately One or Many is inevitably
suggested to us by the diverse aspects of our own direct experience
of the world. The different theories may be classed, according to
their solution of this problem, as Monistic, Pluralistic, and
Monadistic. § 2. Pluralism starts from the presumed fact of the
mutual independence of human selves, and teaches that this
independence of each other belongs to all real beings. But (_a_) the
independence with which experience presents us is never complete,
nor the unity of the “selves” perfect. (_b_) The theory is
inconsistent with the systematic character of all reality as
presupposed in both knowledge and action. § 3. Monadism again makes
the systematic unity of the real either an illusion or an
inexplicable accident. § 4. Reality, because systematic, must be the
expression of a single principle in and through a multiplicity. The
unity and multiplicity must both be real, and each must necessarily
involve the other. § 5. If both are to be equally real, the whole
system must be a single experience, and its constituents must also
be experiences. A perfect systematic whole can be neither an
aggregate, nor a mechanical whole of parts, nor an organism. The
whole must exist for the parts, and they for it. § 6. This may also
be expressed by saying that Reality is a subject which is the unity
of subordinate subjects, or an individual of which the constituents
are lesser individuals. § 7. The nearest familiar analogue to such a
systematic whole would be the relation between our whole “self” and
the partial mental systems or lesser “selves.” § 8. The nearest
historic parallel to this view is to be found in Spinoza’s theory of
the relation of the human mind to the “infinite intellect of God.”

§ 1. The problem of the One and the Many is as old as Philosophy itself,
and inevitably arises from the earliest and simplest attempts to think
in a consistent way about the nature of the world in which we play our
part. On the one hand, our experience, in the piecemeal shape in which
it first appears as we begin to reflect on it, seems to exhibit an
indefinite plurality of more or less independent things, each pursuing
its own course and behaving in its own way, and connected at best with
only a few of the other members of our environment. There is, for
instance, no obvious connection between one man’s career and those of
most of his contemporaries, to say nothing of the innumerable host of
his predecessors and successors in the race of life. And, similarly, the
behaviour of one inanimate thing seems at first sight to be unaffected
by that of most of the other things around it. The world seems to us at
times to be made up of an indefinite multiplicity of beings who merely
happen to be actors on the same stage, but have, in the majority of
cases, no influence upon each other’s parts.

Yet, on the other hand, there are equally strong _primâ facie_ reasons
for regarding the world as a single unity. Every addition to our
theoretical insight into the structure of things adds to our recognition
of the intimate connection between things and processes which previously
seemed merely disconnected. Physical science, as it grows, learns more
and more to look upon nature as a realm of interconnected events where
no one fact is ultimately entirely independent of any other fact;
political experience and social science alike reveal the intimate
interdependence of human lives and purposes. And, over and above the
ascertained empirical facts which point to the ultimate unity of the
world, there is another potent influence which we might call the
“instinctive” basis for the belief in unity. However discontinuous my
environment may appear, it is never a mere disconnected multiplicity.
The very circumstance that it is throughout _my_ environment, and thus
relative to the ends by which my attention is determined, gives it to a
certain degree the character of a coherent system. At the lowest level
of philosophic reflection, we cannot permanently fail to apprehend our
world as in principle one, precisely because it is _our_ world, and we
ourselves are all in some degree beings of steady systematic purpose,
not mere bundles of disconnected and conflicting impulses. While yet
again, it is the very limitation of our own interests and our lack of
clear insight into their full import which leads us at other times to
find apparent disconnected multiplicity and lack of cohesion in our
world.

The problem of Philosophy in dealing with these rival aspects of the
world of experience then becomes that of deciding whether either of them
can be adopted as the truth in isolation from the other. Or if neither
is the whole truth, we must ask ourselves in what way the world can be
at once One and Many, how the characters of systematic unity and of
indefinite variety can be consistently thought of as belonging to the
same Reality. Is Reality, we have to ask, One or is it Many, and if it
is both, how are the unity and multiplicity connected?

The answers which different philosophical systems have given to this
question may conveniently be classified under three general
denominations. There are (1) the _Monistic_ views, which lay the
principal stress upon the unity of the real, and tend to treat the
aspect of plurality and variety as illusory, or at least as of secondary
importance; (2) the various forms of _Pluralism_, according to which the
variety and multiplicity of real beings is the primary fact, and their
systematic unity either an illusion, or at any rate a subordinate aspect
of their nature; (3) _Monadism_, which aims at harmonising the positions
of the monist and pluralist, by treating the world as a multiplicity of
really independent things or “monads,” which are somehow combined from
without into a system. From this last point of view the plurality and
the systematic unity are alike real and alike important for the
understanding of the world, but are of different origin, the plurality
being inherent in the things themselves, the unity external to them and
coming from a foreign source. Within each of the three main types of
theory there is, of course, room for the greatest divergence of view as
to the special nature of the real. A monistic system may be purely
materialistic, like that of Parmenides, who taught that the world is a
single homogeneous solid sphere, or idealistic like that, _e.g._, of
Schopenhauer; or again, it may treat mind and “matter” as “aspects” of a
common reality. A pluralist or monadist, again, may conceive of each of
his independent real things as a physical atom, as a soul of any degree
of organisation, or even, in the fashion of some contemporary thought,
as a person.

With regard to the relation between this classification of philosophical
theories and that of the last chapter, I may just observe that, while a
monist is not necessarily an idealist, a consistent pluralist or
monadist ought logically to be a realist. For the mutual independence of
the various real things cannot exist without involving in itself their
independence of experience. If A and B are two completely independent
things, then the existence and character of A must be independent of
presence to the experience of B, and similarly A must be equally
independent of presence to the experience of C, or of anything in the
world but itself. And we have already seen that there is always more in
the nature of any finite percipient than can be present to his own
experience. Thus ultimately the existence and qualities of A must be
independent of all experience, including A’s own.[54] For this reason I
cannot but think that the various attempts to combine Pluralism with
Idealism by maintaining that the universe consists of a number of
independent “souls” or “persons,” rest on confusion of thought. These
doctrines appear to be essentially realist in their spirit.

§ 2. We may conveniently attempt to construct our own theory of the One
and the Many by first excluding views which appear mistaken in
principle, and thus gradually narrowing the issues. Among these mistaken
views I am forced to reckon all forms of consistent and thorough-going
Pluralism. Pluralism, so far at least as I am able to see, begins by
misapprehending the facts upon which it professes to base itself, and
ends by giving an interpretation of them which is essentially
irrational. The fundamental fact from which Pluralism starts as an
ultimate datum of all experiences is the familiar one that there are
other men in the world besides myself. My world is not simply a theatre
for the execution of my own aims and the satisfaction of my own wants.
There are interests in it which are not mine, and to which I must adapt
myself if I mean to achieve my own purposes. The world thus contains
minds other than my own, and what makes them _other_ is that the
interests and purposes by which their lives are determined are, like my
own, unique and incommunicable. Now, Pluralism bids us take the facts,
as thus stated, as the model for our conception of the universe. The
pattern upon which the pluralist views of Reality are constructed is
that of a community consisting of a great number of selves or persons,
each with its own unique interests, and each therefore at once
internally simple and indivisible and exclusive of all the rest. In
whatever special form the pluralist thinks of his ultimate realities,
whether as physically indivisible particles, as mathematical points, or
as sentient beings, it is always from the facts of human social life
conceived in this ultra-individualist way that he in the last resort
derives his concept of their simplicity and mutual repulsion.

But (_a_) the facts themselves are not correctly stated. The human
experiences upon which the pluralist relies for his conclusion present
at once too much and too little unity for the purposes of his theory. On
the one hand, the selves or persons composing society are not themselves
simple, undifferentiated unities. Just as your interests and mine may
often collide, so within what the pluralist assumes as the indivisible
unit of my own personality there may be a similar collision. What I call
my “own interests” or my own “apperceptive systems” or “trains of
thought” may exhibit the same kind of incompatibility and the same sort
of conflict for superiority as is found where your ideas and mine clash.
Thus Ethics and Psychology are led to distinguish between my “true” self
and the false selves by which it may on occasion be dominated, between
my “higher” self and the “lower” selves which, in morality, have to be
repressed by the higher, my “permanent” self, and the temporary
interests by which it is often overpowered, to say nothing of
“subliminal” consciousness and “dual” or “alternating personality.” The
“self” is so far from being a mere unit, that the variety and, what is
more, the incompatibility of its contents is a matter of everyday
experience.[55]

Pluralism may, of course, and often does, verbally admit this. The units
of the pluralist, we are often told, are not mere units devoid of
variety, but wholes which are the union of differences. But to concede
this is to cut away the ground from under the pluralist’s feet. If the
variety and the mutual struggle between the elements of the self are not
enough to destroy its unity, by parity of reasoning the multiplicity of
selves in the world and their mutual repulsions are not enough to prove
that the whole of Reality is not, in spite of its multiplicity of
detail, a unity more complete than any of the partial unities to be met
with in our experience. In fact, the pluralist has to meet the following
dilemma. Either his units are mere units without internal variety, and
then it is easy to show that they are the merest nothings, or they have
internal variety of their own, and therefore simply repeat within
themselves the problem they are supposed to solve.

On the other hand, just as the facts of experience show us internal
struggle and repulsion within the supposed units, so they also exhibit
other relations than that of mutual exclusion between the different
units. Human personal interests, for instance, are never merely mutually
exclusive. No society consists of individuals whose purposes and
interests are simply reciprocally repellent. My aims and purposes may
never completely coincide with those of other members of the same
community, yet they have no meaning and could get no realisation but for
the fact that they are, partially at any rate, comprised in the wider
whole of social interests and purposes which makes up the life of the
social organisations to which I belong. As the very etymology of such
words as “society” and “community” shows—to say nothing of the results
of psychological inquiry into the process of learning by imitation—the
conception of human selves as independent units which somehow happen to
stand in merely accidental or external relations is in flagrant conflict
with the most fundamental facts of our social experience. It is only by
the systematic suppression of fact that personal and social life can be
made to support the hypothesis of Pluralism.

(_b_) Again, even if we could accept the pluralist account of the facts,
the theory which Pluralism puts forward to account for them is in the
end unintelligible. What Pluralism does, consciously or unconsciously,
is to separate the unity of the world from its multiplicity. The
multiplicity is supposed to be grounded in the ultimate nature of the
real things themselves, their unity as a system, if they really are a
system, to be imposed upon them from without. We are, in fact, left to
choose between two alternatives. Either the world is not a systematic
whole at all, but a mere chaos of purely independent atoms, in which
case the whole of our thought, with its indispensable presupposition of
the systematic unity of the object of knowledge, is an illusion, or else
the world really is a system, but a system, so to say, by accident. The
things of which the system is composed are real as detached separate
units, but by a fortunate chance they happen all to possess some common
relation to an external _tertium quid_ (for instance, to God), by which
they are combined into a system and thus become knowable as a connected
whole.

Now we cannot, if we are intellectually conscientious, rest finally
content with a statement of this kind, which leaves the plurality and
the systematic unity of the real world side by side as two independent
unconnected facts. If the contents of the world really form a system at
all, in any way whatever, that is itself one fact among others which a
sound metaphysical theory must recognise, and of which it must offer
some intelligible account. _E.g._, suppose you say, with some recent
pluralists, that the world consists of a number of independent persons
or spirits, who nevertheless form a connected system or “moral kingdom,”
in virtue of the fact that they all find their moral ideal in God, the
most perfect among them. You have now not one ultimate fact before you,
the multiplicity of independent selves, but two, this multiplicity and
the relation of each element in it to God. Unless you are going to treat
this second fact as an “ultimate inexplicability,” _i.e._ a fortunate
accident, you are now bound to treat the systematic relation of the
selves to God and through God to each other as no less a part of their
ultimate nature than their distinction from each other. Their
separateness and independence is thus no longer for you the ultimate
truth; they are just as truly one by your account as they are many.
Their union in a system is no longer an external relation foreign to
their own nature, but the deepest truth about that nature itself.

I will repeat the essence of this argument in another form. Any genuine
Pluralism must be resolute enough to dismiss the idea of a systematic
interconnection between its independent realities as an illusion of the
human mind. But in doing so it must, to be consistent, deny the
possibility of their mutual knowledge of each other’s states. Each real
thing must be a little world to itself, shut up within the closed circle
of its own internal content. And thus, supposing Pluralism to be true,
and supposing myself to be one of the real things of the pluralist
scheme, I should have no means of knowing it to be true. Pluralism is
unable to stand the question propounded by Mr. Bradley as the test of a
philosophical doctrine, “Is the truth of this theory consistent with the
fact that I know it to be true?”

The persistent popularity of Pluralism in many quarters is in fact due
to the intrusion into Metaphysics of other than genuinely philosophical
interests. It is maintained, not on its philosophical merits as a
consistent theory, but because it is believed by its adherents to
safeguard certain interests of morality and religion. It gives us, we
are told, a “real God” and “real moral freedom.” But, apart from the
question whether these claims are justified by candid examination of the
doctrine,[56] we must protest against their being allowed any place at
all in a metaphysical discussion. Metaphysics is, from first to last, a
purely speculative activity; its one concern is to think logically about
the constitution of Reality, and the only interests it has a right to
consider are those of consistent logical thought. If consistent logical
thought about ethical and religious problems involves the recognition of
a “real God” and “real freedom,” and if these again are only possible on
the pluralistic theory, then the mere process of consistent thought is
bound in the end to lead us to a pluralistic result, and it is
superfluous to appeal to extra-logical interests in the matter. But if
those who defend Pluralism on the ground that it gives us a “real God”
and “real freedom” mean that, apart from the question of their
intellectual justification, these beliefs ought to be maintained in
Metaphysics because certain persons will be less moral or less happy
without them, we must answer that Metaphysics has nothing to do with
making us moral or happy. It is no proof of the truth of a belief that
it increases my personal virtue or happiness, nor of its falsity that it
diminishes them. And if the study of Metaphysics could be shown to make
certain persons less virtuous or less happy, Metaphysics would still be
in no worse case than Ethics or Medicine. There may be persons for whom
it is undesirable, on grounds of happiness or morality, to devote
themselves to the pursuit of speculative truth, but it is none the less
a lapse from intellectual single-mindedness for the man who has elected
to play the game of speculation to violate its rules by indulging in
constant appeals to speculatively irrelevant issues.[57]

§ 3. The _Monadism_ of Leibnitz was an attempt to effect a compromise
between Pluralism and Monism. According to this view, the universe
consists of an infinite plurality of fundamentally separate beings.
These beings are at once simple and indivisible, and at the same time
each of them contains an infinite variety of internal states. Being
mutually independent, the monads have no genuine relations with each
other; each is conscious only of the succession of its own states. As
Leibnitz expressed it in a metaphor which has become classic, the monad
has no windows. So far the system is pure Pluralism. But at the same
time the unity of the whole system of monads, though “ideal” and not
“real,” is to be genuine. They form a system “ideally,”—_i.e._ for the
understanding of an omniscient spectator,—inasmuch as the internal
states of each monad are adjusted to those of all the rest, or, as
Leibnitz also puts it, inasmuch as each monad “represents” the same
systematic structure from its own special point of view. Hence, though
no monad really perceives or acts upon any other, every monad behaves as
it would _if_ there were mutual perception and interaction between all.
When we ask after the source of this “pre-established harmony,” we meet
with a double answer. On the one hand, its actual _existence_ as a fact
is due to the creative will of God. On the other, it was precisely the
complete adjustment of the internal states of its various monads which
determined God to will the existence of the actual world-order in
preference to that of any other of the indefinitely numerous logically
possible arrangements which He foresaw and might have chosen. This
relation between God and the world-order is further complicated by the
fact that on occasion Leibnitz treats God as simply one, though the
supreme one, among the monads.

Now a system of this kind seems to exhibit all the defects of Pluralism
with certain superadded difficulties of its own. We might reasonably
object that experience presents us with no example of a genuine system
in which all the elements are actually independent. The nearest approach
to such a case seems to be found in the classes of an “artificial
classification,” in which things standing in no relation of interaction
among themselves are put together by us because it is convenient for
some extraneous purpose of our own to comprehend them under a single
point of view. But, apart from the impossibility of constructing a
classification which shall be more than relatively artificial, such a
mere aggregate or collection is not a real system. In a true system, as
distinct from a mere collection, the principle of unity has always some
sort of significance for the members of the system themselves. It
represents, at the least, the way in which the members interact with
each other. (Thus, to take an extreme case, the serial arrangement of
cutting implements in a museum, from the flaked stone of the Palæolithic
age to the latest specimen of Sheffield cutlery, is more than a merely
“artificial” classification, precisely because it is more than a mere
grouping of separate objects according to their likeness and unlikeness;
it represents the stages of a continuous historical evolution.) Now, it
is essential to Monadism that the monads, because ultimately
independent, shall only seem to interact. They appear to form a single
world with a history in which each distinct state of each monad is a
stage. But really, while the successive states of the individual monad
are, what they seem to be, a connected process of development, the
various processes do not make up a single-world history at all. They
only seem to do so by an inevitable illusion. Hence the unity of the
whole system must after all be not only ideal, but, strictly speaking,
imaginary.

Similar difficulties arise from the ambiguous position accorded to God
in the scheme. If the “pre-established harmony” between the states of
the individual monads were simply due to a creative fiat of God, we
should be thrown back upon mere arbitrary chance as the reason, if it
can be called a reason, why existence is not a chaos. But if God’s
choice to create this scheme of things rather than another was due to
the superior attraction which a world with at least the appearance of
connected system had for the divine intellect, then it is ultimately in
the constitution of the divine mind that we have to find the reason why
the alternative possibilities before creation were what they were;[58]
and again, why just this one was preferred to all the rest. And thus the
monads cease to be any longer ultimate and independent, and the nature
of God becomes the single determinate ground of all reality.

It is scarcely necessary to add that Monadism suffers besides from all
the defects which we found in Pluralism. If the monad be made into a
mere unit without internal variety, it ceases to be a thing with a
definite nature at all; and if its unity is compatible with the variety
of its states, there seems to be no special reason why the wealth of
varied existence in the world should lead us to assume a plurality of
independent principles as its ground. It has been pointed out that
Leibnitz was apparently determined in favour of Monadism against Monism
by the assumption that individual human selves are internally simple
units and externally entirely exclusive of each other, an assumption we
have already seen reason to reject.

§ 4. We seem driven, then, to reject the view that the ordered world of
experience can be the expression of a plurality of ultimately distinct
and heterogeneous principles. Because the world as known, or again as
providing for the coherent realisation of practical purposes, is an
orderly system, and on any other supposition coherent knowledge and
consistent action are alike impossible, the world must for Metaphysics
be regarded as the complete embodiment and expression of a single
ultimate principle. We are thus committed to some form of theory of the
type generally known as Monism. The _name_ Monism we may perhaps be
allowed to avoid, as it has gathered about it associations which are apt
to mislead. Among the doctrines most frequently spoken of as monistic
are some which treat the apparent variety and multiplicity of existence
as purely illusory. Again, the name has of late been widely used as the
self-chosen designation of the doctrine according to which “mind” and
“matter” are alike “aspects” or “manifestations” of a third principle
which is neither material nor mental. It should already be clear that
the doctrine indicated by our previous discussions differs widely from
both these types of Monism. We have insisted that the source of fallacy
in Pluralism and Monadism was one-sided emphasis upon one term in the
antithesis of the Many and the One to neglect of the other, and we have
no intention of repeating the mistake for ourselves. Also, we have
already come to the conclusion that Reality, whatever its detailed
structure, is mental in its general character; we can have nothing
therefore to do with a “neutral” or “agnostic” Monism. Our detailed
theory of the relation between the unity of the world and its
multiplicity must do equal justice to both, and it must be consistent
with our previous recognition of the experiential nature of the real.

We may perhaps work out our theory in detail as follows. The world for
knowledge must, we have seen, be an orderly whole or system. To be a
system at all, it must be the development or expression in detail of a
single principle. Therefore it must most certainly be one; it cannot be
a medley of independent elements which somehow luckily happen to form a
coherent collection. But again, because it is a system, it cannot be a
mere unit; it must be the expression of a single principle in and
through a multiplicity of terms or constituents. Not only must it be
both one and many, but it must be many precisely because it is truly
one, and one because it is truly many.[59] Further, we must add that
because the world-system is a perfectly systematic whole, not only is
multiplicity in general necessary to its unity, but each particular
element in the multiplicity is necessitated or logically implied by the
character of the unity. In a complete system no single member can be
missing or be other than it is without the fundamental law of
construction of the whole being changed. Also, we may incidentally
observe that in a complete system the number of distinct terms may be
actually endless, while the law of construction is perfectly
determinate. To think of the world as a single systematic unity, then,
means to think of it as the manifestation in a possibly infinite
multiplicity of detail of one perfectly determinate principle. And, of
course, what we have called the individual elements of the multiplicity
may on inspection themselves turn out to be systems of infinite
complexity determined by a law of construction derived in a determinate
way from that of the complete system, and so on literally _ad
infinitum_. Thus the unity of ultimate principle we demand for Reality
in no way excludes its possession of a wealth of detail infinitely
infinite.

§ 5. We may take a further most important step forward. In the
all-embracing systematic whole the unity and the multiplicity must be
equally real and each must be real through the other. How is this
possible? Only on condition that the whole system forms a single
experience, and that the constituent factors again are single
experiences. This will perhaps be best brought out by examining some
typical case of the kind of unity in multiplicity which is insufficient
for our purpose. (_a_) The unity of the world cannot be that of a mere
collection or aggregate. In a mere aggregate the elements are real
independently of their relation to one another as elements in this
aggregate. So long as we keep strictly to the case of what is no more
than an aggregate, the quality of the elements is entirely unaffected by
their inclusion in the aggregate. The aggregate has no unitary character
of its own which reveals itself in and through the behaviour of its
elements. Its unity consists in nothing more than the fact that we have
found it convenient to think of its elements together. An aggregate of
ten bricks, for instance, has no character as a whole beyond the mere
fact of being thought of in one mental act. It has not even a collective
weight until you put your ten bricks into the same cart, or on the same
scale-pan, and then they have ceased to be a _mere_ aggregate in the
very moment of exerting pressure upon the same surface, and have become
a true material system.

(_b_) Nor can the world of Reality be satisfactorily thought of as a
mere _whole of parts_. A whole of parts approaches indeed more nearly to
the ideal of a true systematic unity than a mere aggregate, inasmuch as
it has a determinate single character as a whole, which manifests itself
in the structure of the various parts. For this reason a geometrical
figure or a machine is much more than a mere aggregate; it has a
character as a whole, and this character is differently expressed by the
construction of the different parts. The figure or machine is thus a
true unity of differences. Yet in this case we cannot really say that
the unity and the variety are equally real. For the whole cannot exist
without the parts, whereas the parts may continue to exist, though not,
of course, _as_ parts of this whole, without the whole. The whole is
constituted by the successive generation or construction of the parts,
and thus may be said to be formed out of pre-existing parts, and the
parts again may survive the destruction of the whole. There is not that
equal reality and complete mutual implication of the two sides which we
have deemed necessary to a genuine systematic unity.

(_c_) An organism is in some respects a truer systematic unity than a
mere whole of parts. It has a systematic character of its own which
manifests itself in and through the difference of its various members.
And here, the whole is not historically subsequent to and generated by
the members. It is not their resultant but their living unity. The
members only come into being along with the whole, and in the course of
its growth as a whole; and though they may, in a sense, continue to
exist after severance from the whole, it is not with the same kind of
existence which belonged to them as members.[60] But an organism, like a
machine, fails to exhibit the perfect systematic unity of the One and
the Many of which we are in quest. In the machine the aspect of
multiplicity was relatively more real than that of unity; in the fully
evolved organism the unity seems more completely real than the
multiplicity. For the unity is a conscious one; in some degree at least
it exists for itself, and its members again for it. Whereas it must be
very doubtful whether the member exists for itself, and still more
doubtful whether the whole exists in any sense for the members. And
though the member cannot retain its peculiar form of existence except as
a member in the whole, yet in even the highest organism the unity is so
far relatively independent that it is unaffected by the removal of some
of the members.

Not every member is of vital significance for the life of the whole. But
in a complete systematic unity, as we saw, the unity and the
multiplicity of the system must be equally real and equally
interdependent. This can only be the case if the whole is for its
members as well as the members for the whole. And that this may be so,
just as the all-embracing whole of reality must, as we have learned, be
an experience, so each of its members must be itself an experience. And
because the members form a single system, just as there can be nothing
in the experience of any member which is not contained in the experience
which is the whole, so, on the other side, there can be nothing in the
whole which does not in some way affect the experience of every member.
Only in this way can we conceive of a systematic Reality in which the
unity and the multiplicity of the system are alike real and equally
real. Such a view is, strictly speaking, hardly to be called either
Pluralism or Monism. It is not Pluralism, for it does not make the unity
of the system an illusion or an inexplicable accident; it is not Monism,
in the current sense of the word, because it does not make the
multiplicity deceptive. If a name is wanted, we might perhaps agree to
call it Systematic Idealism.

§ 6. We may say, then, that Reality is a systematic Experience of which
the components are likewise experiences. It would be much the same thing
if we called it a subject which is the unity of subordinate subjects. It
is tempting again, at first sight, to say it is a self of selves. But
the extreme ambiguity of the term “self” as used in contemporary
Psychology makes it desirable to avoid an expression which is capable of
the gravest misuse.[61] It is scarcely possible to say with any
precision what we mean by one “self,” whereas it is possible in a
general way to say what we mean by one experience. An experience may be
called one and the same in so far as it is the systematised expression
of a single coherent purpose or interest, in so far, in fact, as it has
a teleological unity. In practice it may be impossible to say precisely
when this condition is fulfilled, but the slightest acquaintance with
the psychological facts of the struggle between competing systems of
ideas in normal, and of “dual” and “multiple” personality in abnormal,
mental life is sufficient to show that the limits thus set by our
definition to the single experience do not coincide with those ascribed
to my “self” or “personality” in any of the shifting senses of the
terms. The limits within which experience remains _one_ experience
according to our definition are, as the facts just alluded to show,
often narrower, but again, the definition suggests that they may also be
wider, than any which would currently be given to the “self.”

Moreover, what we have already said as to the possibility of each
“member” of our system being itself a system of lesser systems, forbids
us to identify our view with any doctrine which asserts merely atomic
and simple “selves” as the elements of Reality.

Another way of expressing the same thought would be to say that Reality
is an Individual of which the elements are lesser individuals. The
advantage of this form of expression is that it emphasises the
fundamentally teleological character of the unity of the real, and also
of each and all of its constituents. A thing, as we have already seen,
is individual just so far as it is unique, and only that which is the
embodiment of a single purpose or interest can be unique. A single whole
of experience, owing its unity as a whole precisely to the completeness
and harmony with which it expresses a single purpose or interest, is
necessarily an individual. The all-embracing experience which
constitutes Reality is thus in its inmost nature a complete individual.
And the lesser experiences which form the elements or material content
of Reality are each, just so far as each is truly one experience,
individual in the same sense as the whole. We may thus call Reality a
complete or perfect individual of minor or incomplete individuals.

What the fundamental distinction between the supreme individual whole
and the lesser individuals must be taken to consist in we shall discuss
in our next chapter. Meanwhile we may note two points:—(1) The important
thing about an individual is not its mere numerical unity, but its
qualitative uniqueness. Any experience which we can pronounce to be
individual must be called so, not merely because it is numerically one
and not many, but because it is the consistent and harmonious embodiment
of a coherent purpose. Numerically considered, every such individual is
necessarily many as well as one, precisely because it is a system. This
applies especially to the supreme or absolute individual, the complete
system of experience. It is individual primarily not because it is
numerically one, but because it is the complete expression of a coherent
idea or purpose. It has been the defect of too many monistic theories to
overlook this, and to lay the main stress on the numerical oneness of
the real.

(2) An experience individual in the sense already explained is what we
mean by a “spirit.” Spirit cannot be properly defined by
contradistinction from a supposed non-spiritual reality, such as
“matter,” for such a definition would only amount to the assertion that
spirit is what is not other than spirit; and would tell us nothing of
the term to be defined. Nor, again, is spirit properly defined as a
series of states or modifications of the abstraction “consciousness.”
The positive characteristic by which spiritual existence may be
recognised is that in it the _what_ and the _that_ are combined in the
unity of immediate feeling. And immediate feeling, as we have seen, is
essentially teleological. Where you have a connected system of factors
which can only be understood as a whole by reference to an explicit or
implicit end, which constitutes their unity, you have spirit, and where
you have spirit you have such a system. So that to call reality an
individual of individuals is the same thing as to say that it is a
spiritual system of which the elements, constituents, or terms, are in
their turn spiritual systems.[62] Our doctrine may thus be seen to be
fairly entitled to the name Idealism, which current usage has
appropriated to the view that all existence is ultimately mental.

§ 7. Such a relation as we have asserted between the individual whole of
Reality and the elements or terms within the whole is necessarily
unique, and cannot be adequately illustrated from any less perfect type
of systematic unity recognised by everyday or by scientific thought. In
particular, we must carefully avoid the mistake of conceiving the
relation of the elements to the totality in a mechanical way as that of
“parts” to a “whole of parts”; or, again, in a merely biological way, as
that of “members” to an organism. All such analogies lose sight of the
intimate character of a union in which the elements and the totality
exist not merely in and through, but also for each other.

The individual experiences which compose the supreme experience have a
genuine, if an imperfect and partial, individuality of their own. They
are not in it merely “ideally” or implicitly, as the points on a curve
may be said to be in the periphery. And the whole, again, is a real
individual, not a mere aggregate in which the parts are real but their
unity merely imaginary. We may, if we like, say that it is made up of
experiences or minds, but we must not say that it is a _collection_ of
minds. For a mere collection, as we have seen, in so far as it is a
collection and nothing more, cannot be said to have any genuine
individuality, precisely because it has no teleological unity of
structure beyond that which we arbitrarily, and with reference to ends
lying outside its own nature, impose upon it in the very act of counting
its members, _i.e._ arranging them in serial order. Whether we could
properly speak of the absolute whole as a _society_ of minds is a
further and a more difficult question. A society is much more than a
mere collection: it has a purposive unity of structure which exists not
merely for the sociological observer from without, but for its own
members as active in assigning to each of them his own special place in
relation to all the rest. How far society can be said to have such a
unity _for itself_ is a question which we cannot answer until we have
dealt more fully with the problem of the relation between selfhood and
individuality. And until we have answered it, we must defer the decision
as to whether the systematic individuality of the Absolute would be
adequately recognised if we thought of it as a society. (See _infra_,
Bk. IV. chap. 3.)

If we are to look at this stage for some analogue within our partial
experience for the kind of unity of individuals in a single supreme
individual which we have demanded for the system of Reality, we shall
probably do best to turn to what is after all the most familiar thing in
the world,—our own personal experience. If we consider the nature of any
coherent purpose or “mental system,” we shall find that, as the coherent
embodiment of a purpose, it possesses a degree of individuality of its
own. In proportion to the comprehensiveness, and again to the inner
harmony or systematic structure of the interest it embodies, it
constitutes a genuine self-existing individual whole of the kind which
psychologists recognise as a “self.” And again, in so far as my life
exhibits determinate character, so far do these systematic purposes or
minor “selves” form a larger system, also individual, which may be
called my “total self.” And both the many lesser “selves” and the larger
“self” are real in the same sense of the word. Neither exists merely in
or for the other; the wider or whole “self” is no mere collection or
resultant or product of the more special “selves,” nor are they again
mere results of a theoretical process of analysis and abstraction. In so
far as they are genuine systems at all, they are not mere “parts” of a
whole, but each is the expression, in a concrete conscious life, of the
nature of a larger whole from a special “point of view.” The whole, if
not equally in every part, is yet as a whole present in every part, and
precisely for that reason the category of part and whole is inadequate
to express their relation. Somewhat after this fashion we must conceive
the structure of any individual whole of lesser individuals. Why, in
spite of the analogy, it is desirable not to speak of the whole of
Reality as a “Self,” will be made clearer as we proceed.[63]

§ 8. The view we have formulated is perhaps more closely akin to
Spinoza’s conception of the relation of the human mind to the “infinite
intellect of God,” than to any other historically famous theory.
According to Spinoza, the individual human mind is an “eternal mode of
consciousness which, taken together with all other such ‘modes,’ makes
up the infinite intellect of God.” The meaning of the epithet “eternal”
we cannot, of course, enter into until we have discussed the relation of
the time-process to experience. The rest of the definition pretty
clearly coincides in its general sense with the view we have tried to
expound of the nature of the relation between the supreme experience and
its constituent experiences. For the “modes” of Spinoza are definitely
thought of as genuinely individual manifestations of the nature of his
ultimate reality, “substance” or “God.” Their individuality and their
infinite multiplicity is no result of illusion or illegitimate
abstraction. And, on the other hand, “substance” itself is genuinely
individual; it is no mere abstract name for the common properties of a
number of ultimately independent things.

Most of the adverse criticism which Spinozism has met with, as far at
least as regards its doctrine of the nature of the human mind, seems to
be based on misapprehension about the first of these points. From his
use of the numerical category of whole and part to express the relation
between substance and its modes, Spinoza has incorrectly been taken to
be denying the fact of the genuine individuality of the finite
experience, and therefore to be declaring the very existence of the
finite to be mere baseless illusion. With his doctrine as thus
misinterpreted, ours has, of course, no similarity. Nothing is explained
away by calling it “illusion”; the “illusory” fact is there in spite of
the hard names you choose to bestow on it, and demands explanation no
less than any other fact. Our theory aims not at dismissing finite
individuality as illusion, but at ascertaining what it means, what are
its limits, and how it stands related to the complete individual whole
of experience which Spinoza calls the _infinitus intellectus Dei_.[64]

The mention of Spinoza will no doubt suggest to the reader the famous
doctrine, which has played so large a part in the subsequent development
of philosophical Monism, of the double “aspects” or “attributes” of
Reality. It is from Spinoza that modern Monism has learned the view that
the mental and physical orders are related as two parallel but distinct
manifestations of a common underlying reality, so that to every member
of one order there corresponds a determinate member of the other. The
two are thus everywhere inseparable and everywhere irreducible
“parallel” expressions of a nature which is neither mental nor physical.
On this fundamental point our theory, as will have been seen already,
completely parts company with Spinozism. That the nature of one and the
same common whole should be _equally_ manifested in two entirely
irreducible forms, is a patent impossibility. Either the unity of the
whole or the absolute disparateness of its twin manifestations must be
surrendered if we are to think consistently. Hence we cannot avoid
asking in which of the two series the assumed common nature is more
adequately expressed. According as we answer this question we shall find
ourselves led in the end either to thorough-going Materialism or to
thorough-going Idealism. For our own part, the perception that Reality
is experience and nothing else has already committed us to the view that
both of the seemingly disparate series must in the end be mental. Thus
our doctrine may be said to be much what Spinoza’s would be if the
attribute of “extension” were removed from his scheme, and the whole of
Reality identified with the “infinite intellect of God.”[65]

_Consult further_:—B. Bosanquet, _Essentials of Logic_, lect. 2;
_Logic_, vol. ii. chap. 7; F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_,
chaps. 13, 14, 20; L. T. Hobhouse, _Theory of Knowledge_, pt. 3, chap.
6, “Reality as a System”; H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i. chap. 6 (Eng.
trans., vol. i. pp. 163-191); J. S. Mackenzie, _Outlines of Metaphysic_,
bk. i. chaps. 2, 3; bk. iii. chap. 6; J. E. M‘Taggart, _Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology_, chap. 2.

-----

Footnote 54:

This consideration obviously influenced Leibnitz. It is a much-decried
doctrine in his system that every “monad,” or simple real thing,
perceives nothing but its own internal states; there are no “windows”
through which one monad can behold the states of another. It is easy
to show that this doctrine leads to extremely far-fetched and
fantastic hypotheses to account for the apparent communication between
different monads, but not so easy to show that Pluralism can afford to
dispense with it. See in particular Leibnitz’s _New System of the
Nature of Substances_ (Works, ed. Erdmann, 124 ff.; ed. Gerhardt, iv.
477 ff.; Eng. trans. in Latta’s _Leibnis: the Monadology_, etc., p.
297 ff.), especially §§ 13-17 and _Monadology_, §§ 7-9, 51.

Footnote 55:

See for a recent treatment of this point in its bearing upon the
theory of volition and moral accountability, Mr. Bradley’s article on
“Mental Conflict and Imputation” in _Mind_ for July 1902. There is
probably no part of Psychology which suffers more from an improper
over-simplification of awkward facts.

Footnote 56:

As the reader will readily collect from the preceding discussion, I do
not myself admit that they are justified. On the contrary, I should
hold that any consistent Pluralism must issue in what, if I held it
myself, I should feel compelled to describe as Atheism, and the
doctrine of blind chance as the arbiter of all things. In this matter
I should like to associate myself entirely with the emphatic protest
of Mr. Bradley, in _Mind_ July 1902, p. 313, and with the remarks of
Mr. B. Russell in his work on _The Philosophy of Leibniz_, p. 172. I
need not say that I do not make these remarks for the purpose of
disparagement. By all means, if Atheism is the logical outcome of
consistent thinking, let us say so; what I object to is the constant
appeal to theistic beliefs on the part of metaphysicians who, so far
as I can see, ought to be atheists if they were in earnest with their
own position.

Footnote 57:

For a popular exemplification of the kind of appeal to religious and
ethical interests here objected to, see the first essay in Prof.
James’s _Will to Believe_. I have never been able to understand why
these appeals, if legitimate, should not be allowed in Psychology or
any other science as readily as in Metaphysics. Would Prof. James
regard it as a valid argument for the “timeless self” or the
_Innervationsgefühle_, that some men may be better or happier for
believing in them? Or again, is it in itself an objection to the study
of Ethics that certain persons may become both less moral and less
happy as a consequence of studying it?

Footnote 58:

_N.B._—These possibilities, it must be remembered, though numerically
infinite, are assumed to be qualitatively determinate, being
constituted of the condition of conformity to the logical principle of
non-contradiction. Now there is no reason in the nature of a plurality
of _independent_ things why this principle should be recognised rather
than not.

Footnote 59:

A medley of independent things would not even be really “many.” For
until you can count “first, second, third....” you have not your Many.
And nothing but the terms of a coherent connected series can be
counted. What you can count as many is shown by the very fact of your
ability to count it to have a common nature or ground which permits of
its orderly arrangement, and thus to be part of one system. Compare
Plato, _Parmenides_, 164, 165.

Footnote 60:

As Aristotle more than once says, a human hand, for instance, is not
when severed from the rest of the body a “hand” at all, except
ὁμωνύμως “equivocally,” any more than the “hand” of a statue is a true
hand. (_I.e._ it is only a “true hand” so long as it _does the work_
of a hand. Captain Cuttle’s hook probably deserved the name of “hand”
better than the severed member it replaced).

Footnote 61:

I shall attempt to show in a later chapter (Bk. IV. chap. 3) that, in
any useful signification of the term “self,” Reality is not a “self”
nor yet a mere community of “selves.”

Footnote 62:

Again, I must remind the reader that this recognition of the
teleological character of mind does not in the least preclude the
necessity for psychological analysis of mental states. Still less does
it require us to include in our analysis a volitional element as one
distinguishable aspect or component of the isolated mental state by
the side of others, such as the presentational and emotional aspects.
It might even be contended that a “tripartite” or three-aspect
Psychology commits the mistake of counting in the whole psychical fact
as one of its own components.

Footnote 63:

See _infra_, Bk. IV. chap. 3, where we shall find that the relation of
the individual self to a social whole probably furnishes a still
better, though not altogether satisfactory, illustration of our
principle.

Footnote 64:

For Spinoza’s doctrine see especially _Ethics_, I. 15, 25; II. 11, 40;
III. 6-9; V. 22, 23, with the explanations of any good exposition of
his system, such as that of Pollock or Joachim.

Footnote 65:

See further on the “Parallelistic” doctrine, Bk. IV. chap. 2.

CHAPTER III

REALITY AND ITS APPEARANCES—THE
DEGREES OF REALITY

§ 1. Reality being a single systematic whole, the nature of its
constituent elements is only finally intelligible in the light of
the whole system. Hence each of its “appearances,” if considered as
a whole in itself, must be more or less contradictory. § 2. But some
“appearances” exhibit the structure of the whole more adequately
than others, and have therefore a higher degree of reality. § 3.
This conception of degree of reality may be illustrated by
comparison with the successive orders of infinites and
infinitesimals in Mathematics. It would be the task of a complete
Philosophy to assign the contents of the world to their proper place
in the series of “orders” of reality. § 4. In general any
subordinate whole is real in proportion as it is a self-contained
whole. And it is a self-contained whole in proportion as it is (_a_)
comprehensive, (_b_) systematic; that is, a thing is real just so
far as it is truly individual. § 5. The two criteria of
individuality, though ultimately coincident, tend in particular
cases to fall apart for our insight, owing to the limitation of
human knowledge. § 6. Ultimately only the whole system of experience
is completely individual, all other individuality is approximate. §
7. In other words, the whole system of experience is an infinite
individual, all subordinate individuality is finite. Comparison of
this position with the doctrines of Leibnitz. § 8. Recapitulatory
statement of the relation of Reality to its Appearances.

§ 1. Reality, we have seen, is to be thought of as a systematic whole
forming a single individual experience, which is composed of elements or
constituents which are in their turn individual experiences. In each of
these constituents the nature of the whole system manifests itself in a
special way. Each of them contributes its own peculiar content to the
whole system, and as the suppression or change of any one of them would
alter the character of the whole, so it is the nature of the whole which
determines the character of each of its constituents. In this way the
whole and its constituent members are in complete interpenetration and
form a perfect systematic unity. In the happy phrase of Leibnitz, we may
say that each of the partial experiences reflects the whole system from
its own peculiar “point of view.” If we call the completed system, as it
is for itself, Reality _par excellence_, we may appropriately speak of
the partial experiences in which its nature is diversely manifested as
its Appearances. We must remember, however, that to call them
appearances is not to stamp them as illusory or unreal. They will only
be illusory or unreal when we forget that they are one and all partial
aspects or manifestations of a whole of which none of them adequately
exhausts the contents.

When we forget this and treat any partial experience as though it were
the complete and adequate expression of the whole nature of Reality,—in
other words, when we try to apply to existence or the universe as a
whole conceptions which are only valid for special aspects of
existence,—we shall inevitably find ourselves led to contradictory and
absurd results. Each partial aspect of a total system can only be
ultimately understood by reference to the whole to which it belongs, and
hence any attempt to treat the part in abstraction as itself a
self-contained whole,—or, in other words, to treat the concepts with
which we have to work in dealing with some special aspect of the world
of experience as ultimately valid in their application to the whole
system,—is bound to issue in contradiction. Again, just because our
knowledge of the structure of the system as a whole is so imperfect as
it is, our insight into the structure of its constituents is also
necessarily limited. Hence it will commonly happen that, even within the
limits of their applicability, the special concepts of our various
sciences are not, when thought out, free from internal contradiction.
For instance, we are led to absurd results when we try, as Materialism
does, to interpret the whole system of experience in terms of the
concepts used in the purely physical sciences; and again, even in their
restricted use as physical categories, these concepts seem incapable of
being so defined as to involve no element of contradiction.

In both these senses all Appearance implies an element of contradiction;
only for an insight which could take in at once the whole system of
existence would its details be completely coherent and harmonious. But
this does not alter the fact that, so far as our insight into any part
of the whole and its connection with other parts is self-consistent, it
does convey genuine, though imperfect, knowledge of the whole. Though
our detailed insight into the structure of the whole may never reach the
ideal of perfect self-consistency, yet it may approximate to that ideal
in different degrees, at different stages, or with reference to
different aspects. And the closer the approximation the less the
modification which our knowledge would require to bring it into complete
harmony with itself, and the greater therefore the element of truth
about Reality which it contains.

In particular, we must carefully avoid falling into the mistake of
thinking of the Reality and the world of its appearances as though they
formed two distinct realms. In a systematic unity, we must remember, the
whole can exist only in so far as it expresses its nature in the system
of its parts, and again the parts can have no being except as the whole
expresses itself through them. To the degree to which this condition is
departed from by any of the types of system familiar to us, those
systems fall short of being perfectly systematic. Reality, then, being a
systematic whole, can have no being apart from its appearance, though
neither any of them taken singly, nor yet the sum of them thought of
collectively,[66] can exhaust its contents. And though no appearance is
the whole of Reality, in none of them all does the whole Reality fail to
manifest itself as a whole. The whole is truly, as a whole, present in
each and every part, while yet no part is the whole.[67]

We may once more illustrate by an appeal to our own direct experience.
Consider the way in which we set to work to execute any systematic
scheme or purpose, _e.g._ the mastery of a particular science or a
particular business. We have in such a case a central aim or purpose,
which in the process of execution spreads out into a connected system of
subordinate ideas and interests welded into one by the reference to a
common end which pervades the whole. The supreme or central aim is only
realised in the successive realisation of the subordinate stages; at the
same time, while it is what sustains all the members of the system, it
has no existence apart from them, though it is identical neither with
any one of them nor yet with their sum collectively considered.

§ 2. If our conviction that Reality is a single systematic unity
pervading and manifesting itself in lesser systematic unities is
correct, we shall expect to find that some of the lesser systematic
unities with which we have to deal in practical life and in the various
sciences exhibit more of the full character of the whole to which they
belong than others. The “points of view” from which each minor system
reflects the whole, though all true, need not be all equally true.
Though the whole, in a genuine system, must be present as a whole in
every part, it need not be equally present in all; it may well _not_ be
“_as_ full, _as_ perfect in a hair as heart.” To take a concrete
example, a cluster of mass-particles, a machine, a living organism, and
a human mind engaged in the conscious systematic pursuit of truth, are
all to some degree or other systematic unities, and all to some degree,
therefore, repeat the structure of the universal whole to which they all
belong. But it does not follow that all manifest the structure of that
whole with equal adequacy and fulness. Indeed, any philosophy which
admits development as a genuine feature of the world-process must
maintain that they do not, that the nature of the whole system of
Reality is exhibited with infinitely greater adequacy and clearness in
the working of the conscious mind than in the changes of configuration
of the system of mass-particles or even the vital processes of the
physical organism.

In practical life, too, one of our most ineradicable convictions is that
there are degrees of worth which coincide with degrees of the adequacy
with which partial systems exhibit the nature of the larger wholes to
which they belong. For instance, among the different mental systems
which may be called my partial “selves,” there are some which I call
“truer” than others, on the ground that they more fully reveal my whole
character as an individual human being. My whole character undoubtedly
appears in and determines all the subordinate systems which make up my
mental life. Each of them _is_ the whole character in a special aspect,
or as reacting upon a special system of suggestions, but some of them
contain the whole in a more developed and explicit form than others. I
am in one sense myself wherever I may be and whatever I may be doing,
and yet I am “more myself” in health than in sickness, in the free
pursuit of self-chosen studies than in the forced discharge of
uncongenial tasks imposed on me by the necessity of earning an income.

We ought, then, to be prepared to find the same state of things
universally in the relation of Reality to its Appearances. In a world
where “higher” and “lower,” “more” and “less” true have a meaning, some
of the lesser systems in which the nature of the whole is expressed must
be fuller and more adequate representations of that nature than others.
This is as much as to say that it would require comparatively little
transformation of some of the partial systems recognised by our
knowledge to show how the common nature of the whole system of Reality
is expressed in them; in other cases the amount of transformation
required to show how the whole repeats itself in the part would be much
more extensive. To take a single instance, if our preceding analysis of
the general nature of Reality is sound, we can see much more clearly how
that nature reappears in the structure of a human mind than how it is
exhibited in what we call a physical thing, and we may therefore say the
human mind expresses the fundamental character of the whole system much
more fully and adequately than physical nature, as it exists for our
apprehension. More briefly, the same thought may be expressed by saying
that Reality has degrees, and that the forms of Appearance in which its
common nature is most fully and clearly manifested have the highest
degrees of reality.

§ 3. This conception of Reality as capable of degrees may at first seem
paradoxical. How can anything, it will be asked, be more or less “real”
than anything else? Must not anything either be entirely real or not
real at all? But the same difficulty might be raised about the
recognition of degree in other cases where its validity is now
universally admitted. Thus to some minds it has appeared that there can
be no degrees of the infinite or the infinitesimal; all infinites, and
again all zeros, have been declared to be manifestly equal. Yet it
hardly seems possible to escape the conclusion that the concept of
successive orders of infinitely great, and again of infinitely small,
magnitudes is not only intelligible but absolutely necessary if our
thought on quantitative subjects is to be consistent (When the sides of
a rectangle, for instance, become infinitely great or infinitely small
relatively to whatever is our standard of comparison, it still remains a
rectangle, and its area therefore is still determined by the product of
its sides, and is therefore infinitely great or small, as the case may
be, in relation not only to our original standard but to the sides
themselves.[68]) What is in one sense not a matter of degree, may yet in
another not only admit but positively require the distinction of degrees
of more and less. And this is precisely the case with Reality as it
manifests itself in its various appearances. In the sense that it is the
same single experience-system which appears as a whole and in its whole
nature in every one of the subordinate experience-systems, they are all
alike real, and each is as indispensable as every other to the existence
of the whole. In the sense that the whole is more explicitly present in
one than in another, there is an infinity of possible degrees of reality
and unreality. We should be justified in borrowing a term from
mathematical science to mark this double relation of the appearances to
their Reality, and speaking of them as successive orders of Reality. And
we might then say that it is one of the principal problems of a complete
Philosophy to ascertain and arrange in their proper sequence, as far as
the limitations of our knowledge permit, the orders of Reality.

§ 4. Such a task as this could only be carried out by an intelligence
equally at home in metaphysical analysis and in the results of the
special sciences, and would form the proper work of applied Metaphysics.
In a discussion of general metaphysical principles it is sufficient to
indicate the general nature of the criteria by which the degree of
reality exhibited by any special partial system must be determined. Now,
this general nature has been already made fairly clear by the foregoing
inquiry into the unity of Reality. Reality, we have seen, is one in the
sense of being an individual self-contained whole of experience. And its
individuality means that it is the systematic embodiment of a single
coherent structure in a plurality of elements or parts, which depend for
their whole character upon the fact that they are the embodiment of
precisely this structure. If this is so, we may say that degrees of
reality mean the same thing as degrees of individuality, and that a
thing is real precisely to the same extent to which it is truly
individual.

A thing, that is, no matter of what kind, is really what it appears to
be, just in so far as the thing, as it appears for our knowledge, is
itself a self-contained and therefore unique systematic whole. Or, in
other words, just in so far as what we recognise as one thing shows
itself, in the face of philosophical criticism and analysis, to be a
self-contained systematic whole, so far are we truly apprehending that
thing as a manifestation of the fundamental character of Reality, of
seeing it as it really is, and so far does our knowledge give us genuine
Reality. On the other hand, just so far as what at first seemed a
self-contained whole is discovered by subsequent analysis not to be so,
so far have we failed to see the facts in their true place in the single
whole of Reality, and so far is our knowledge affected with error and
unreality. Or, again, the more truly anything is a self-contained
individual whole, the higher its place in the scale of Reality.

When we ask what are the marks by which one thing may be shown to be
more of a true individual whole than another, we shall find that they
may be reduced to two, both of which we can easily see to be in
principle the same, though, owing to the limitations of our insight,
they do not always appear to coincide in a given case. One thing is
_ceteris paribus_ more truly an individual whole than another: (1) when
the wealth of detailed content it embraces is greater; (2) when the
completeness of the unity with which it embraces that detail is greater.
Or, the degree of individuality possessed by any system depends: (1) on
its _comprehensiveness_; (2) on its _internal systematisation_. The more
a thing includes of existence and the more harmoniously it includes it,
the more individual it is.

It is manifest, of course, that these two characteristics of a
systematic whole are mutually interdependent. For, precisely because all
Reality is ultimately a single coherent system, the more there is
outside any partial system the greater must be the dependence of its
constituents for their character upon their connection with reality
outside, and the less capable must the system be of complete explanation
from within itself. The more the partial system embraces, the less will
its constituents be determined by relation to anything outside itself,
and the more completely will its organisation be explicable by reference
to its own internal principle of structure. That is, the greater the
comprehensiveness of the system, the completer in general will be its
internal coherence. And, conversely, the more completely the working of
the whole system in its details is explicable from within as the
expression of a single principle of internal structure, the less must be
the dependence of its contents on any external reality; and therefore,
seeing that _all_ reality is ultimately interconnected, the less must be
the extent of what lies outside the system in question. That is, the
greater the internal unity, the greater in general the comprehensiveness
of the system. Thus ultimately the two criteria of individuality
coincide.

§ 5. In practice, however, it constantly happens, as a consequence of
the fragmentary way in which our experiences come to us, that
comprehensiveness and thorough-going systematic unity seem to be opposed
to one another. Thus we can see, as a general principle, that the
systematic organisation of knowledge depends upon its extent. The wider
our knowledge, the greater on the whole the degree to which it exhibits
organic structure; the systematisation of science and its extension
ultimately go together. Yet at any one moment in the development of
knowledge the recognition of fresh truths may necessitate a temporary
introduction of disorganisation and discrepancy among the accepted
principles of science. Thus in the history of geometry the recognised
principles of the science were temporarily disorganised by the admission
of incommensurable magnitudes which was forced upon the early Greek
mathematicians by the discovery that the side and diagonal of a square
have no common measure, and the discrepancy was only removed when it
became possible to revise the principles of the theory of numbers
itself. So again at the present day there is a real danger that
premature anxiety to give the study of Psychology precise systematic
character by an exact definition of its subject and its relation to the
various physical and mental sciences, may stand in the way of the
extension of our knowledge of the facts of psychical life. We have often
to purchase an important extension of knowledge at the cost of temporary
confusion of principles, and to be content to wait for the future
readjustment of facts to principles in the course of subsequent
progress.

So in our moral life we judge one man’s character more individual than
another’s, either on the ground of the superior breadth of his
interests, or of the superior consistency with which his interests are
wrought into a self-consistent whole. The man of many interests has so
far a truer individuality than the man of few, and again the man of
steady purpose than the man whose energies are dissipated in seemingly
conflicting pursuits. But the two criteria do not always, for our
insight, coincide. An increase in variety and breadth of interests may
be accompanied by a diminution in coherency of aim, and a gain in
coherency of aim appears often to be bought by concentration upon a few
special objects. And we should find it hard or impossible to decide,
where the two aspects of individuality appear to fall thus apart,
whether the man of many interests and relatively dissipated energies, or
the man of few interests and intense concentration upon them, exhibits
the higher individuality. For what looked like self-dissipation in the
pursuit of disconnected objects might really be the systematic pursuit
of a consistent purpose too wide to be clearly apprehended in its unity
either by contemporary observers or by the actor himself, yet apparent
enough to the reflective historian reading the significance of a life by
its whole effect upon society, and what seemed at the time the single
object of the man of one idea might similarly be found in the light of
the sequel to be the hasty combination of radically inconsistent
aims.[69]

Such reflections, however, only show that our limited insight is
insufficient to assign to every appearance with certainty its own place
in the ordered system of appearances through which the single Reality
expresses itself. They do not touch our general position, that where
comprehensiveness and harmony _can_ be seen to go together, we are
justified in using them as the measure of the individuality and
therefore of the reality of the partial system in which we discover
them. It is on such grounds, for instance, that we may safely pronounce
that an organism, which is the living unity of its members, is more
individual and therefore a higher reality that a mere aggregate of
pre-existing units, in which the nature of the parts is wholly or mainly
independent of the structure of the whole; and again, that a mind
consciously and systematically pursuing a coherent self-chosen system of
ends is more individual, and therefore again a higher reality, than an
organism reacting according to the temporary character of its
environment or its momentary internal condition in ways which form no
systematic execution of a connected scheme of ends. And it is clear
that, if only on this ground, we should have to say that we are nearer
the truth in thinking of the individual whole of complete Reality as an
organism than in thinking of it as an aggregate, and nearer the truth
still in thinking of it as a mind. Similarly in our judgments upon our
own lives and character. So far as one life possesses more breadth and
again more conscious unity of aim than another, so far it is more truly
individual, and therefore a more adequate type of complete reality. Just
so far as I am individual, I am truly real. And just so far as I fall
short of systematic individuality, whether from the poverty of my
interests or their mutual incompatibility, the appearance of unity in my
life is illusory, and I must be pronounced an unreal appearance.

At this point we may observe our metaphysical criterion of reality
coincides with our ethical criterion of moral worth. For in morality too
we esteem one life worthier than another, either for the superior
comprehensiveness of its ideals or for the thoroughness with which they
are wrought into a harmonious whole of coherent purpose. The better man
is either the man of the wider ideal, or again the man of completer and
purer self-devotion to his ideal. And thus for Morality the measure of
our worth, as for Metaphysics the measure of our reality, lies in our
individuality. And for Morality no less than for Metaphysics
individuality is pre-eminently a thing of degrees. In both cases, again,
the same difficulty besets us as soon as we attempt to use our criterion
for application to particular cases. Its two aspects fall apart; it is
not always the more comprehensive ideal which is served with the higher
fidelity of purpose. And so our actual moral judgments on the worth of
particular men, like our metaphysical judgments on the order of reality
to which particular things belong, are often necessarily uncertain and
fluctuating. We rate one man morally high for the comprehensive
rationality of his ideals, though he suffers from a lack of concentrated
energy, another for the steady and earnest purpose with which he follows
what we perhaps deplore as a contracted ideal.

§ 6. One more point of supreme importance concerning the relation of the
lesser individuals to the perfect individual which is the absolute whole
of Reality. Now that we have learned what is meant by degrees of
individuality, we can see that there can, in the last resort, be only
one perfect and complete individual, the whole of Reality itself, and
that the subordinate individuals can never be wholly and entirely
individual in themselves. For to be a complete individual would be, as
we have seen, to be a whole system absolutely self-contained and
explicable solely by reference to internal structure. Whatever requires,
for the full understanding of its systematic character, reference to
existence outside itself, we have seen, must also, so long as it is
considered apart from the rest of existence, be internally wanting in
complete systematic harmony, and thus must fall doubly short of the
ideal of individuality.

And precisely because the whole of experience is a single system, no
lesser system within the whole is entirely explicable in terms of its
own internal structure. For a full understanding of the nature of the
lesser system, and of the way in which it manifests a common character
through the variety of its elements, you have always, in the last
resort, to go outside the system itself, and take into account its
relation to the rest of the whole system of existence. And for that very
reason no subordinate individual, considered in itself, is a completely
coherent self-determined whole. For a limited knowledge like our own,
which has in the main to deal with subordinate systems as we find them,
and without that complete understanding of the whole structure of
Reality which would enable us to see their precise place in the whole,
the subordinate systems themselves, when closely scanned by a resolute
philosophical analysis, will inevitably exhibit some degree of
discrepancy and want of systematic unity.

Consider, for instance, such a system as is formed by the life-work of a
man of marked “individuality.” On the whole, the life of such a man may
fairly be said to be the systematic working out of a consistent scheme
of purposes. But this is, after all, only approximately the truth. It is
not the case that the nature of the central or dominant purpose of the
scheme is of itself enough to determine the nature and order of the
successive stages by which it finds expression. We have to take into
account factors in the man’s “heredity,” and again in his social and
physical environment which form no part of the nature of his central
dominant ideal and yet influence the manner of its fulfilment. We are
thus thrown back for our full understanding of the “individual” system
in question upon circumstances which are, so far as that system is
concerned, “accidental,” _i.e._ which are equally with itself part of
the whole system of experienced fact, without our being able to see
_how_ it and they form a wider coherent whole. The subordinate
individual, because incapable of explication solely from within, is in
the end only approximately “individual,” and we therefore fall into
contradictions whenever we isolate it from the rest of Reality and treat
it as absolutely individual and self-contained.

In dealing with subordinate wholes, we always, if we go far enough, come
to a point where we have to recognise their dependence upon a realm of
external fact which _our_ knowledge fails to see in its systematic
relation with them, and has therefore to treat as accidental or as an
ultimate “collocation.” This is why, as has already been said, full
knowledge of our own aims and interests as a genuine systematic whole
would coincide with complete insight into the structure of the whole
universe. We may invert the sentiment of a hackneyed verse, and say with
equal truth that until you know what God and man is, you cannot really
know what the “flower in the crannied wall” is. This is as much as to
say that every appearance must involve some element of contradiction for
our philosophical analysis precisely because we cannot in the end see
fully _how_ any appearance is related to the whole of Reality. But we
must carefully remember that if appearances, taken by themselves, are
contradictory, this is not because they are appearances, but because, as
so taken, they are all to some extent _mere_ appearance. The conclusion
of the whole matter is, that the individuality of anything less than the
ultimate whole of being is a matter of degree and approximation. We
shall be equally in error if we assume that because no subordinate
system is fully individual, some are not more individual and therefore
more real than others or if we declare that, because whatever is real at
all must be in its degree individual, therefore every element of Reality
is completely real in its isolation. The first error is that of a
one-sided Monism, the second that of an equally one-sided Pluralism.

Once more we may note a point of coincidence between our general
metaphysical theory of individuality and our personal experience as
moral agents. In so far as each of us is truly an individual, his aims
and ends form a system with an internal unity pervading its structure,
and therefore capable of progressive realisation as a system. Yet again,
because each of us is less than the whole of Reality, or, what is the
same thing, because the systematic unity of our inner life is never
complete, and our totality of interests relations, and aspirations never
a completely self-contained ordered whole, our ideals will always be
found to contain aspects which will not fully harmonise, elements which
fall outside such a unity of structure as it is possible to effect
within the limit of our single personality. And thus all our victories
contain an inseparable element of defeat. The defeated aspects of the
self may no doubt, and in general do, in proportion to the degree of our
individuality, belong to the “lower” and relatively more “untrue” self,
yet they are elements in the whole self, and their suppression is a
genuine if necessary self-suppression. There is a sense in which an
aspect of failure is an inevitable feature in the life of every
subordinate and therefore imperfect individual. Human life, even in the
millennium, as we rightly feel, would not be human life if the note of
sadness were altogether absent from it. Only in the single experience of
the absolute whole can the discordant notes be finally resolved into a
faultless harmony.

§ 7. Technically, we may mark the distinction between complete and
approximate individuality by saying that the absolute whole is an
infinite individual, whereas all lesser wholes are but finite
individuals. And here it is important to note carefully the true meaning
of these often much-abused terms. The infinite must not be confounded
with the indefinite or unfinished. Its fundamental property is not the
merely negative one of having no end or “last term,” but the positive
one of having an internal structure which is the harmonious and complete
expression of a single self-consistent principle. The finite, again, is
finite not primarily merely because it has a “last term,” _i.e._ because
there is something else outside it, but because its “last term” is
arbitrarily determined, _i.e._ determined by something other than the
principles of its internal structure. In other words, the essential
defect of the finite is that it is not solely determined by its own
structural principle.

We can see this even in the simple case of the familiar “infinite
series” of arithmetic and algebra. Such a series as 1, 1/2, 1/4 ... is
“infinite” not merely because you never come to the last term, but
because its character is determined from _within_, solely by the
principle according to which each term is derived from the one before
it; that the series has no end is a simple consequence of this positive
property of self-determination. But suppose I take _n_ terms of this
series and no more, where _n_ is a specified number, the resulting
series is now _finite_, not primarily because there are more terms of
the same kind outside it, but because the number of terms to be taken is
not prescribed by the law of formation of the series, but fixed with
reference to some object independent of the principle of the series
itself. In other words, only the infinite is in the full sense of the
words a completely self-determined whole. The finite is the imperfect,
not primarily because there is something outside it, but because its
contents are not solely prescribed by the principle of structure which
they embody. I, for instance, am a finite being, not principally or
merely because there are other men in the world, but because my ideas
and purposes are not a fully coherent systematic whole in
themselves.[70]

The view we have taken of individuality and the distinction between
finite and infinite individuality is closely akin to some of the most
fundamental ideas in the philosophy of Leibnitz. It was the doctrine of
Leibnitz that each of his monads “represented” the nature of the whole
system of existence, _i.e._ repeated the structure of the whole in its
own special structure, from a particular “point of view.” According to
the fulness and clearness of the “representation,” _i.e._ the adequacy
with which the structure of the monad repeated the structure of the
whole system, the monads were classed as higher or lower in the scale of
existence. The clearer a monad’s representation of the whole within
itself, the greater the monad’s “activity”; the more confused the
representation, the greater its “passivity.” It followed that, inasmuch
as no created monad fully exhibits the systematic structure of the whole
of Reality within itself, every one contains some element of
“passivity,” and that to be “passive” primarily means not to be affected
by extraneous influences, but to contain internal “confusion.”

Thus the “activity” of Leibnitz exactly corresponds to what we have
called individuality, and his “passivity” to that want of complete
internal systematisation which we have found inseparable from finite
existence. The immense significance of this definition of activity and
passivity in terms of internal systematisation will be more apparent
when we come, in our concluding book, to discuss the meaning of human
freedom, and its connection with determination and “causality.” For the
present it is enough to note that our own doctrine is substantially that
of Leibnitz freed from the inconsistency which is introduced into it by
the monadistic assumption of the complete independence of the various
finite individuals. It is, of course, impossible to unite, as Leibnitz
tried to do, the two thoughts. Either there is ultimately only one
independent individual, the infinite individual whole, or there is no
meaning in speaking of higher and lower degrees of individuality.
Leibnitz’s inconsistency on this point seems due entirely to his desire
to maintain the absolute individuality of the particular human “soul,” a
desire which is explained, partly at least, by his anxiety not to come
into collision, as Spinoza and others had done, with the official
theology of the period.

§ 8. The definition of infinite and finite individuality completes the
general outline of our conception of Reality as a whole, and its
relation to its constituent elements. Recapitulating that doctrine, we
may now say that the real is a single all-embracing whole of experience
or psychical matter of fact, determined entirely from within by a
principle of internal structure, and therefore completely individual.
Because the matter of the system is in all its parts experience, the
principle of its structure must be teleological in character.[71] That
is, the system must be the embodiment, in a harmonious unity of
conscious feeling, of a consistent interest or mental attitude. As such
we may call it the realisation indifferently of a purpose or idea, and
we may speak of the absolute experience as the completed expression of
an absolute knowledge or an absolute will.

But if we do so, we must bear in mind that there can be here no question
of a thought which works upon and reconstructs into systematic harmony a
body of data originally supplied to it in a relatively unintelligible
and disconnected form from some foreign source, or of a volition which
gradually translates into reality an end or purpose originally present
to it as an unrealised idea. The processes of thought and volition can
clearly have no place in an experience for which the what and the that
are never disjoined; as we shall by and by see more fully, they involve
existence in time, and existence in time can belong only to the finite
and imperfect. Hence it is best, in the interest of intellectual clarity
and candour, to avoid the use of such expressions as knowledge and will
in speaking of the absolute experience; at best they are in large part
metaphorical, and at worst potent weapons of intellectual
dishonesty.[72] The constituents of the system, again, are lesser
experience systems of the same general type, in each of which the nature
of the whole manifests itself, though to different degrees. They are
thus all finite individuals of varying degrees of individuality. The
more comprehensive and the more internally unified by an immanent
principle of teleological structure such a system, the more fully
individual it is, and the more adequately does it reveal the structure
of the all-pervading whole. This is the intellectual justification for
our instinctive belief that what is for our human experience highest and
best is ultimately in the constitution of the universe most completely
real.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 24,
“Degrees of Truth and Reality”; Plato, _Republic_, vi. 509 ff., with the
commentary in R. L. Nettleship’s _Lectures on Plato’s Republic_, or
Bosanquet’s _Companion to the Republic_.

-----

Footnote 66:

Not the sum of them, because the systematic whole of Reality is not a
sum but a single experience. To identify it with the _sum_ of its
appearances would be the same error which occurs in Ethics as the
identification of happiness (a qualitative whole) with the sum of
pleasures (a quantitative collection).

Footnote 67:

The reader will find it instructive to observe how Prof. Sidgwick
unconsciously assumes that the distinction between Reality and
Appearance means a distinction between two more or less independent
“worlds” or “things” (_Philosophy: its Scope and Relations_, Lectures
1 and 4), and thus deprives his own criticism of the antithesis of all
validity as against a view like our own.

Footnote 68:

So, again, a velocity which is already infinitesimal may receive an
acceleration which is infinitesimal in relation to the velocity
itself. The reader’s own studies will no doubt furnish him with
numerous other illustrations of the same kind.

Footnote 69:

See for illustrations of the impossibility of carrying out a single
principle in our actual judgments of particular cases, Mr. Bradley’s
already quoted article in _Mind_ for July 1902.

Footnote 70:

For a fuller exposition of the conception of infinity here adopted I
may refer the reader to the famous essay of Dedekind, _Was sind und
was sollen die Zahlen_, especially pp. 17-20. The English reader will
find an account of Dedekind’s work, with an acute discussion of its
metaphysical significance, in Royce, _The World and the Individual_,
First Series, Supplementary Essay. It does not seem necessary for the
purpose of this chapter to specify the points in which I find myself
unable to follow Professor Royce in his use of the theory. See
_infra_, chap. 4, § 10.

Footnote 71:

It would not be hard to show that in the end all systematic structure
is teleological. For all such structure in the last resort is a form
of order, and depends on the possibility of saying “here this is
first, that is second.” And wherever we predicate order we are
asserting the embodiment in detail of some dominant purpose.

Footnote 72:

In fact, it is clear that if we speak of “idea” or “volition” in
connection with the absolute individual, we cannot mean _actual_
“ideas” or _actual_ “volitions.” We must be using the psychological
terms improperly in something of the same sense in which we speak of a
man’s “guiding ideas” or “settled will” to denote what clearly,
whatever it may be, is _not_ actual ideational or volitional process.
See further, Bk. IV. chap. 6, § 1.

-----

CHAPTER IV

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(1) SUBSTANCE,
QUALITY, AND RELATION

§ 1. The natural or pre-scientific view of the world regards it as a
plurality of “things,” each possessing _qualities_, standing _in
relation_ to others, and interacting with them. § 2. Hence arise
four problems: those of the Unity of the Thing, of Substance and
Quality, of Relation, of Causality. § 3. No simple answer can be
given to the question, _What is one thing?_ The Unity of the Thing
is one of teleological structure, and this is a matter of degree,
and also largely of our own subjective point of view. § 4.
_Substance and Quality._ The identification of the substance of
things with their primary qualities, though useful in physical
science, is metaphysically unjustifiable. § 5. Substance as an
“unknowable substratum of qualities” adds nothing to our
understanding of their connection. § 6. The thing cannot be a mere
collection of qualities without internal unity. § 7. The conception
of a thing as the law or mode of relation of its states useful but
metaphysically unsatisfactory. Ultimately the many can be contained
in the one only by “representation;” the unity in things must be
that of an individual experience. § 8. _Relation._ We can neither
reduce qualities to relations nor relations to qualities. § 9.
Again, the attempt to conceive Reality as qualities in relation
leads to the indefinite regress. §10. We cannot escape this
difficulty by taking all relations as “external.” And Professor
Royce’s vindication of the indefinite regress seems to depend on the
uncriticised application of the inadequate category of whole and
part to ultimate Reality. The union of the one and the many in
concrete experience is ultra-relational. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE: Dr.
Stout’s reply to Mr. Bradley.

§ 1. When we turn from the inquiry into the structure of Reality as it
must be conceived by a consistent Philosophy, to consider the aspect in
which it appears to ordinary non-philosophical thought, the systematic
unity which has demanded our attention in the two preceding chapters
seems to be replaced by a bewildering and almost incalculable variety.
According to the naïve pre-scientific theory of existence to which the
experiences of practical life naturally give rise, and which serves as
the point of departure for all the more scientific and systematic
theories of the physicist, the psychologist, and the metaphysician, the
world is composed of a multitude of apparently independent things,
partly animated, like ourselves, partly inanimate. Each of these things,
while in some sense a unit, is thought of as possessing an indefinite
multiplicity of _qualities_ or _properties_, as capable of standing in a
variety of _relations_ to other things, and as _acting_ upon other
things and _being influenced_ by them in a variety of ways.

In all these respects, it should be observed, the naïvely realistic
thought of the pre-scientific mind treats what from a more developed
point of view would be distinguished as mental and physical existences
alike. Human persons, like the other things of which my environment is
composed, are thought of as being at once units and the possessors of
diverse properties, as capable of a variety of relations to one another
and to other things, and as interacting with each other and the rest of
the environment. The recognition of the psychical as an order distinct
from the physical, with its momentous consequences for general
metaphysical theory, belongs to a later and much more sophisticated
stage of intellectual development. Also, it must be noted, for the
naïvely realistic intelligence, I am myself thought of as simply one
object or thing in an environment of things of a similar nature, and my
relations to that environment are conceived as being of the same type as
the relations between its various component parts. I too am, for my own
thought, so long as it remains at this primitive level, simply a thing
with numerous properties, in various relations to other things, and
interacting with them in diverse ways.[73]

We have called this exceedingly primitive way of conceiving the nature
of existence “pre-scientific,” on the ground that both in the mental
development of the individual and in that of a community of individuals
it precedes even the most tentative conscious efforts to organise
thought about the world into a coherent whole. All scientific and
philosophical constructions may be regarded as so many artificial
modifications of this earlier point of view, instituted and carried out
for the purpose of rendering it more coherent and systematic. At the
same time, our use of the epithet “pre-scientific” must not be allowed
to mislead. The “pre-scientific” view may and does co-exist in the same
mind with the various modifications of it which arise in the effort to
think consistently. We are all of us habitually “naïve realists” in
respect of those aspects of the world of experience which lie outside
the limits of our personal scientific studies; and even as regards those
aspects of existence in respect of which our theoretical views may be of
a much more developed type, we habitually relapse into the
“pre-scientific” attitude when our immediate object is practical[74]
success in action rather than logical consistency in thinking. For the
purposes of everyday life, the most “advanced” man of science is content
to be a naïve realist outside his laboratory.

Again, pre-scientific as the primitive attitude towards existence is, in
the sense of being unaffected by the deliberate effort after system and
coherency of thought, it is so far scientific as to be a real though
rudimentary and unconscious product of our intellectual need for order
and system of some kind in our thought about things. It is a genuine
though an unconscious result of our earliest reflection on the course of
experience, and thus a true thought-construction, not a passive
reproduction of a merely “given” material. It performs in rudimentary
fashion, and without explicit purpose, the same task of systematising
experience which the various scientific and philosophical theories of
the more developed mind undertake more elaborately and with conscious
intent. It is thus pre-scientific, but not properly speaking
unscientific.

As the mass of ascertained fact accumulates and reflection upon it
becomes more systematic and deliberate, our primitive conception of the
systematic nature of the real inevitably proves unsatisfactory for two
reasons. New facts are discovered which we cannot fit into the old
scheme without modification of its structure, and, again, the concepts
in terms of which the scheme was originally constructed prove on
examination to be themselves obscure and ambiguous in their meaning.
There is thus a double motive perpetually operative in bringing about
reconstruction of the original scheme. To the various sciences it falls
in the main to devise such alteration of the old schematism as is
necessary for the inclusion of fresh facts; it is the special province
of metaphysical criticism to examine the various terms both of the
original scheme and its subsequent modifications, with a view to
determining how far they form an ultimately intelligible and coherent
system.

§ 2. When we scrutinise the original “pre-scientific” theory of the
world from this point of view, we shall find that its four leading
features give rise to four metaphysical problems of great generality and
considerable difficulty. The conception of the world as made up of a
multiplicity of things, each of which is one, gives rise to the problem
of the unity of the thing; the plurality of the qualities, and again of
the relations ascribed to the single thing, gives rise to the problems
of _Substance_ and _Quality_ and of _Relation_; the belief in the
interaction between different things finally gives rise to the
exceptionally important and difficult problem of _Causality_. The four
problems are not altogether disconnected; in particular, it is hard to
discuss the sense in which a thing can be spoken of as “one,” without at
the same time raising the question how the “one” thing stands to its
many properties, and again discussing the general meaning of relation.
And the problem of Causality may be raised in so general a form as to
include the other three. Still, for the sake of having a definite order
of discussion, it will be well to take them as far as may be separately,
and to proceed from the simpler to the more complex. When we have
indicated in outline our solution of these problems, we shall have to
ask what is the general conception of a thing which our results
establish, and whether and on what grounds we are warranted in believing
in the actual existence of things answering to our conception. The
present chapter will be devoted to the examination of the first three
problems; in the succeeding chapter we shall discuss the meaning of
Causality, and indicate our general conclusion as to the existence of
“things.” With this result our survey of the general structure of
Reality will be completed, and we shall then proceed in our third and
fourth books to examine the most important of the special problems
suggested by the existence of physical nature and conscious mind
respectively.

§ 3. _The Unity of the Thing._—The problem we have to face is as
follows: in what sense do we call any thing “one thing,” and what gives
it its character as a unity? It is obvious that we may attack this
question from either of two rather different points of view. We may ask
either, why do we mark off just this portion of our environment from all
the rest as a single thing among many things; or, again, how is the
oneness which we predicate of any part of the environment so marked off
compatible with the multiplicity of its properties? The question we
propose to deal with in this section is the former of the two just
propounded; the latter shall be dealt with next as the problem of
substance and its qualities. What, then, do we mean by the unity which
we ascribe to whatever we recognise as one thing among a multiplicity of
others? We have, in a way, implicitly answered this question already by
the result arrived at in our discussion of the character of the elements
or constituents of the system of Reality. But whereas, in our former
investigation, we started from the general notion of Reality as a
systematic whole of experience, and went on to ask what character is
imposed on the elements of such a system by their presence in it as its
elements, we have now to raise the same question from the other side;
starting with our everyday recognition of our environment as divided
into things, we have to ask how far these things possess the character
which must belong to the genuinely individual members of an individual
whole of subordinate individuals.

For the purpose of the inquiry we must begin by taking the term thing in
the same wide and ambiguous sense in which everyday thought and
discourse use it. We must reckon among the things which are the topic of
discussion, human persons, animals, plants, greater and smaller
inorganic masses, in a word, whatever the most matter-of-fact
common-sense thinking recognises as possessed of a character in virtue
of which it can as a whole determine the course of experience at a given
moment. The character or aspect in virtue of which such a whole
determines the course of experience in this one special way rather than
another, is by this definition excluded from our conception of a thing;
it is not the thing itself but its quality or property or relation to
some other thing, and forms the subject of our second and third
problems. Thus we may say of a thing, in the sense in which we are using
the term, that it is what has existence as a whole here and now in the
series of experiences, though in saying so we must be careful to bear in
mind that the here and now of the thing’s existence are not indivisible
points of space or time, but continuous stretches of extension and
duration. Now, when we ask in what sense such a thing is one, and why we
mark off the limits which separate the one thing from the other things
just where we do, it at once becomes apparent that the oneness is a
matter of degree. We seem at first sight able with comparatively little
difficulty to decide that the organism of a human being or of one of the
higher animals is one thing; when we come to deal with the lower
organisms which consist of loosely aggregated colonies of largely
independently functioning cells, we begin to feel more diffidence in
pronouncing what is one organism, though we still think we can say what
is one cell. So, in dealing with inanimate masses, while we might be
ready to say without much misgiving that a machine of our own
construction is one, we should find it much harder to decide whether
what we perceive as a mere inorganic mass is one or many, and harder
still to give reasons for our decision in a particular case. And even in
the cases where our decision is most unhesitatingly pronounced,
subsequent reflection will show that the matter may not be so obvious as
it seems. For instance, a pair of separated Siamese twins would
undoubtedly be generally held to be two organisms and not one; but
whether they were one or two before the severance is a question we
should find it easier to ask than to answer.

When we try to detect some common principle in our various judgments as
to whether a thing is one thing or several, the following results seem
to emerge:—(1) A thing is clearly not made _one_, as is sometimes
assumed, by the possession of an unbroken contour or an uninterrupted
temporal existence. The succession of my mental states may make up one
mental life, and again my organism from the cradle to the grave may be
pronounced in some sense one, though no one can prove that there are no
gaps in their temporal existence. Again, even if we leave out of account
the corpuscular theories of body according to which every thing that
looks to us like a spatially continuous whole with an unbroken contour
is really composed of discrete particles with interstices between them,
it is abundantly clear that common sense regards as one thing the parts
of a system which works as a connected whole, quite independently of the
existence or non-existence of immediate contact between them.

(2) Again, the unity of the one thing does not depend upon identity of
material, whatever that phrase may mean. My organism still remains one
thing, though its material is constantly changing by the loss of some
elements and the acquisition of others.

(3) On the positive side, it is clear that the unity we attribute to one
thing is that of teleological structure. A thing is one or many
according to the point of view from which you look at it, _i.e._
according to the idea or purpose in the light of which you study it.
That is one thing which functions as one, in other words, which is the
systematic embodiment of a coherent scheme of structure. Thus, when we
are considering the whole of an organism as subservient to the
realisation of a unique individual aim or interest, the organism is
necessarily judged to be one, because in respect of that interest it
behaves as a whole; when we are studying the specific mode of reaction
of a particular nerve, for instance, the same organism just as naturally
appears to us a multiplicity of distinct but interconnected things.
Similarly, a system of material particles appears one thing to us so
long as our interest in the system is directed to those ways in which it
behaves as one, _e.g._, the exchanges of energy between it and other
systems external to it. Generally we may say that whatever is called one
is called so because it is the systematic expression of a single aim or
interest. A thing, in fact, is one just in so far as it has the
character we ascribed, in our last chapter, to a finite individual. Its
unity is never _merely_ numerical, but always qualitative, the unity of
coherent structure.

Even in our rough-and-ready way of treating continuity of contour as
evidence of oneness in inanimate and apparently structureless masses, we
may detect the influence of this principle. We judge the sensibly
continuous mass to be one rather than many things, because in many
obvious respects it functions as one (_e.g._, in respect of its weight,
the simultaneous displacement of its parts in rotation or translation
through space). Also, no doubt, our judgment is influenced by the
analogy of our own bodies, which are sensibly continuous. We project in
imagination into the sensibly continuous inanimate mass the same kind of
teleological unity which we find in our own mental life. The sensibly
discontinuous, on the other hand (_e.g._, two inorganic masses separated
by an apparently empty interval), is judged to be many things rather
than one, because, in imagination, we project such an inner mental life
into each of the discontinuous parts.

If all this is so, it would follow that the line of demarcation between
one thing and another can never be drawn with hard and fast precision.
For if one thing ultimately means one individual, the embodiment of a
unique self-consistent idea, the only thing which is fully and
absolutely one will be the infinite individual Reality itself. The
extent to which any lesser portion of the whole can be pronounced one
thing will depend on the extent to which it exhibits self-contained
systematic individuality, and thus will be a matter of degree. The
highest kind of finite unity we can conceive will be that of a life
which is the conscious progressive realisation of coherent purpose. Such
a life is one not merely for the outside observer who detects its
underlying unity of aim, but for itself. Its oneness may thus be said to
be both objective and subjective. Thus the more completely our own inner
life is the systematic expression of consistent purpose, the greater the
right with which we may regard ourselves as being each truly “one thing”
and as such truly individual. But when we remember how far what any one
of us calls “his” inner life is from exhibiting such complete internal
coherency of structure, we shall realise that even in the highest case
the unity is still a matter of degree.

This is still more palpably the case with the lower forms of organic
life. Not to speak of the well-known puzzles which arise when we seek to
determine whether a creature which is a colony of largely independent
cells is one animal or many, our difficulties begin as soon as we have
to deal with any type of life below the most fully self-conscious. We
can say, to some extent, that a human character is one so long as it is
the conscious expression of systematic purpose, but it is less easy to
say in what sense we call an animal’s conscious life one. The absence of
anything like systematic unity of aim and interest from the life of
animal impulse makes it appear, at least at first sight, more reasonable
to speak of it as a bundle or collection of distinct impulses and
instincts rather than as one.[75] If, in spite of this, we still
habitually speak and think of the particular higher animal as _one_
rather than many, the reason no doubt is that we tacitly ascribe to it
something like the conscious unity of interest which we find in our own
mental life, though with a diminished clearness.

When we come to the inanimate world, it seems to become purely a matter
of our own subjective interest what we shall call one thing and what we
shall call many. That is one which may be regarded as acting as one
whole in respect of its bearing upon any interest of ours; that many
which, in respect of our interests, does not behave as a whole. Thus,
except where we are dealing with forms of life to which we can with more
or less plausibility ascribe some degree of conscious unity of aim and
interest, there seems no valid reason for drawing the line between
different things in one place rather than in another, except reasons of
convenience. It is important to bear this in mind in applying our
idealistic theory of existence to the case of the inanimate world. If
the foundations of the idealistic theory are sound, every real existence
must be a finite individual experience of some order of individuality,
and this must of course hold good of that part of existence which
appears to us as the inanimate world. The inanimate world must be—as we
shall see more fully in the succeeding book—a system of individual
experiences, which appears to us lifeless and purposeless merely because
the kind of life it possesses is too far removed from our own for us to
recognise it. But we must most carefully observe that the line of
demarcation between the different individual experiences which
constitute the reality of that world need not in the least coincide
everywhere with the line which we, for purposes of our own, draw between
different things.

§ 4. _The Problem of Substance and Quality._—More important, in the
history of metaphysical theory, has been the other aspect of the problem
of the unity of things. What we call one _thing_ is said, in spite of
its unity, to have many _qualities_. It is, _e.g._, at once round,
white, shiny, and hard, or at once green, soft, and rough. Now, what do
we understand by the _it_ to which these numerous attributes are alike
ascribed, and how does it possess them? To use the traditional technical
names, what is the _substance_ to which the several qualities belong or
in which they inhere, and what is the manner of their _inherence_? The
full difficulty of this problem may be most easily exhibited by
considering the ways in which popular thought commonly tries to solve
it.

(1) One of the commonest and most obvious solutions is to identify the
“substance” which has the qualities (or, to use the more general
scholastic expression, the _accidents_) with some one group of the
thing’s properties which we regard as specially important or permanent.
The “substance” is then taken to be just this group of “primary”
qualities, and is said to have or possess the less permanent “secondary
qualities.” For obvious reasons, the “primary” qualities have in modern
Philosophy usually been identified, as by Galileo, Descartes, and Locke,
with those mathematical properties of body which are of fundamental
importance for the science of mechanical Physics.[76] And usually,
though not always, the way in which the substance, as thus defined,
_has_ the secondary qualities, has been further explained by saying that
these latter are subjective changes in our sensibility produced by the
action of the primary qualities upon our various sense-organs. Neither
of these special views is, however, necessarily involved in the
identification of the substance of things with their fundamental
qualities. The essential principle of the theory consists simply in the
recognition of some groups of qualities as of primary importance, and
the identification of the one “substance” which has the many properties
with this group.

Now, it would be impertinent for us to raise any objection to the use of
such a theory as a working hypothesis in the physical sciences, so long
as it does in those sciences the work for which it is required. The
object of the physical sciences as a body is simply to enable us to
describe and calculate the course of events in nature with the highest
degree of accuracy and the least complicated set of formulæ. If this end
is most successfully attained by treating a certain group of the
properties of sensible things as of primary importance and all the rest
as mere derivatives of them, this fact of itself affords sufficient
justification for the scientific use of the distinction. For the special
objects of physical science any group of properties which thus lends
itself to the purposes of description and calculation is of primary
importance. But it is no less true that its importance for physical
purposes does not afford the least ground for regarding it as equally
valuable as a solution of the metaphysical problem of the meaning of
substance. For instance, one reason why the mathematical properties of
body are of such supreme importance for Physics is that in respect of
them bodies can be treated as differing not in kind but only in number.
This is why they are of such inestimable service as the basis of our
calculations as to the behaviour of things. But it might very well be
that the true nature of things is most fully manifested just in those
points in which they are different in kind; from the standpoint of the
metaphysician, a view of non-human nature, however serviceable, which
rests entirely upon the aspects in which things are most alike, may be
as superficial as the statistical sociologist’s view of human nature.
The true being of a concrete thing may be as inadequately expressed by
its mathematical properties as the true character of an individual man
by a list of anthropometrical results.[77]

In point of fact, we can readily see that the distinction between
“primary” and “secondary” qualities, when propounded as an answer to the
problem about substance, leaves us just where we were before. For (1) we
ascribe the primary qualities to the “substance” of the thing in just
the same fashion as the secondary. The thing _is_ of such and such a
configuration, _is_ of such and such a mass, _is_ solid, etc.; just as
it _is_ rough, or heavy, or green. Or, again, it _has_ configuration,
mass, solidity; just as it _has_ weight, taste, colour. Hence the old
problem breaks out again with respect to the primary qualities
themselves, however the list of them may be constructed. Again we have
to ask, what is the _it_ which possesses shape, mass, velocity, etc.?

(2) Moreover, the theory fails to explain the nature of that
“possession” of the secondary qualities which it ascribes to the group
of primary qualities. In what way, we ask, do the primary qualities have
or possess the secondary? The only serious attempt to answer this
question seems to be that of the numerous philosophers (Descartes,
Galileo, Locke, etc.) who treat the secondary qualities as “subjective”
effects of the primary qualities upon our sense-organs. Now, this
familiar solution of the problem seems deficient in logic. For the one
solid argument which has been advanced in favour of the subjectivity of
secondary qualities seems to be the contention that they cannot be
perceived without sense-organs of a special type. Colours, it is said,
exist only for an eye, sounds for an ear, taste for a tongue, and so
forth. And differences of structure or temporary condition in the
sense-organ lead to the perception of different secondary qualities, as
when, to take the stock examples, everything looks yellow to the
jaundiced eye, the same water feels warm to one hand and cold to the
other, and so forth.

But these considerations seem just as applicable to the supposed
“primary” as to the “secondary” qualities of things. Geometrical form,
for instance, is imperceptible apart from sight or touch; motion, again,
and consequently change of configuration, and similarly mass, which is a
ratio of accelerations, require either sight or touch for their
perception. Of course, we can think of motions and masses which we are
not actually perceiving, just as we can think of an absent colour or
smell, and in both cases we can in reasoning about motions or masses or
colours or smells abstract altogether from the presence of a percipient.
But this does not affect the fact that the mathematical qualities of
body are just as dependent for perception upon the presence of a
percipient with suitable sense-organs as anything else. Configurations,
extensions, and motions which no one perceives by sight or touch or any
other sense are exactly in the same case as a colour which no one sees
or a sound which no one hears. The argument from the indispensability of
a perceiving organ ought logically to tell just as much in the one case
as the other.[78]

Again, and this is a point of the first importance, experience never
gives us the “primary quality” by itself. What we get in actual
experience is always the conjunction of primary and secondary qualities
in a concrete perception. Thus we never perceive extension apart from
some special visual or tactual filling of the “secondary” kind. The
extended has always some quality of colour, or texture, or resistance.
An extension which is totally devoid of colour, tactual quality, and
everything which belongs to the so-called sensible, non-mathematical, or
“secondary” properties of body, is an unreal abstraction, got by leaving
out an aspect which in actual experience appears inseparable from it,
and therefore presumably illegitimate. Illegitimate, that is, when
offered as an account of the fundamental reality of body, however useful
for the special purposes of natural science. Thus the attempt to take
the so-called primary qualities as the unitary “substance” which has or
“possesses” the secondary qualities, and to dispose of these latter as
“subjective,” leads to no satisfactory result. The former, too, must be
merely qualities possessed by a more ultimate substance.

§ 5. Hence it constantly happens that the same writers who treat
substance as identical with the primary qualities of things, alternate
this view with another according to which substance is an unknowable
unit of which we can say no more than that it, whatever it may be, is
what is presupposed in all propositions about the behaviour of things as
the “unknown substratum” of their various qualities. According to this
view, the many qualities of the thing in some inexplicable manner “flow”
either from the nature of its own unknown substratum or substance, or
from the relations in which this substratum stands with that of other
things.[79] Our knowledge is then held to be confined to these
consequences of the unknown ultimate character of real things; we are
ignorant, it is said, of the substance both of physical and of mental
existence, we know only its attributes or manifestations. Or it is
otherwise phrased thus: we do not know what things really are, we know
only their effects on one another and on our own senses. This is, for
instance, the view represented by those portions of Locke’s Essay in
which emphasis is laid upon our inability in the last resort to know the
true substance of things.

Now, such a general doctrine as this is manifestly open to grave
objections. (1) If we are serious in maintaining the unknowable
character of the substratum of a thing’s qualities, it is hard to see
how the assertion of its existence can be any addition to our knowledge
of the thing. To say that we are entirely ignorant of the nature of this
substratum only amounts to saying in other words, that we have really no
idea how the many qualities can be qualities of a single thing. If this
is so, it does not appear what we gain by talking of the single thing at
all as the owner or possessor of its qualities. It would, we might
think, be better to abandon the confessedly unintelligible notion of a
single substratum in which the qualities “inhere,” and say that the
thing, for our intellect, is simply the many qualities themselves. How
this view would have to be reconciled with the tacit assumption of the
thing’s unity as a substance, which underlies all the judgments in which
its attributes are predicated of it, we shall have to discuss more fully
in the next section.

(2) A still more serious difficulty remains behind. Not only is an
“unknowable substratum of qualities” a superfluous luxury in
metaphysical theory, but the nature of the supposed relation between
such a substratum and the attributes which “flow” from it is
unintelligible. We can understand neither what a substance or substratum
totally devoid of qualities could possibly be, nor yet how the various
qualities of the world of things presented to our experience could
“flow” as secondary consequences from one or more such substrata. We
cannot conceive how things could first “be” without this being of theirs
possessing any definite character, and then subsequently, in virtue of
their relations among themselves, give rise to their qualities or
characteristic modes of being. Nothing can be at all without being in
some determinate way, and this “being in some determinate way” is
precisely what we mean by the qualities of a thing. A thing cannot be
without behaving in special ways towards its environment, and these
special ways of behaving are the thing’s qualities. We cannot,
therefore, divorce the being or _that_ of a thing from its determinate
mode of being or _what_, and regard the latter as something which
supervenes on or is derived from the former, or the former as something
which can exist without and apart from the latter. Things are not first
there and afterwards in some mysterious way clothed with qualities;
their qualities are simply their special way of being there. As Lotze
well puts it, all such attempts to formulate a theory of the way in
which the _what_ of things flows from a mere _that_, are attempts to
answer the absurd question how Being is made.[80] The notion that things
have a _that_ or substance prior to their _what_ or quality, and
consisting simply in “being” which is not this or that determinate mode
of being, is thus unmeaning as well as superfluous.

§ 6. Accordingly the whole notion of a substantial unity in things
behind the multiplicity of their states or qualities has been regarded
with disfavour by many students of positive science. The qualities being
all that interests us in things, and the notion of an indeterminate
substratum contradictory, we ought, it is argued, to identify the thing
and the series of its states and qualities without more ado. From this
point of view the thing ceases to be an unknown somewhat, which in some
mysterious way _has_ properties; it becomes the properties themselves
thought of as a collection. It is no longer the unperceived _this_ which
_has_ warmth, redness, etc., it is the warmth, the redness, and the rest
of the sensible qualities taken collectively. For phenomenalist
Metaphysics, as for associationist Psychology, the thing is a “bundle of
attributes” and nothing more.

When we ask how, if a “thing” is merely the series or sum of its
attributes, and possesses no underlying unity to which the attributes
belong, the whole of our ordinary language about things comes to be
constructed on the contrary assumption, how it is that we always talk
and think as if every “bundle” of attributes were owned by something of
which we can say that it _has_ the quality, we are met by the
phenomenalist with a reference to Psychology. Owing to the fact, which
Phenomenalism and Associationism are content to accept as ultimate, that
sensible qualities are always presented to our perception in definite
groups, it is argued that the thought of any one member of such a group
is enough to revive by association the thought of the other qualities
which have regularly been presented simultaneously with itself or in
immediate succession to it. Hence, because thus associated in our
perception, the group comes naturally, though illegitimately, by one of
those mental fictions of which Hume treats so fully, to be thought of as
one, though it is actually a discrete multiplicity. The unity of the
thing thus lies not in itself, but solely in our way of perceiving and
thinking.

A more recent version of the same doctrine, which avoids the old
associationist mistake of treating perception as a merely passive
reception of a given material, is that the unity of the one subject of
many predicates is ultimately derived from the unity of our own acts of
attention. The qualities appear to belong to “one” thing because _we_
attend to them together as one in a single moment of attention. Thus the
unity of substance which common sense believes itself to find in its
objects has really been put into them by the perceiving mind itself.
What is “given” to it is a disconnected plurality of qualities; by
attending to groups of them as one it makes those groups into the
attributes of a single reality. This is the essence of the doctrine of
Kant, according to which the concept of “substance” is simply one form
of the “synthetic unity of apperception” _i.e._ the process by which we
project the unity of our own acts of attention into their objects, and
thus create an orderly world for our own thought out of sensations which
as they are given to us are a chaos. In principle, Kant’s doctrine,
though intended as a refutation of Hume’s Associationism, only differs
from Hume’s in the stress it rightly lays on the element of subjective
interest in perception; the two theories agree on the main point, that
the bond which unites the many qualities of sense perception into one
thing is a subjective one,—in Hume’s expressive phrase, a “fiction of
the mind.”[81]

With the psychological aspects of this doctrine we are not directly
concerned in the present inquiry. For us the problem is not by what
precise steps the mind comes to “feign” a unity in its objects which is
not really there, but whether this conception of a feigned or subjective
unity imposed by the mind upon a number of actually disconnected
qualities is itself ultimately intelligible. Thus the metaphysical issue
may be narrowed down to the following question: Can we intelligibly hold
that a thing is in reality simply a number of qualities, not in their
own nature connected, which we arbitrarily regard for our own purposes
as one?[82] In other words, can we say the thing is simply identical
with its qualities considered as a mere sum or collection, and any
further unity of the kind the old Metaphysics denotes by “substance” a
mental addition of our own to the facts?

Now there are two considerations—both ultimately reducible in principle
to one—which seem fatal to the identification of a thing with its
qualities, considered as merely discrete. (1) There can be no doubt that
it is largely true to say that a given group of qualities appear to us
to be the qualities of one thing because we attend to them as one. And
again, attention is undoubtedly determined by, or, to put it in a better
way, is an expression of, our own subjective interests. But these
considerations do not in the least show that attention is purely
arbitrary. If we take any group of qualities to form one thing because
we attend to it as one, it is equally true that we attend to it as one
because it affects our subjective purposes or interests as one. That
group of qualities is “one thing” for us which functions as one in its
bearing upon our subjective interests. What particular interest we
consider in pronouncing such a group one, in what interest we attend to
it, may be largely independent of the qualities of the group, but the
fact that the group does function as one in respect to this interest is
no “fiction” or creation of our own thought; it is the expression of the
nature of the group itself, and is independent of “our mind” in
precisely the same sense in which the existence and character of any
single member of the group of qualities is independent. There is no
sense in assigning the single quality to “the given,” and the union of
the qualities into a single group to “the work of the mind”; in one
sense both are the “work of the mind,” in another both are the
expression of the nature of the “given.”[83]

(2) Again, the insufficiency of the simple identification of the thing
with its qualities considered as a mere collection, may be illustrated
by considering what the group of qualities must contain. The group of
qualities is obviously never present in its entirety at any moment of
experience. For the majority of what we call the qualities of a thing
are simply the ways in which the “thing” behaves in the presence of
various other things, its modes of reaction upon a number of stimuli.
Now, at any moment of the “thing’s” existence it is only actually
reacting upon a few of the possible stimuli, and thus only exhibiting a
few of its qualities. The vast majority of its qualities are at any
moment what Locke calls “powers,” _i.e._ ways in which it _would_ behave
if certain absent conditions were fulfilled. Thus the thing to which we
ascribe a number of predicates as its qualities is never the actual
group of predicates themselves. Grass is green, but its greenness is not
a fact in the dark; the sun is capable of melting the wax, and this
capacity qualifies it permanently, but it does not actually melt the wax
unless the wax is there, and various other conditions are also given; a
man is temperamently choleric, but he is not actually at every moment of
his existence in a passion. He is only predisposed to fly into a passion
readily on the occurrence of provocation. Most of a thing’s qualities
thus are mere possibilities; the nature of the thing is to act in this
or that way under certain definite conditions which may or may not be
realised in actual existence. Thus the collection of qualities with
which Phenomenalism identifies a thing has itself no real existence as a
collection. The collection is just as much a “fiction of the mind” as
the unity which we attribute to it. Yet the fact that the thing’s
qualities are mainly mere possibilities does not destroy the existence
of the thing. It actually is, and is somehow qualified by these
possibilities. And for that very reason its existence cannot be
identified with the actual realisation of these possibilities in a group
or collection of events. We might add as a further consideration, that
the number of such possibilities is indefinite, including not only the
ways in which the thing has behaved or will behave on the occurrence of
conditions at present non-existent, but also all the ways in which it
would behave on the occurrence of conditions which are _never_ realised
in actual existence. But the previous argument is already in itself
sufficient, the moment its significance is fairly grasped, to dispose of
the notion that anything can be merely identical with a group of
actually existing sensible qualities. The being of the things must be
sought not in the actual existence of the group of sensible qualities,
but in the law or laws stating the qualities which would be exhibited in
response to varying sets of conditions.[84]

§ 7. Considerations of this kind compel us to forego the attempt to find
the substance or being of a thing in the mere sequence of its different
states considered as an aggregate. To make Phenomenalism workable, we
are forced to say at least that the thing or substance to which the
various attributes are assigned is the “_law_ of its states,” or again
is “the _mode of relation_ of its various qualities.” Such a definition
has obviously a great advantage over either of the two we have just
rejected. It is superior to the conception of the thing as an unknown
substratum of qualities, since it explicitly excludes the absurd notion
of a world of things which first _are_, without being in any determinate
way, and then subsequently set up determinate ways of existing among
themselves. For a law, while not the same thing as the mere collection
of occurrences in which it is realised, has no existence of its own
apart from the series of occurrences which conform to it. Again, every
law is a statement of possibilities, a formula describing the lines
which the course of events will follow _if_ certain conditions are
operative; no law is a mere register of actually observed sequences.[85]
Hence, in defining the thing as the “law of its states,” we avoid the
difficulty dealt with in the last paragraph, that the collection of the
thing’s states never actually exists as a “given” collection. Thus for
ordinary practical purposes the definition is probably a satisfactory
one.

Yet it should be evident that in calling the thing the “law” of its
states, we merely repeat the metaphysical problem of the unity of
substance without offering any solution of it. For, not to dwell on the
minor difficulty that we might find it impossible to formulate a
_single_ law connecting _all_ the ways in which one thing reacts upon
others, and thus ought more properly to speak in the plural of the laws
of the states, we are now left with two distinct elements or aspects of
the being of the thing, namely, the successive states and the law of
their succession, and how these two aspects are united the theory fails
to explain. We have the variety and multiplicity on the one hand in the
states or qualities of the thing, its unity on the other in the form of
the law connecting these states, but how the variety belongs to or is
possessed by the unity we know no better than before. Thus the old
problem of substance returns upon us; the many qualities must somehow be
the qualities of a single thing, but precisely how are we to conceive
this union of the one and the many?[86]

At this point light seems to be thrown on the puzzle by the doctrine of
Leibnitz,[87] that the only way in which a unity can, without ceasing to
be such, contain an indefinite multiplicity is by “representation.”
Experience, in fact, presents us with only one example of a unity which
remains indubitably one while embracing an indefinite multiplicity of
detail, namely, the structure of our experience itself. For the single
experience regularly consists of a multiplicity of mental states, both
“focal” and “marginal,” simultaneous and successive, which are
nevertheless felt as one single whole because they form the expression
of a coherent purpose or interest. And this conscious unity of feeling,
determined by reference to a unique interest, is the only instance to
which we can point when we desire to show by an actual illustration how
what is many can at the same time be one. If we can think of the thing’s
qualities and the law of their connection as standing to one another in
the same way as the detailed series of acts embodying a subjective
interest of our own, and the interest itself which by its unity confers
a felt unity on the series, we can in principle comprehend how the many
qualities belong to the one thing. In that case the thing will be one
“substance” as the embodiment of an individual experience, determined by
a unique subjective interest, and therefore possessing the unity of
immediate feeling. Its many qualities will “belong” to it in the same
sense in which the various constituents of an experience thus unified by
immediate feeling are said to “belong” to the single experience they
constitute. And thus our idealistic interpretation of the general nature
of Reality will be found to contain the solution of the problem of
Substance and Quality.

Now it is fairly clear that some such idealistic solution is already
contained in germ in the pre-scientific view of the world of things.
There can be little doubt that our original notion of the unity of the
thing as contrasted with the multiplicity of its qualities has been
obtained by “introjectively” ascribing to whatever groups of qualities
act upon us as one in respect of some interest of our own, the same
conscious unity of feeling which we know in ourselves and our fellows.
We shall have frequent opportunities, as we proceed, of discovering the
enormous extent to which the whole pre-scientific view of the world is
based upon the interpretation of all existence in terms of our own.
Systematic Idealism will thus gradually be found to be no more than the
consistent and deliberate carrying through of that anthropomorphic
interpretation of Reality which lies at the bottom of all man’s attempts
to make his surroundings intelligible to himself. It will follow, if our
general attitude towards the problem of substance is tenable, that only
what we have already defined as an individual experience can truly be
called a “substance,” and that such experiences are “substances,” if the
word is to be retained in our philosophical vocabulary, to the same
degree to which they are truly individual. And thus we should be led in
the end to the distinction between the one infinite substance which
forms the whole of Reality and the finite and imperfect substances which
are its components.

Again, we should have once more to remember that since, in general, we
call that group of qualities one which acts on our interests as one, and
our insight into those interests themselves is limited and confused, the
boundaries assigned by us to the group of qualities we ascribe to a
single substance as “its” states will be more or less arbitrary, and
dependent upon the degree of our actual insight. It is possible for us
to group together as states of the same thing qualities which a
profounder insight would have disjoined, and _vice versâ_. And in the
end, if all that is is contained in a single coherent self-determined
system, it is clear that, speaking rigorously, there will ultimately be
only one “substance”—the central nature or principle of the system
itself—of which all subordinate aspects or parts of existence will be
the attributes.

§ 8. _The Problem of Relation._—More perplexing than the problem of
Substance and its Qualities is the question to which the pre-scientific
assumption that the world consists of a number of _interrelated_ things
gives rise. This problem of Relation becomes still more prominent when
reflection upon the problem of Substance and Quality has made it
manifest that what we call the qualities of things are one and all
dependent upon their relations either to our perceptive organs or to
other things. Put quite simply the problem is as follows: Things stand
in a variety of relations to one another, and what we commonly call the
qualities of each are dependent on (_a_) its modes of relation to other
things, (_b_) its relation to our percipient organism. Again, the
various qualities of one thing stand in relation among themselves. To
begin with, they all exhibit the relations of identity and difference.
They all so far possess a common nature as to be capable of being
compared in respect of the special ways in which they manifest that
nature, and are thus so far identical; again, they can be discriminated
and distinguished, and are so far in the relation of difference.
Further, the qualities of one thing are interconnected, as we have
already seen, by various special laws or modes of relation, which
exhibit the changes in the behaviour of the thing corresponding to
changes in the surrounding circumstances.

Thus Phenomenalism, when it has banished the notion of a substantial
unity in things, has to identify the world of things, as we have already
seen, with qualities in relation to one another. But now the question
arises, How are we to understand the conception of qualities in
relation? Can we, on the one hand, reduce all qualities to relations or
all relations to qualities, or, on the other, can we form an
intelligible idea of the way in which a single whole or system can be
formed by the union of the two? There are, of course, other questions of
great though relatively secondary importance connected with the problem
of relation, _e.g._, the question as to the number of ultimately
irreducible kinds of relation, but the scope of the present work will
permit of nothing beyond a brief discussion of the central difficulty.
We will take the various alternatives in order.

(1) Philosophers have often been tempted to evade the difficulty of
showing how qualities _and_ relations together can make up a system by
suppressing one member of the antithesis altogether. Thus it has been
maintained, on the one hand, that the world of real things consists
entirely of simple unrelated qualities, and that what we call relations
between these qualities are merely our own subjective ways of
apprehending them. On the other hand, it has been suggested that there
may be nothing in the real world except relations, and that what we call
qualities of various kinds are nothing but forms of relation. But
neither of these views seems seriously tenable.

For (_a_) reality cannot consist of _mere_ relations. Every relation
implies two or more terms which are related. And these terms cannot be
created by the relation itself. In every relation the terms have _some_
character of their own over and beyond the mere property of being terms
in that relation. Thus, to take a simple example, the successive terms
of the series of ordinal numbers express in themselves nothing beyond
determinate position in an ordered series, but when they are applied to
the actual arrangement of any content in serial order, that content is
(_c_) not created by the arrangement of it in an ordered series of
terms, and (_b_) is dependent for the actual order of its terms upon
some positive character of its own. In other words, whenever you
actually count you count something other than the names of the numbers
you employ, and you count it in an order which depends on the character
of the particular things counted.[88] And so generally of all relations.
A question has been raised which presents considerable difficulty and
cannot be discussed here, whether there are or are not merely _external_
relations (_i.e._ relations which are independent of the special
qualities of their terms). But even if we admit that there may be such
merely external relations, which do not depend upon the nature of the
terms between which they subsist, it is at least clear that there cannot
be relations without _any_ terms, and that the terms are not created out
of nothing by the relation between them.[89] Perhaps it might be
rejoined that what I call the terms of a certain relation, though no
doubt not created by that particular relation, may be themselves
analysed into other relations, and those again into others _ad
indefinitum_. Thus it might be said that the term A of the relation A-B
may no doubt have a quality of its own which is not created by this
relation. But this quality, call it A_{1}, is found on analysis to be
resoluble into the relation C-D, and the quality C_{1} of C again into
the relation E-F, and so on without end. This would not, however, amount
to a reduction of qualities to mere relations. For it would give us, as
the unit of our scheme of things, a pair of terms or qualities in
relation; and however often we repeated the process of analysis, we
should still always be left with the same type of triad, two terms and a
relation, as the result of analysis. Whatever its worth, this particular
solution falls under our second alternative, and must be considered in
connection with it.

(2) But again, it is even more manifest that we cannot reduce all
reality to qualities, and dismiss the relations between them as simply
_our_ subjective mode of apprehension. This line of thought is capable
of being worked out in two slightly different ways. We might hold that
what really exists is disconnected simple qualities, each distinct from
all others as red is from sweet, or loud from hot, and that the whole
network of relations by which everyday and scientific thought bring
these “reals” into connection is a mere intellectual scaffolding to
which nothing in the real world corresponds. Something like this would
be the logical outcome of the Humian doctrine that all relations are
“the work of the mind,” and that reality is the residuum left after we
have removed from our conception of the world everything which is of our
own mental fabrication. The grounds upon which this doctrine was
advanced by Hume and his followers have already been destroyed by the
progress of Psychology and the consequent abandonment of the old
hard-and-fast distinction between sensation and mental construction. It
was the belief of Hume, and apparently of Kant, that what is given in
“sensation” is single uncompounded qualities, and that all relations
between these psychical atoms are produced by a subsequent process of
subjective synthesis. But the advance of Psychology, by leading to the
recognition that sensation itself is a continuous process containing a
multiplicity of “marginal” elements which in all sorts of ways modify
the character of its central or “focal” element, has made it impossible
any longer to maintain an absolute distinction between the sensory and
the intellectual factor in cognition.

And apart from the illusory nature of the distinction on which the
theory was based, it is sufficiently condemned for Metaphysics by its
own inherent absurdity. For the fundamental presupposition of
Metaphysics, as of all serious science, is that Reality is a coherent
system. But, according to the view which regards relations as pure
“fictions of the mind,” just that element in our thought which gives it
its systematic character is an unwarranted addition of our own to the
real. Order and system are in fact, on this view, mere illusion. And, as
has often been pointed out by the critics of Hume, it is quite
inconceivable how, in a world where nothing but disconnected simple
qualities exist, the illusion should ever have arisen. If even our own
inner life is simply incoherent, it is quite impossible to see how we
can ever have come, even by a fiction, to read system into the world of
fact.

A more plausible attempt to reduce all relations to qualities proceeds
on the following lines. Relations, it is said, are of subjective
manufacture, but they are, for all that, not mere fictions. For every
relation between two terms, say A and B, is based upon the presence in A
and B of certain qualities, which are called the _fundamenta relationis_
or basis of the relation. These qualities may be the same in both the
terms, in which case the relation is called symmetrical; such a case is
that, _e.g._, of the equality of A and B, a relation having for its
_fundamentum_ the fact that A and B have both the same magnitude. Here
the real fact is taken to be that A has this magnitude, and again that B
has it. The subjective addition to the facts is thought to come in in
the voluntary comparison of A and B in respect of this property and the
consequent assertion of their equality. Or the qualities which are the
foundation of the relation may be different in each of the terms, in
which case the relation is technically called asymmetrical. Examples of
such asymmetrical relations are, _e.g._, A greater than B, B less than
A, or again, A father to B, B son to A. Here the actual facts would be
taken to be A possessed of magnitude _x_, B of magnitude _x_-_y_, A
qualified by the circumstance of begetting B, B by the circumstance of
being begotten by A. The subjective addition would come in, as before,
when we brought A and B under one joint of view by comparing them in
respect of these properties.

The inherent difficulties of the reduction of relations to qualities
are, however, only thinly disguised in this version of the doctrine. To
argue that the establishment of judgments of relation presupposes
subjective comparison of the related terms from a more or less
arbitrarily chosen point of view, is metaphysically irrelevant. The
whole question is as to whether the result of the process is to make
things more intelligible as a systematic whole; if it is, the
subjectivity of the process is no ground for discrediting the result as
truth about the real. If it is not, the philosophers who insist on the
subjectivity of relations should explain how we can coherently think of
a systematic whole of reality in terms of quality apart from relation.
This they have never been able to do, and that for obvious reasons. It
is manifestly impossible to give any intelligible account of the
qualities which we recognise as _fundamenta_ of relations without
introducing previous relations. Thus the possession of the common
magnitude _x_ may be assigned as the foundation of the relation of
equality between A and B; but when we ask what is meant by predicating
of A and B possession of the magnitude _x_, we find that we are thrown
back upon a relation between A, B, and some third term S, which we take
as our unit of measurement. A and B are both of magnitude _x_ because
each contains S, let us say, _x_ times exactly. So again the fact “A
begetter of B” was assigned as the _fundamentum_ of the asymmetrical
relation of paternity between A and B, and the same fact under another
name as the _fundamentum_ of the asymmetrical relation of filiation
between B and A.

But now what is meant by saying that the _same_ fact qualifies A and B
in _different_ ways? Any answer to this question plunges us back at once
into a perfect network of relations. For first, that a fact x may be
known to qualify A and B differently, A and B must themselves be
discriminated, _i.e._ they must be compared and found different, and
without relation difference is unmeaning. For ultimately two terms are
different only when they also possess a common character which admits of
their comparison with reference to a common standard. Thus only things
which are like can be different, and the problem of the relation of
their likeness to their difference is inevitably forced upon us by the
very existence of the difference. And similarly, the common fact _x_
qualifies either term in a definite way, which can be discriminated from
the ways in which other facts qualify the same term, and this
discrimination leads in precisely the same manner to the assertion of
various relations among the different qualities of A and again of B.[90]

It is not difficult to see the common source of the difficulties which
beset both the attempt to reduce all reality to qualities, and the
attempt to identify it with mere relations. In actual experience our
world always comes to us as at once many and one, never as merely single
nor as merely discrete. If you pay exclusive regard to the aspect of
unity and interconnection, you will naturally be tempted to dwell on the
relations between your elements to the exclusion of the various elements
themselves; if you think solely of the aspect of variety, it is equally
natural to treat the elements as real and their relations as fictions.
But in either case you arbitrarily concentrate your attention on a
single aspect of the experienced fact taken in isolation from the other,
and are thus led to results which are bound to collide with the whole
facts. A true view, if possible at all, can only be got by impartial
adherence to the whole of the facts.

§ 9. We are thus brought to the second of our alternatives. Can we
conceive of Reality as _qualities in relation_ or qualities _and_ their
relations? This is really, in a somewhat more developed form, the same
problem as that suggested by the definition of a thing as the “law of
its states.” We are now to take the qualities as fixed terms with a
character of their own which stand in or support further relations, and
we have to ask if the view of the world thus formulated is entirely
intelligible. And it speedily becomes clear that such a view is
confronted by a formidable difficulty. For suppose that A and B are two
qualities which stand in any relation C. (For simplicity’s sake we might
suppose this relation C to be, _e.g._, that of being discriminated, and
we might take as instances of A and B, say, two definitely discriminated
shades of the same colour.) Then A and B, standing in the relation C,
are not identical with A and B as they would be apart from this
relation. (A, for instance, as qualified by contradistinction from B, is
not the same thing as _mere_ A not in any way affected by B, a fact
which is frequently brought home to us with startling force by the
effects of contrast.) At the same time the relation C cannot create its
own terms; A, which is qualified in some special way by its standing to
B in the relation C, may also exist out of this relation, and the mere
fact of our recognising it as A shows that, both in the relation C and
outside it, it has a recognisable identical character. (_E.g._, A as
discriminated from B is not precisely the same thing as A before
discrimination, but the difference of A from B has not been created by
the act of discrimination; it must previously have been different in
order to be discriminated.)

Thus we seem forced to split up the quality A, which we took as one of
the terms of our relation, into two aspects, A (A_{1}) the quality as it
was before the establishment of the relation, and A (A_{2}) the quality
as it is after the establishment of the relation. And the two aspects
thus discovered in what we took for the single quality A must again be
somehow in relation to one another. Hence within A (A_{1}) and A (A_{2})
itself the same process will be repeated, and what we began by regarding
as the fixed terms of the relation will turn out to be themselves
systems of qualities in relation, and this process will have no limit.
The classification of the contents of experience into fixed terms with
relations between them, it is contended, is no solution of the problem
how the experienced world can be both one and many but a mere
restatement of it. “We have to take reality as many and to take it as
one, and to avoid contradiction.... And we succeed, but succeed merely
by shutting the eye which if left open would condemn us.” Hence the
conclusion is drawn that “a relational way of thought ... must give
appearance and not truth. It is a makeshift, a device, a mere practical
compromise, most necessary but in the end most indefensible.”[91]

§ 10. The foregoing reasoning, which has been condensed from the fuller
exposition in Mr. F. H. Bradley’s _Appearance and Reality_, demands most
careful examination, as the consequence to which it leads is of supreme
importance for our whole metaphysical view of the nature of ultimate
Reality. If the conclusion of Mr. Bradley is sound, it is clear that our
discursive thought with its scheme of predication, which is from first
to last relational, can never give us adequate insight into the nature
of the union of the one and the many. We shall then have to conclude
that it is not in thought about Reality, but in some mode of experience,
if such there is, which enables us to transcend the separation of
subject from predicate, and is therefore suprarelational, that we come
nearest to experiencing the real as it really is. We should thus be more
or less in sympathy with the traditional Mysticism which has always made
the transcending of the distinction of subject from predicate the
keynote of its special way of experiencing the Divine. On the other
hand, if the relational scheme of ordinary knowledge could be defended
as a self-consistent way of regarding the facts, we should have the
advantage of being able to construe the absolute Experience in terms of
our own intellectual life much more completely than Mysticism allows.

How, then, might the interpretation of the world as a system of
qualities in relation be defended against Mr. Bradley’s powerful
formulation of the mystic’s objection, and what is the worth of
the defence? Two possible lines of argument suggest themselves as
sufficiently plausible to call for examination. (1) The edge of
the objection would be turned, as far as it rests upon the
unsatisfactoriness of the indefinite regress, if we could regard
_all_ relations as “external,” that is, as making no difference in
the qualities they relate. Now, some relations, it has been
asserted, are merely external, _e.g._, relations of position and
again of _sense_ in the geometrical meaning of the word (like the
difference between a right-hand and a left-hand glove). Why, then,
may this not ultimately be the case with all relations? But if all
relations are external, we can no longer argue that the related
terms must contain a further relation between themselves as the
basis and themselves as the result of the first relation, and so
the whole anti-relational case falls to the ground.

Such a view seems, however, to suffer from fatal deficiencies. For (_a_)
it is at least hard to see how any relation can be ultimately external
to its terms. For you cannot hold two terms in a relation of any sort
without discriminating them; until they are at least discriminated as
two they cannot be terms with a relation between them. Thus
discrimination, and therefore the relation of distinction, is
fundamental in all relation. But where we can distinguish there must
already be in the discriminated terms some difference to afford a basis
for discrimination. Only what is already different can be distinguished.
And with this admission the door is once more opened for the indefinite
regress.

(_b_) And even if this were not so, it seems unthinkable that _all_
relations should be in the end external to their terms. If no relation
in the end makes any difference to its terms, and thus has no foundation
in their nature, it becomes a standing miracle how or why the terms
should enter into relations to which they are all the time absolutely
indifferent. The logical consequence of such a view would surely be the
dismissal of all relations as pure illusion, and the reduction of real
existence to a chaos of disconnected reals which we by some inexplicable
intellectual perversity persist in taking for a system. The now
universally recognised failure of Herbart’s attempt to work out a theory
of Realism on these lines seems ominous for the success of any future
doctrine of the same kind.

(2) Much more subtle is the line of thought suggested by Professor Royce
in the Supplementary Essay appended to his book, _The World and the
Individual_, First Series. Professor Royce admits the indefinite regress
as an inevitable consequence of the reduction of the world to terms in
relation, but denies that it affects the soundness of the reduction. On
the contrary, he regards it rather as a proof of the positive
correctness of the interpretation of existence which gives rise to it.
His argument, which is based upon the modern doctrine of infinite
series, may be briefly summarised as follows:—It is a recognised
characteristic of an infinite series (and of no others) that it can be
adequately “represented” by a part of itself. That is to say, if you
take any infinite series you please, you can always construct a second
series such that it consists of a selection, and only of a selection,
from the terms of the first series, and that every term is derived from
and answers to the corresponding term of the first series according to a
definite law. And this second series, as it is easy to prove, is itself
infinite, and therefore capable of being itself represented adequately
in a third series derived from it in the same manner as it was derived
from the first, and so on indefinitely.

For instance, let the first series be the infinite series of the natural
integers 1, 2, 3, 4, ... then if, _e.g._, we construct a second series,
1^2, 2^2, 3^2 ... of the second powers of these integers, the terms of
this second series are derived by a definite law from those of the first
to which they correspond, and again they constitute a selection out of
the terms of the first series. Every one of them is a term of the first
series, but there are also terms of the first series which are not
repeated in the second. Again, if we make a third series from the second
in the same way as the second was made from the first, by taking the
terms (1^2)^2, (2^2)^2, (3^2)^2, and so on, the terms of this third
series fulfil the same conditions; they correspond according to a fixed
law with the terms of the second, and are also themselves a selection
from those terms. And thus we may go on without end to construct
successive infinite series each of which “adequately represents” the
preceding one. And we are led into this indefinite regress by the very
attempt to carry out consistently a single definite principle of
correspondence between our original infinite series and its first
derivative. In constructing the first derived series in our illustration
1^2, 2^2, 3^2 ... we necessarily also construct the series (1^2)^2,
(2^2)^2, (3^2)^2, ... and the other successive derivatives. Therefore
Prof. Royce claims that any consistent attempt to make an orderly
arrangement of the terms of an infinite whole _must_ lead to the
indefinite repetition of itself. Hence that each term of every relation
on analysis turns out itself to consist of terms in relation, is no
valid objection to the soundness of our principle of interpretation, but
a necessary consequence of the infinity of Reality.[92] Any consistent
attempt to exhibit an infinite whole as an orderly system of terms
_must_ lead to the indefinite regress.

Now it strikes one at once that Professor Royce’s conclusion is in
danger of proving too much. You certainly do not show a method of
dealing with facts to be sound by showing that it leads to the
indefinite regress. It is a common experience that the liar who tells
his first lie must tell a second to back it, and a third to support the
second, and so on indefinitely. And you cannot put a quart of liquor
into a pint pot without first putting half the quart into half the
space, and so forth _ad indefinitum_. Yet these considerations do not
prove that lying or putting quarts of liquor into pint pots is a
consistent way of dealing with reality. A purpose may lead in execution
to the indefinite regress because it is self-contradictory and therefore
self-defeating, as these familiar illustrations suggest. And this raises
the question whether the purpose to arrange an infinite whole in an
ordered system of terms may not lead to the indefinite regress for the
same reason, namely, that the treatment of a true whole as a sequence of
terms is incompatible with its real nature. It is at least worth while
to ask whether Professor Royce’s own treatment of the subject does not
contain indications that this is actually the case.[93]

To begin with, we may note one point of some importance in reference to
which Prof. Royce’s language is at least ambiguous. He speaks of the
indefinite succession of infinite series which arise from the single
purpose of “representing” the series of natural integers adequately by a
selection out of itself as if they could be actually constructed in
pursuance of this purpose. But this is clearly not the case. All that
you can actually do is to construct the various series _implicitly_ by
giving a rule for their formation. The actual construction of the series
would be a typical instance of a self-defeating and therefore internally
contradictory purpose, inasmuch as it would involve the actual
completion of an unending process. Hence we seem forced to make a
distinction which Prof. Royce has perhaps unduly neglected. If your
purpose of ordering the number series on a definite plan means no more
than the formulation of a rule for obtaining any required number of
terms of the successive series, it can be executed, but does not involve
the indefinite regress; if it means the actual completion of the process
of formation of the series, it does involve the indefinite regress, but
is therefore self-contradictory and cannot be realised in act.
Similarly, we may say of the scheme of qualities in relation, that if it
is taken for no more than a rule for the systematic arrangement and
organisation of a finite material, it does not involve the completion of
an infinite process, and is both workable and useful; but if presented
as an account of the way in which a completed all-embracing and
perfectly harmonious experience of the whole of Reality is internally
organised, it involves the completion of the infinite process, and is
therefore self-contradictory and finally inadequate.[94]

This reflection may serve to lead up to another which seems to take us
into the heart of the matter. The researches upon which Prof. Royce’s
defence of the relational scheme is based were in the first instance
investigations into the significance of the number-series. As such they
start with the conception of a system which is a whole of _parts_
external to one another[95] as the object of inquiry. Consequently,
while such investigations are of the highest philosophical importance as
bringing out the implications of this concept, they are only valid as an
analysis of ultimate Reality, provided that the concept of whole and
part is an adequate expression of the way in which the whole Reality is
present in its constituents and they in it. But if, as we ourselves
urged in a previous chapter, the conception of a whole of parts is
entirely inadequate to express the intimate union between the absolute
experience and finite experiences,[96] the proof that the indefinite
process is logically implied in the relation of whole and part does not
show it to belong to the structure of ultimate Reality. Rather, we
should be inclined to urge, the fact that the relational scheme leads to
the indefinite process proves that the conception of whole and part upon
which it is based does not truly represent the mode of union between a
completed experience and its components. And therefore the attempt to
interpret this union in terms of the number-series cannot stand the test
of criticism.

At the same time, Professor Royce’s argument in any case throws
considerable light upon the problem of relation. For it shows _why_ the
attempt to construct the world as a system of qualities in relation
leads to the indefinite regress. For a complete experience embodying at
one stroke the whole of existence, such a construction would, as we have
seen, because essentially incomplete, be impossible. But when _we_ try
to piece together the data of our fragmentary experience into a
connected whole, we inevitably have to start with more or less isolated
facts as fixed terms and weld them together by a relation. In doing so
we unavoidably put ourselves at the point of view from which the
numerical series arises; we unavoidably treat existence _as if_ it were
a whole of mutually external parts. And so the indefinite regress
involved in the nature of the number-system inevitably parades the whole
of our discursive and relational thinking about existence. But its
presence is due to the inadequacy of the conception of Reality with
which discursive thought has to work.

On the whole, then, it seems that Prof. Royce’s investigations only make
it more apparent than before that the relational scheme which discursive
thought uses does not adequately express the true nature of the real,
and that the mystics of all ages have been so far justified in their
contention that the form of our experience which presents the truest
analogy to the experience of the Absolute must be supra-relational, or,
in other words, that the most real type of finite experience must be one
which transcends the distinction of subject and predicate. To admit this
is, however, not to admit that we are altogether ignorant how the one
and the many are united in Reality. For there are many other types of
human experience besides that which is dominated by the discursive and
relational intellect.

In immediate simple feeling we have obviously a type of conscious
experience in which distinction and relation have as yet not emerged.
And I have tried in Bk. I. chap. 2 to show how in the direct intuition
of an æsthetic whole by trained artistic perception we have at a higher
level an experience which contains the results of an elaborate process
of distinction and relation, but contains them in a way which transcends
the relational form and reverts in its directness to the unity of
immediate feeling. While again we have in the personal love which is one
with mutual insight a form of experience that, if translated into the
language of the intellect, would require for its description a whole
world of relations and predicates, and is yet, as experienced, an
intimate unity no relational scheme can more than faintly adumbrate. And
it is worthy of consideration that religious emotion in all ages has
borrowed from these forms of experience its favourite expressions for
the highest modes of communion between the finite and the infinite, the
“beatific vision,” the “love of God,” etc.

It seems indeed as if the function of the mere intellect were always
that of a necessary and valuable intermediary between a lower and a
higher level of immediate apprehension. It breaks up, by the relations
and distinctions it introduces, the original union of the _what_ and the
_that_ of simple feeling, and proceeds to make the _what_, which it
deals with in its isolation, ever more and more complex. But the
ultimate issue of the process is only reached and its ultimate aim only
satisfied so far as it conducts us at a higher stage of mental
development to the direct intuition of a richer and more comprehensive
whole in the immediate unity of its _that_ and its _what_. The besetting
philosophical sin of the mere mystic is not so much his refusal to
accept the work of the mere intellect as the highest and truest type of
human experience, as his tendency to satisfy his demand for the fuller
union of the _what_ with the _that_ by reverting to the lower forms of
immediacy upon which intellectual reflection has not done its work,
instead of pressing on to the higher in which the effect of that work is
preserved though its form is transcended.

These reflections may serve to obviate the objection that to reject the
relational scheme when it is offered as the ultimate truth is to deny
the value and significance of the scientific work we accomplish by means
of it. Though the scheme of relations cannot adequately express the mode
of union between the finite and the infinite, there is no fresh addition
to the system of relations into which scientific analysis translates the
real world of experience that does not increase our knowledge of what
the real world must contain, though it may fail to explain how it
contains it. And, in conclusion, let it be remembered that it is true
not only of the religious mystic’s special experience of union with
deity, but of all direct experience, that the relational scheme is quite
inadequate to explain how it holds its double aspects, its unity and its
multiplicity, its _that_ and its _what_, in complete interpenetration.
For _no_ living experience is a mere whole of parts, and none,
therefore, can be fully represented by a scheme based upon the concept
of whole and part.[97]

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 1-3,
15, 27; L. T. Hobhouse, _Theory of Knowledge_, pp. 172-181 (Qualities
and Relations), 540-557 (Substance); H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i.
chap. 1 (The Being of Things), chap. 2 (The Quality of Things), chap. 3
(The Real and Reality); J. Royce, _The World and the Individual_, First
Series, Supplementary Essay; B. Russell, “The Concept of Order” (_Mind_,
January 1901), and article on “Position in Space and Time” (_Mind_, July
1901); G. F. Stout, “Alleged Self-contradictions in the Concept of
Relation” (_Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_, New Series, vol.
ii. pp. 1-14, with the accompanying discussion, pp. 15-24).

-----------------------

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER IV.

DR. STOUT’S REPLY TO MR. BRADLEY’S CRITICISM
OF THE CONCEPT OF RELATION.

Since the preceding chapter was written, I have had the opportunity of
studying Dr. Stout’s paper in the current volume of _Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society_. I have not thought it necessary to make any
alterations in the text of Chapter 4, in consequence of Dr. Stout’s
criticism, but I may perhaps be permitted to add the following remarks,
which must not be regarded as a systematic appreciation or examination
of Dr. Stout’s views. The latter, as he himself pleads, cannot indeed be
finally judged until he has worked out the theory of Predication for
which his present paper merely prepares the way.

1. Dr. Stout begins by admitting what to my own mind is the essence of
the anti-relational argument. “No relation or system of relations can
ever constitute a self-subsistent and self-contained Reality. The
all-inclusive universe cannot ultimately consist in (? of) a collection
of interrelated terms” (_op. cit._, p. 2). This being once conceded, I
should have thought it an inevitable consequence that a “collection of
interrelated terms” cannot give us the final truth about the nature of
anything. For the whole idealist contention, as I understand it and have
tried to sustain it in the present work, is that the structure of the
whole is so repeated in any and every one of its members that what is
not the truth about the whole is never the _ultimate_ truth about
anything. precisely because there is ultimately nothing apart from the
whole, and the whole again is nothing apart from its members. So much, I
had thought, we have all learned from Hegel, and therefore Dr. Stout’s
dilemma that any proposition asserting relation (p. 5) must be false,
unless the relational scheme, so long as it is not affirmed of the
ultimate whole itself, gives us truth, does not seem to me to possess
any real cogency. With Mr. Bradley himself, as quoted by Dr. Stout, I
should urge that if the relational scheme is not itself internally
discrepant, there remains no valid ground for disputing its
applicability to the whole.

2. Dr. Stout’s introduction into a “relational unity” of the third
term,—_relatedness_ does not seem to me to remove the difficulties
inherent in our problem. And the illustration by which he supports it
appears to be unsound. He argues that when my hat is on my head this
state of things implies (1) the two related terms, the hat and the
head,(2) a relation of _on_ and _under_. (3) the fact that the terms
stand in this relation—their relatedness. For (1) and (2) by themselves
would be compatible with my hat being on the peg and my head bare. But
surely there is here a confusion between the relation of _above_ and
_below_, and the very different relation of _on_ and _under_. The latter
relation includes, as the former does not, immediate contact as part of
its meaning. If there are (1) a hat and a head, and (2) the relation
_on_ and _under_—in this sense—between the two, there is surely no need
of a third factor to complete the concrete actuality of “hat on head.”
If the hat is not actually on the head, then (2), the supposed relation,
is not there at all. And if (2) is there the whole fact is already
there. In a word, Dr. Stout seems to me to count in the concrete fact of
“thing exhibiting related aspects” as a third constituent in itself,
precisely as popular Logic sometimes counts in the actual judgment,
under the name of _Copula_, as one factor of itself.[98]

Then to Dr. Stout’s use of his distinction between the relation and the
fact of relatedness, I think it may be replied that it leaves us
precisely where we were before. The hat is qualified by being _on_ the
head, the head by being _in_ or _under_ the hat, and hat and head
together by the relation of _on_ and _under_ between them. But how these
various aspects of the fact are to be combined in a single consistent
view we are no nearer knowing.

3. _The endless regress._ I think it will be seen from the preceding
chapter that in my own view a genuine endless regress is evidence of the
falsity of the conception which gives rise to it, and that I hold this
on the ground that the endless regress always presupposes the
self-contradictory purpose to sum an admittedly infinite series. Hence I
could not concur, so far as I can see at present, in Dr. Stout’s
distinction between the endless regress which does and that which does
not involve self-contradiction. As to his illustration of endless
regress of the second kind, the infinite divisibility of space (p. 11),
I should have thought that there is no actual endless regress in
question until you substitute for infinite divisibility infinite actual
_subdivision_, and that when you make this substitution it commits you
at once to the self-contradictory completion of an unending task. (Cf.
what was said above, § 10, with reference to infinite numerical series.)

4. Dr. Stout goes on to deny that there is any endless regress,
self-contradictory or not, involved in the relational scheme. According
to him, what connects the relation with its terms is not another
relation (which would of course give rise to an endless regress), but
their relatedness, which is “a common adjective both of the relation and
the terms” (p. 11). I have already explained why this solution appears
to me merely to repeat the problem. The relatedness, so far as I can
see, is a name for the concrete fact with its double aspect of quality
and relation, and I cannot understand how mere insistence upon the
concrete unity of the fact makes the conjunction of its aspects more
intelligible.

5. Dr. Stout further supports his contention by a theory of the nature
of continuous connection which I have perhaps failed to understand.
Replying in anticipation to the possible objection of an opponent, that
if the “relatedness” connects the terms with their relation there must
be a second link to connect the term with its relatedness, he says
“there is no intermediate link and there is need for none. For the
connection is continuous, and has its ground in that ultimate continuity
which is presupposed by all relational unity” (p. 12, cf. pp. 2-4). And,
as he has previously told us, “so far as there is continuous connection
there is nothing between [_i.e._ between the connected terms], and there
is therefore no relation.”

Now there seems to me to be a contradiction latent here. Continuous
connection, of course, implies distinct but connected terms which form a
series. Where there are no such distinct terms there is nothing to
connect. Now it is, as I understand it, part of the very nature of a
continuous series that any two terms of the series have always a number
of possible intermediate terms between them. And therefore, in a
continuous series, there are _no_ immediately adjacent terms. Dr.
Stout’s own illustration brings this out—

│ │ │
──────┼──────┼──────┼──────
β │ α │ _a_ │ _b_
M

In a diagram like the accompanying _b_ and β are, he argues, “mediately
conjoined,” but _a_ and α are “immediately co-adjacent.” Surely Dr.
Stout forgets here that what can be intelligibly called “co-adjacent”
are not lines but points or positions on the lines. And between any
point in α and any point in _a_ there are a plurality of intermediate
positions, except for the special case of the extreme left point of _a_
and the extreme right point of α. These, of course, coalesce in the
single point M, and there is therefore no connection, mediate or
immediate, left in this case.[99] The illustration, I think, may serve
to reveal a serious discrepancy in Dr. Stout’s theory. He sees that
relations presuppose a unity which is supra-relational, and which he
calls “continuous,” on the ground of its supra-relational character. At
the same time, to save the relational scheme from condemnation as
leading to the endless regress, he has to turn this supra-relational
unity itself into a sort of relation by calling it an immediate
connection between _adjacent_ terms, and thus ascribing to it the
fundamental character of a _discontinuous_ series. And I cannot help
regarding this procedure as unconscious evidence to the truth of the
principle, that what is not the truth about the whole of Reality is not
ultimately the truth about any reality.

-----

Footnote 73:

See the admirable account of the “natural conception” of the world in
the final chapter of Avenarius, _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_.

Footnote 74:

May I say here once for all, that when I oppose _practice_ to
intellectual speculation, I must be understood to mean by practice the
alteration by myself of some datum of given existence. The activity of
thought is thus for me not practical, precisely because the “truths”
which I know or contemplate are not _quà_ truths given existences
operated upon and altered by the act of thinking.

Footnote 75:

Such a view of the mental life of the animal seems to have been
actually held, for instance, by the late Professor T. H. Green. Yet
see Green, Works, ii. 217.

Footnote 76:

Strictly speaking, the “solidity” or “impenetrability” of the ultimate
particles of matter, which is with Locke and Newton one of the most
prominent “primary” qualities, is not a “mathematical” property, but
it still owes its inclusion in the list to the conviction of these
philosophers that it is, like extension and form, fundamentally
important for mathematical Physics. The explanation of the “secondary”
qualities as _subjective_ appears to go back to Democritus.

Footnote 77:

See the further elaboration of this analogy in Bk. III. chap. 3, § 2
ff.

Footnote 78:

Professor Sidgwick’s defence of the Lockian view (_Philosophy: its
Scope and Relations_, p. 63 ff.) seems to me to ignore the point at
issue. namely, that in any sense in which “secondary” qualities get
their meaning from the content of sensation, primary qualities do the
same. The whole point is that the sensation is not merely (as process)
the _occasion_ of our cognition of, _e.g._, hardness or softness, but
also (as content) furnishes the very meaning of “hard” or “soft.” Cf.
with what follows, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 1.

Footnote 79:

The former alternative is that of scholasticism; in modern science the
latter has been more or less consciously adopted by those thinkers who
retain the notion of substances. The various qualities are on this
view consequences of the relations in which each substance stands
(_a_) to other interacting substances, and (_b_) in particular to the
unknown substratum of our “consciousness.”

Footnote 80:

See chaps. 1 and 2 of bk. i. of his _Metaphysic_.

Footnote 81:

The reader who desires to study Kant’s doctrine in detail may begin by
taking up Kant’s own _Prolegomena to the Study of any future
Metaphysic_, which may be profitably consulted even by those who find
the _Critique of Pure Reason_ too diffuse and technical. The latest
and cheapest translation is that included in the Open Court Publishing
Co.’s series of Philosophical Classics.

Footnote 82:

“Arbitrarily” because it is, as all recent psychology insists, the
direction of our attention which determines _what_ qualities shall be
presented together, and thus become “associated.”

Footnote 83:

In Psychology this comes out in the rejection by the best recent
writers of the whole associationist account of the process of
perception, according to which the perception of a thing as a whole
was taken to mean the actual presence in sensation of one of its
qualities _plus_ the reinstatement by association of the “ideas” of
the others. For the modern doctrine of the perception of a whole, as
distinct from the mere perception of its constituent parts, consult
Stout, _Analytic Psychology_, bk. i. chap. 3, or _Manual of
Psychology_,^3 bk. i. chap. 3.

Footnote 84:

This is just as true of the so-called primary qualities of things as
of any others. Thus the mass and again the kinetic energy of a
conservative material system are properly names for the way in which
the system will behave under determinate conditions, not of modes of
behaviour which are necessarily actually exhibited throughout its
existence. The laws of motion, again, are statements of the same
hypothetical kind about the way in which, as we believe, particles
move if certain conditions are fulfilled. The doctrine according to
which all events in the physical world are actual motions, rests on no
more than a metaphysical blunder of a peculiarly barbarous kind. Cf.
Stallo, _Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics_, chaps. 10-12.

Footnote 85:

Thus, _e.g._, so fundamental a proposition in our current mechanical
science as the “first law of motion” is avowedly a statement as to
what _would_ be the behaviour of things under a condition which, so
far as we know, is never actually realised. On the thing as the “law
of its states,” see Lotze, _Metaphysic_, I. 3. 32 ff. (Eng. trans.,
vol. i. p. 88 ff.), and L. T. Hobhouse, _The Theory of Knowledge_, pp.
545-557.

Footnote 86:

Mr. Hobhouse (_op. cit._, p. 541 ff.) thinks that the solution is
simply that those qualities belong to one “substance,” which are
apprehended together as occupying one space. As a working criterion of
what we mean by one bodily thing, this account seems satisfactory, and
has probably suggested itself spontaneously to most of us. But it
leaves untouched the more fundamental question how the identification
of a certain sight-space with a certain touch-space is effected, and
what are the motives which lead to it. Mr. Hobhouse is content to take
the identification as “given in adult perception,” but it seems to me
to emerge from his own good account of the matter that it is the still
more primitive apprehension of my own body as a felt unity upon which
the synthesis between sight and touch spaces is based. If so, the
ultimate source of the “unity of substance” must be sought deeper than
Mr. Hobhouse is willing to go for it. And _quaere_, whether his
account, if accepted as ultimate, would not lead to the identification
of substance with space? For the difficulties which arise when you say
the substance is the space and its filling of qualities, see
_Appearance and Reality_, chap. 2, pp. 19, 20 (1st ed.).

Footnote 87:

_Monadology_, §§ 8-16, 57-62.

Footnote 88:

This is true even where we merely count a number of qualitatively
equivalent units in order to ascertain their sum. It is their positive
character of being qualitatively equivalent which makes it permissible
in this case to take any one of them indifferently as first, any other
as second, etc. Whenever you apply the numerical series to the
arrangement in order of the qualitatively dissimilar, the nature of
your material as related to the character of your special interest in
it decides for you what you shall call first, second, third, etc.

Footnote 89:

As to the possibility of relations which are in this sense external to
their terms, see B. Russell, _The Philosophy of Leibniz_, p. 130, and
the articles by the same writer in _Mind_ for January and July 1901.

Footnote 90:

See the elaborate discussion of the relational scheme implied in any
assertion of difference in Royce, _The World and the Individual_,
Second Series, lect 2.

Footnote 91:

Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 3. Compare also chap. 15,
“Thought and Reality.”

Footnote 92:

The reader who desires further knowledge of the researches in the
theory of Numbers upon which Prof. Royce’s doctrine is based, may
profitably consult Dedekind, _Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen_, and
Couturat, _L’Infini Mathématique_.

Footnote 93:

Professor Royce’s own illustration of the map of England executed upon
a portion of the surface of the country is really a typical instance
of a self-contradictory purpose. He argues that such a map, to be
theoretically perfect, must contain a reduced facsimile of itself as
part of the country mapped, and this again another, and so on
indefinitely. But the whole force of the reasoning depends on
overlooking the distinction between the surface of England as it is
before the map is made, and the surface of England as altered by the
presence of the map. Prof. Royce assumes that you set out to represent
in the map a state of things which can in fact have no existence until
after the map is made. The previous existence of the map at a certain
spot is falsely taken to be one of the conditions to which the
map-maker is to conform in executing it. Every one of the supposed
“maps within the map” will thus involve distortion and
misrepresentation of the district it proposes to map. It is as if
Hamlet had chosen “Hamlet” as the subject of the “play within the
play.” The professor’s illustration thus does less than justice to his
theory.

Footnote 94:

The fundamental defect in Professor Royce’s reasoning seems to me to
lie in the tacit transition from the notion of an infinite _series_ to
that of an infinite completed _sum_. Thus he speaks of the series of
prime numbers as a “whole” being present at once to the mind of God.
But are the prime numbers, or any other infinite series, an actual sum
at all? They are surely not proved to be so by the existence of
general truths about any prime number.

Footnote 95:

See, _e.g._, Dedekind, _op. cit._, § 2: “It frequently happens that
different things _a_, _b_, _c_ ... are apprehended upon whatsoever
occasion under a common point of view, mentally put together, and it
is then said that they form a _system_; the things _a_, _b_, _c_ ...
are named the _elements_ of the system”; and § 3 (definitions of
_whole_ and _part_).

Footnote 96:

_Ante_, Bk. II. chap. 2, § 5.

Footnote 97:

It is no answer to this view to urge that as soon as the intellect
undertakes to reflect upon and describe Reality it unavoidably does so
in relational terms. For it is our contention that the same intellect
which uses these relational methods sees _why_ they are inadequate,
and to some extent at least how they are ultimately merged in a higher
type of experience. Thus the systematic use of the intellect in
Metaphysics itself leads to the conviction that the mere intellect is
not the whole of Reality. Or, in still more paradoxical language, the
highest truth for the mere intellect is the thought of Reality as an
ordered system. But all such order is based in the end on the
number-series with its category of whole and part, and cannot,
therefore, be a perfectly adequate representation of a
supra-relational Reality. Hence Truth, from its own nature, can never
be quite the same thing as Reality.

Footnote 98:

Or does Dr. Stout merely mean that there may be a hat and a head, and
also a relation of on and under (_e.g._, between the _hat_ and the
_peg_), and yet my hat not be on my head? If this is his meaning, I
reply we have not really got the _relation_ and its _terms_; if the
hat is not on the head, hat and head are not terms in the relation at
all. I do not see why, on his own principles, Dr. Stout should not add
a fourth factor to his analysis, namely, qualified_ness_, or the fact
that the qualities are there, and so on indefinitely.

Footnote 99:

If you consider the _lines_ _a_ and α, as Dr. Stout prefers to do, I
should have thought two views possible. (_a_) There are not two lines
at all, but one, the “junction” at M being merely ideal. Then there
remains nothing to connect and there is no relation of “immediate
connection.” Or (_b_), the junction may be taken as real, and then you
have a perfectly ordinary case of relation, the terms being the
terminated lines _a_ and α, and the relation being one of contact at
M. On every ground (_a_) seems to me the right view, but it is
incompatible with the reduction of continuity to “immediate
connection.” Thus the source of the difficulty is that (1) immediate
connection can only hold between the immediately successive terms of a
discontinuous series, and yet (2) _cannot_ hold between them precisely
_because_ they are discontinuous.

-----

CHAPTER V

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(2) CHANGE AND
CAUSALITY

§ 1. The conception of things as interacting leads to the two problems
of Change and Causality. The paradoxical character of change due to
the fact that only what is permanent can change. § 2. Change is
succession within an identity; this identity, like that of
Substance, must be teleological, _i.e._ must be an identity of plan
or end pervading the process of change. § 3. Thus all change falls
under the logical category of Ground and Consequence, which becomes
in its application to succession in time the Principle of Sufficient
Reason. § 4. _Causality._ Cause—in the modern popular and scientific
sense—means the ground of a change when taken to be completely
contained in preceding changes. That every change has its complete
ground in preceding changes is neither an axiom nor an empirically
ascertained truth, but a postulate suggested by our practical needs.
§ 5. In the last resort the postulate cannot be true; the dependence
between events cannot be one-sided. The real justification for our
use of the postulate is its practical success. § 6. Origin of the
conception of Cause anthropomorphic § 7. Puzzles about Causation.
(1) _Continuity._ Causation must be continuous, and yet in a
continuous process there can be no distinction of cause from effect.
Cause must be and yet cannot be prior in time to effect. § 8. (2)
_The indefinite regress_ in causation. § 9. (3) _Plurality of
Causes._ Plurality of Causes is ultimately a logical contradiction,
but in any form in which the causal postulate is of practical use it
must recognise plurality. §10. The “necessity” of the causal
relation psychological and subjective. §11. Immanent and Transeunt
Causality: Consistent Pluralism must deny transeunt Causation; but
cannot do so successfully, §12. Both transeunt and immanent
Causality are ultimately appearance.

§ 1. The fourth of the features which characterise the pre-scientific
view of the world we found to be the belief that things act and are
acted upon by one another. The problems to which this belief gives rise
are so vast, and have been historically of such significance for
Metaphysics, that they will require a separate chapter for their
discussion. In the conception of the interaction of things as it exists
for the naïve pre-scientific mind, we may distinguish at least two
aspects. There is (1) the belief that things _change_, that within the
unity of the one thing there is a succession of different states; and
(2) the belief that the changes of state of various things are so
inter-connected that the changes in one thing serve as occasions for
definite changes in other things. We thus have to discuss, first, the
general notion of change as an inseparable aspect of the being of
things, and next the concept of systematic inter-connection between the
changes of state of different things.

(_a_) _Change._ The problem presented by the apparently unceasing
mutability of existence is one of the earliest as well as one of the
most persistent in the whole range of Philosophy. In itself it might
seem that the successive presentation in time of various states is
neither more nor less noteworthy a feature of the world of experience
than the simultaneous presentation of a like variety, but the problem of
mutability has always appealed with special force to the human
imagination from its intimate connection with our personal hopes and
fears, ambitions and disappointments. Tempora mutantur, _nos_ et mutamur
in illis; there is the secret of the persistence with which our
philosophic thought has from the first revolved round this special
problem. There, too, we may find a pregnant hint of the central paradox
implied in all mutability—namely, that only the identical and permanent
can change. It is because the self which changes with the flux of time
and circumstance is still in some measure the same old self that we feel
its changes to be so replete with matter for exultation and despair.
Were we completely new-made with each successive change in our self,
there would no longer be ground for joy in transition to the better or
grief at alteration for the worse.

The thought that only what is permanent can change has affected
Philosophy in different ways at different periods of its history. At the
very dawn of Greek Philosophy it was the guiding principle of the Ionian
physicists who sought to comprehend the apparent variety of successive
phenomena as the transformations of a single bodily reality. As the
difficulties inherent in such a materialistic Monism became more
apparent, the felt necessity of ascribing unity of some kind to
existence led Parmenides and his Eleatic successors to the extreme view
that change, being impossible in a permanent homogeneous bodily reality,
must be a mere illusion of our deceptive senses. While yet again the
later Ionian physicists, and their Sicilian counterpart Empedocles,
sought to reconcile the apparent mutability of things with the criticism
of Parmenides by the theory that what appears to the senses as
qualitative change is in reality the mere regrouping in space of
qualitatively unalterable “elements” or “atoms”—μεῖξις διάλλαξίς τε
μιγέντων.

At a more developed stage of Hellenic thought, the necessity of taking
some account of the mutability as well as of the permanence of existence
impelled Plato to draw the momentous distinction between two worlds or
orders of being—the real, with its eternal unvarying self-identity, and
the merely apparent, where all is change, confusion, and instability. In
spite of Plato’s manifest failure to make it intelligible how these two
orders, the eternal and the temporal, are ultimately connected, this
distinction in one form or another has continued ever since to haunt all
subsequent metaphysical construction. Even our modern scientific
Materialism, with its loudly avowed scorn for all merely metaphysical
questions, shows by its constant endeavour to reduce all material
existence to a succession of changes in a homogeneous medium, both the
persistence with which the intellect demands a permanent background for
change, and the difficulty of finding logical satisfaction for the
demand.

Yet there have not been wanting attempts to get rid of the paradox by
denying its truth. As the Eleatics sought to escape it by reducing
change itself to a baseless illusion, so some at least of the disciples
of Heracleitus seem to have evaded it by refusing to admit any permanent
identity in the changeable, and they have not been entirely without
imitators in the modern world. Incessant change without underlying unity
has had its defenders in the history of Metaphysics, though they have
not been numerous, and we must therefore briefly consider what can be
urged for and against such a concept. Apart from the general difficulty
of seeing how what changes can at the same time be permanently identical
with itself, the only special argument in favour of the doctrine that
only incessant change is real seems to be the appeal to direct
experience. In any actual experience, it is contended, however
contracted its limits, we are always presented with the fact of change
and transition; we never apprehend an absolutely unchanging content.
Even where the object before us exhibits no succession, self-examination
will always detect at least alternating tension and relaxation of
attention with the accompanying fluctuations of bodily sensation.

Now there can, of course, be no gainsaying these facts of experience,
but the conclusion based on them evidently goes much further than the
premisses warrant. If experience never gives us mere persistence of an
unchanging content, neither does it ever give us mere change without
persistence. What we actually experience always exhibits the two aspects
of identity and transition together. Usually there will be, side by side
with the elements which sensibly change in the course of the experience,
others which remain sensibly constant throughout it. And even when,
through inattention, we fail to detect these constant elements, the
successive states of the changing content itself are not merely
momentary; each has its own sensible duration through which it retains
its character without perceptible changes. Experience thus entirely
fails to substantiate the notion of mere change apart from a background
of permanent identity.

The positive disproof of the notion must, however, be found in its own
inherent absurdity. Change by itself, apart from a background of
identity, is impossible for the reason that where there is no underlying
identity there is nothing to change. All change must be change of and in
some thing. A mere succession of entirely disconnected contents held
together by no common permanent nature persisting in spite of the
transition, would not be change at all. If I simply have before me first
A and then B, A and B being absolutely devoid of any point of community,
there is no sense in saying that I have apprehended a process of change.
The change has been at most a change in myself as I passed from the
state of perceiving A to the state of perceiving B, and this subjective
transition again can only be called change on the assumption that the I
who am qualified first by the perception of A and its various emotional
and other accompaniments, and then by that of B and its accompaniments,
am the same. And where you have not merely a change of perception but an
actual perception of change, the case is even clearer. What we perceive
in such a case is “A changing into B,” the two successive states A and B
being held together by the fact that they are successive states of some
more permanent unity [gamma]. Apart from the presence of this identical
[gamma] in both the earlier and later stages of the process, there would
be no meaning in speaking of it as one of change.

§ 2. Change, then, may be defined as succession within an identity, the
identity being as essential to the character of the process as the
succession. In what way, then, must we think of this identity or common
nature which is present throughout the whole succession of changes? It
should be clear that this question—how that which changes can be
permanent?—is simply our old problem of quality and substance, how the
many states can belong to one thing, considered with special reference
to the case of states which form a succession in time. Thus, whatever is
the true nature of the unity to which the many states of one thing
belong, will also be the true nature of the identity which connects the
successive stages of a process of change.

Now we have already seen in what the unity to which the many states
belong must be taken to consist. We found that this unity is essentially
teleological; that group of states, we saw, is one thing which functions
as one in regard to an end or interest, or, as we may also say, is the
embodiment of coherent structure. The same is true of the process of
change. The earlier and later stages of the process are differences in
an identity precisely because they constitute one process. And a process
is one when it is the systematic realisation of a single coherent end.
To be one process means to be the systematic expression in a succession
of stages of a single coherent plan or law. The succession of stages is
thus welded into a unity by the singleness of the plan or law which they
embody, and it is this systematic connection of each stage with all the
rest which we express by saying that whatever changes possesses an
underlying permanent identity of character. It would amount to precisely
the same thing if we said the successive states of anything that changes
form a connected system.

We must be careful here, as we were in dealing with the problem of
Substance, not to be misled by taking symbolic aids to imagination for
philosophical truths. Just as it is easy to imagine the “substance” of
things as a sort of material substratum, it is easy to imagine the
identity which pervades all changes as that of a number of pieces of
matter, and to think of the changes as constituted by their motion
through space. But such a representation must not be taken for anything
more than an aid to imagination. It helps us to make a mental diagram,
but it throws absolutely no light upon the real nature of the connection
between the identity and the succession. For the same problem breaks out
within each of the “self-identical” pieces of matter; we have to say
what we mean by calling it one and the same throughout the series of its
changing positions, and the necessity of answering this question shows
us at once that the identity of a material particle throughout its
motion is only one _case_ of that identity pervading succession which
belongs to all change, and in no sense affords any explanation of the
principle it illustrates.[100] As a recent writer puts it, “it seems to
be a deeply rooted infirmity of the human mind ... that it can hardly
conceive activities of any sort apart from material bases, ... through
habitually seeking to represent all phenomena in mechanical terms, in
terms of the motion of little bits of matter, many of us have come to
believe that in so doing we describe the actual events underlying
phenomena.”[101] This “disease of the intellect,” as the same writer
aptly calls it, is nowhere more insidious than where we are dealing with
the problem of Change.

Change, then, involves two aspects. It is a succession of events in
time, and these events are connected by a systematic unity in such a way
that they form the expression of a plan or law of structure. The series
of successive states which make up the history of a thing are the
expression of the thing’s nature or structure. To understand the thing’s
structure is to possess the key to the succession of its states, to know
on what principle each gives way to its successor. And similarly, to
have complete insight into the nature or structure of Reality as a whole
would be to understand the principles according to which every
transitory event in the history of the Universe, regarded as a series of
events in time, is followed by its own special successor.

It is evident that, in proportion as our knowledge of any thing or
system of things approaches this insight into the laws of its structure,
the processes of change acquire a new character for us. They lose their
appearance of paradox, and tend to become the self-evident expression of
the identity which is their underlying principle. Change, once reduced
to law and apprehended as the embodiment in succession of a principle we
understand, is no longer change as an unintelligible mystery. We should
bear this in mind when we reflect on the doctrine of Plato that the
physical world must be unreal because the scene of incessant change.
Such a view is only to be understood by remembering that before the
invention of the mathematical methods which have enabled us with such
conspicuous success to reduce physical phenomena to orderly sequence
according to law, the physical world necessarily appeared to the
philosopher a scene of _arbitrary_ change following no recognisable
principle. Change, so far as understood in the light of its principle,
has already ceased to be mere change.[102]

§ 3. _Ground and Consequence._ In the technical language of Logic, the
underlying principle of any system is called its _Ground_, the detail in
which the principle finds systematic expression is called its
_Consequence_. Ground and Consequence are thus one and the same
systematic whole, only considered from two different points of view. The
Ground is the pervading common nature of the system, thought of as an
identity pervading and determining the character of its detail; the
Consequence is the same system, looked at from the point of view of the
detail, as a plurality of differences pervaded and determined by an
identical principle. The understanding of a process of change thus
clearly consists in bringing it under the principle of Ground and
Consequence. In so far as we are successful in detecting a principle in
the apparently arbitrary succession of events, these events become for
us a system with a common principle of structure for its Ground, and a
plurality of successive states as its Consequence.

Change is not, however, the only instance of the principle of Ground and
Consequence. These two aspects may also be found in systematic wholes
which contain no element of succession in time, _e.g._ in a body of
logical deductions from a few fundamental premisses. The special
peculiarity of the case of Change is that it is the principle of Ground
and Consequence as applied to a material which is successive _in time_.
As thus applied, the principle has received the special name of the
_Principle of Sufficient Reason_, and may be formulated thus: _Nothing
takes place unless there is a sufficient reason why it should occur
rather than not_. It is clear that such a proposition is a mere result
of the application of the conception of Reality as a systematic whole to
the special case of the existence of the successive in time. It is
therefore simply one case of the fundamental axiom of all knowledge, the
axiom that what truly exists is a coherent whole.[103] We must of course
observe that the principle does nothing to solve the perhaps insoluble
problem _why_ succession in time should be a feature of experience. This
is a question which could only be answered if we could show that
succession in time is a logical consequence of the existence of any
multiplicity forming a systematic whole. Until we are able to establish
this result, we have simply to accept succession as a datum of our
experience. (Yet for some light upon the problem, see _infra_, Bk. III
chap. 4, § 9)

§ 4. _Causality._ So far we have said nothing of a concept which is much
more familiar in the popular treatment of the problem of Change than
that of Ground and Consequence, the concept of _Cause_. In proceeding to
discuss this concept, it is necessary in the first place to explain
which of the numerous senses of the word we are taking for examination.
There was an old scholastic distinction, which still reappears
occasionally in philosophical writings, between the _Causa cognoscendi_,
or reason for affirming a truth, and the _Causa existendi_ or _fiendi_,
the cause of the occurrence of an event. It is this latter meaning of
the word “cause,” the meaning which is predominant wherever the term is
used in modern scientific language, that we shall have in view in the
following sections.

The _Causa cognoscendi_, or logical _reason_ for the affirmation of a
truth, as distinguished from the psychological factors which lead a
particular individual to affirm it, is clearly identical with what
modern logicians call the _Ground_. A given proposition must logically
be affirmed as true in the last resort, because it fills a place in a
wider system of truths which no other proposition would fill. Thus,
_e.g._, a special proposition about the relation between the sides and
angles of a triangle is logically necessitated, because it is an
integral element in the development of a system of geometrical ideas
which repose as a whole upon certain fundamental assumptions as to the
character of spatial order. The original presuppositions cannot be
worked out to their logical consequence in a body of internally coherent
geometrical notions unless the proposition in question is included in
that body. And reciprocally, the logical justification for regarding
these presuppositions rather than any others as sound, lies in the fact
that they yield a body of internally consistent consequences.
Incidentally, we see by means of this illustration that Ground and
Consequence are mutually convertible, which is what we might have
inferred from the way in which we defined them as mutually complementary
aspects of a single systematic whole.

What we are concerned with in the everyday and scientific treatment of
Causation, is not this purely logical relation of Ground and
Consequence, but something partly identical with it, partly different.
The _Causa fiendi_ has no significance except in connection with
occurrences or events in time, and may roughly be said to correspond
with what Aristotle denotes the “Source of Change”—ἀρχὴ κινήσεως or ὅθεν
ἡ κίνησις—and his mediæval followers named the Efficient Cause. Cause,
in the popular sense of the word, denotes the attempt to carry out the
principle of the interconnection of events in a system along special
lines by regarding every event as completely determined by conditions
which are themselves previous events. Widely as the popular and the
scientific uses of the term “cause” diverge in minor respects, they
agree in the essential point. That every event has its cause is
understood, both in everyday life and in the sciences which use the
concept of causation, to mean that the occurrence and the character of
every event in the time-series is completely determined by preceding
events. In more technical language, causation for everyday thought and
for the sciences means _one-sided dependence_ of the present on the
past, and the future on the present.

It is, of course, obvious that the principle of Causation as thus
understood is not a necessary logical deduction from the principle of
Ground and Consequence. It might be the case that all occurrences form a
coherent plan or system, such that if you once grasped the principle of
the system you could infer from it what precise occurrence must take
place at any one moment, and yet it might be impossible to discover this
principle by an examination of the course of events up to the present
moment. In other words, the principle of the systematic interconnection
of events might be valid, and yet the events of the present might depend
on those which will succeed them in the future no less than on those
which have preceded them in the past. In that case it would be
impossible with absolute logical certainty to infer what will occur at a
given moment from the mere examination of what has preceded, _i.e._ the
principle of Causation as used in the sciences would not be logically
valid.[104]

Cause, as currently understood, is thus identical not with the whole
true logical ground, but with the ground so far as it can be discovered
in the train of temporally antecedent circumstances, _i.e._ cause is
_incomplete_ ground. This point is important, as it shows that the
principle of Causation is not, like the principle of Sufficient Reason,
axiomatic. It is no necessary logical consequence of the knowability or
systematic character of the Real that an event should be completely
determined by temporally antecedent events; for anything that is implied
in the systematic character of the Real, the event may be equally
dependent on subsequent occurrences. Again, the principle of Causation
cannot be empirically established by an appeal to the actual course of
experience. Actual experience is certainly not sufficient to show that
every event is absolutely determined by its antecedent conditions; at
most the success of our scientific hypotheses based upon the assumption
of causality only avails to show that events may be inferred from their
antecedents with sufficient accuracy to make the causal assumption
practically useful.

Regarded as a universal principle of scientific procedure, the causal
assumption must be pronounced to be neither an axiom nor an empirical
truth but a _postulate_, in the strict sense of the word, _i.e._ an
assumption which cannot be logically justified, but is made because of
its practical value, and depends upon the success with which it can be
applied for confirmation. In the sense that it is a postulate which
experience may confirm but cannot prove, it may properly be said to be
_a priori_, but it is manifestly not _a priori_ in the more familiar
Kantian sense of the word. That is, it is not a necessary and
indispensable axiom without which systematic knowledge would be
impossible. For, as we have already seen and shall see more fully in the
immediate sequel, it may not be, and indeed in the last resort cannot
be, true.

§ 5. This last statement will possibly appear startling to the reader
who is unacquainted with the history of metaphysical investigations into
Causality. But it is easy to show that it is really the expression of an
obvious truth. For the causal principle, as we have just seen, is an
imperfect expression of the really axiomatic principle of Sufficient
Reason or Ground and Consequence. And it is readily seen that the
expression it gives to that principle, because imperfect, must be
partially false. What the principle of Ground and Consequence says is,
that the whole of existence is a single coherent system in which every
part is determined by the nature of the whole as revealed in the
complete system. But if this is true, each constituent of the system can
only be completely determined by its connections with all the rest. No
constituent can be entirely determined by its relations to a lesser part
of the whole system, in the way presupposed by the notion of one-sided
causal dependence. The “cause” must, if the principle of Ground and
Consequence be valid, be determined by the “effect” no less than the
“effect” by the “cause.” And therefore the causal postulate cannot be
the whole truth.

How this fatal logical defect in the principle of Causation makes itself
felt in the logic of the inductive sciences, and how logicians have
sought without success to avoid it, we shall incidentally see as our
discussion proceeds. At present we must be content to note that, owing
to this flaw, Causation, wherever it is asserted, can only be Appearance
and never complete Reality, and that no science which works with the
concepts of cause and effect can give us the highest truth. Of course,
the logical defects of the concept need not impair its practical
usefulness. Though it can never, for the reason given already, be
ultimately true that any event is absolutely determined by antecedent
events, the assumption may be sufficiently near the truth to yield
useful deductions as to the course of occurrences, precisely as a
mathematical approximation to the value of a surd quantity may, without
being the exact truth, be close enough for practical use. Also, it might
well be the case that the causal postulate approximates more nearly to
the truth in some spheres of investigation than in others, a
consideration which is not without its bearing on the ethical problems
of freedom and responsibility.

If we ask how the causal postulate, being as it must be only imperfectly
true, comes to be made, the answer is obvious. The whole conception is
anthropomorphic in origin, and owes its existence to our practical
needs. To take the latter point first, logically there is no better
reason for treating an event as determined solely by antecedents, than
for treating it as solely determined by subsequent events. Yet when the
latter supposition is made, as it is by all believers in omens and
presages, we all agree to condemn it as superstitious. Why is this? Two
reasons may be assigned. (_a_) Even granting that an event may be
determined by subsequent events, yet, as _we_ do not know what these
events are until after their occurrence, we should have no means of
inferring by _what_ particular events yet to come any present event was
conditioned, and thus should be thrown back upon mere unprincipled
guess-work if we attempted to assign its, as yet future, conditions.

(_b_) A more important consideration is that our search for causes is
ultimately derived from the search for _means_ to the practical
realisation of results in which we are interested. We desire to know the
conditions of occurrences primarily, in order to produce those
occurrences for ourselves by setting up their conditions. It is
therefore essential to us for our practical purposes to seek the
conditions of an occurrence exclusively among its antecedents, and the
causal postulate which asserts that the complete conditions of the event
are comprised somewhere in the series of antecedent events is thus the
intellectual expression of the demand made by our practical needs upon
Reality. We postulate it because, unless the postulate is approximately
realised, we cannot intervene with success in the course of events. We
refuse, except as a pure speculation, to entertain the notion that an
event may be determined by subsequent as well as by antecedent events,
because that notion leads to no practical rules for operation upon our
environment.

§ 6. As might be expected of a postulate so obviously originated by our
practical needs, the concept of cause on examination reveals its
anthropomorphic character. This is particularly obvious when we consider
the concept of Causation as it figures in everyday unscientific thought.
The various scientific substitutes for the popular notion of cause all
exhibit traces of the endeavour to purge the conception of its more
anthropomorphic elements. In the popular use of the concept this
anthropomorphism comes out most strikingly in two ways. (_a_) A cause,
as popularly conceived, is always a person or thing, _i.e._ something we
can imagine as a whole, and into which we can mentally project a
conscious life akin to our own. To the scientific mind it seems obvious
that causes and effects are alike _events_ and events only, but for
popular thought, while the effect is always a quality or state (_e.g._,
death, fever, etc.), the cause is regularly a thing or person (the
bullet, the poison, the tropical sun, etc.).

(_b_) Closely connected with this is the emphasis popular thought lays
upon what it calls the _activity_ of the cause. The cause is never
thought of as merely preceding the effect as an “inseparable
antecedent”; it is supposed to _make_ the effect occur, to bring it
about by an exercise of activity. According to the most coherent
expositions of this type of thought, in causation one thing is always
_active_ in producing a change in another thing which is _passive_. The
origin of this notion is sufficiently obvious. As all philosophers since
Hume have recognised, the “activity” of the cause results from the
ascription to it of the characteristic feeling of self-assertion and
self-expansion which accompanies our own voluntary interference in the
course of events. Similarly, the “passivity” of the thing in which the
effect is produced is only another name for the feeling of coercion and
thwarted self-assertion which arises in us when the course of nature or
the behaviour of our fellows represses our voluntary execution of our
designs.

Science, in its attempt to extend the concept of causal determination
over the whole domain of existence, has naturally felt these
anthropomorphic implications as obstacles. From the effort to expel them
arises what we may call the common scientific view of causation, as
ordinarily adopted for the purposes of experimental investigation and
formulated in the works of inductive logicians. The concept of a thing,
except as the mode of interconnection of states, being unnecessary for
the sciences which aim simply at the reduction of the sequence of
occurrences to order, the notion of causation as a transaction between
two things is replaced in the experimental sciences by the conception of
it as merely the determination of an event by antecedent events.
Similarly, with the disappearance of things as the vehicles of causal
processes falls the whole distinction between an active and a passive
factor. As it becomes more and more apparent that the antecedent events
which condition an occurrence are a complex plurality and include states
of what is popularly called the thing acted upon as well as processes in
the so-called agent, science substitutes for the distinction between
agent and patient the concept of a system of reciprocally dependent
interacting factors. These two substitutions give us the current
scientific conception of a cause as the “totality of the conditions” in
the presence of which an event occurs, and in the absence of any member
of which it does not occur. More briefly, causation in the current
scientific sense means sequence under definitely known conditions.

Indispensable as this notion of the determination of every event by a
definite collection of antecedents and by nothing else is for practice,
regarded as a logical formulation of the principle of the systematic
unity of existence, it is open to grave objections, most of which will
be found to have made themselves felt in the logic of the inductive
sciences quite independently of conscious metaphysical analysis. In
dealing with these difficulties, we shall find that their general effect
is to place us in the following dilemma. If we wish to state the causal
principle in such a way as to avoid manifest speculative falsehood, we
find that it has to be modified until it becomes identical with the
principle of Ground and Consequence in its most universal form, but as
thus modified it is no longer of any service for the purposes of the
experimental sciences. You seem driven to take it either in a form in
which it is true but practically useless, or in one in which it is
useful but not true. To illustrate the way in which this dilemma arises,
we may examine three of the main problems which have actually been
created by the scientific use of the principle,—(_a_) the puzzle of
continuity; (_b_) the puzzle of the indefinite regress, (_c_) the puzzle
of the plurality of causes.

§ 7. (_a_) _The Puzzle of Continuity._ Continuity is, strictly speaking,
a property of certain series, and may be defined for purposes of
reference much as follows. A series is continuous when any term divides
the whole series unambiguously into two mutually exclusive parts which
between them comprise all the terms of the series, and when every term
which so divides the series is itself a term of the series. From this
second condition it obviously follows that a number of intermediate
terms can always be inserted between any two terms whatever of a
continuous series; no term of the series has a _next_ term. This is the
peculiarity of the continuous with which we shall be specially
concerned. Thus the series of points on a straight line is continuous
because (1) any point P on the line divides it into two collections of
points in such a way that every point of the one is to the left of every
point of the other, and every point of the second to the right of every
point of the former; and (2) every point which divides the line in this
way is a point on the line. Again, the whole series of real numbers is
continuous for the same reason. Every member of the number-series
divides it into two classes, so that every number of one is less than
every number of the other, and every number which thus divides the
series is itself a term of the number-series.

But the series of _rational_ real numbers is not continuous, because it
can be divided into mutually exclusive classes by terms which are not
themselves members of the series. (_E.g._ √2 is not a member of the
series of rational numbers, but we can exhaustively divide all rational
numbers into the two mutually exclusive classes, rational numbers _less_
than √2 and rational numbers _not less_ than √2.)[105] From the
continuity of the series of real numbers it follows that any other
series which corresponds point for point with the terms of the
number-series will be continuous. Now one such series is that of the
successive parts of time. Every moment of time divides the whole series
of moments into two mutually exclusive classes, the moments _before_
itself and the moments which are _not before_ itself. And whatever thus
divides the time-series is itself a moment in that series. Hence from
the continuity of the time-series it follows that any puzzles created by
this property of continuousness will apply to the case of Causation. In
what follows I shall not discuss the general problem of the continuous,
a problem which requires special mathematical equipment for its
efficient handling, but shall confine myself to the difficulties
introduced by continuity into the scientific concept of causal relation.

We may conveniently attack the problem by taking it up in the form in
which Hume bequeathed it to modern science. As any careful reader of
Hume must perceive, Hume’s whole doctrine of Causation is based on the
assumption that the causal process is not continuous. Experience is
supposed by him to come to us not in an unbroken stream, but in isolated
separate pieces which we subsequently proceed to link together
artificially by the notion of Causation. We are supposed to begin by
observing the sequence of an event B on a previous distinct event A, and
the problem of Causation thus becomes that of discovering the nature of
the link by which the originally distinct A and B are connected in our
scientific thought. In more technical language, Hume thought of the
series of events as one in which every member has a next term, and this
way of conceiving it has coloured the whole subsequent treatment of
Causation by the inductive logicians who have commonly got their
metaphysical doctrines from Hume.

Now, recent Psychology, in deserting the old notion of the atomic
sensation for that of the “stream of consciousness,” has completely
destroyed the supposed empirical foundation for this Humian theory of
the discontinuity of the course of events. The real problem for the
inductive logician we can now see to be not to discover the link by
which an originally separate A and B have got joined together in
thought, but to find the source of the distinction we habitually draw
within what comes to us as one continuous process between an earlier
stage A which we call cause, and a later stage B which we call effect.
We are not, however, concerned here with the psychological weakness of
Hume’s doctrine, but with the logical difficulty to which it gives rise.

We may state the difficulty thus: (1) Causation cannot possibly be
thought of as discontinuous, _i.e._ as the sequence of one distinct
event upon an assemblage of other events without gross contradiction. To
think of it as discontinuous, we must conceive the _cause_ A to exist
first in its completeness, and then to be suddenly followed by the
effect B. (That the cause A consists of a number of conditions, _a_,
_b_, _c_ ... which themselves come into existence successively, and that
A is not there until the last of these conditions has been realised,
makes no difference to the principle.) Now this seems to be what is
actually implied by the language of those inductive logicians who insist
that in all Causation the cause must _precede_ the effect. But what can
such precedence mean? It can only mean that after the complete
realisation of the conditions included in the cause A, there must
intervene a space of empty time _before_ the effect B enters on the
scene. However brief and “momentary” you take this gap in the stream of
events to be, the gap must be there if your language about the cause as
being _before_ the effect is to have any meaning. For if there is no
such gap, and the entrance of B is simultaneous with the complete
realisation of its conditions A, it is no longer true to say that the
cause A is _before_ the effect B. A does not exist as A until _a_, _b_,
_c_ ... are all present, and as soon as they are present B is present
too. And thus the relation between A and B is not that of the sequence
of a later event on an earlier. They are actually _together_.

In fact, the doctrine that the cause precedes the effect rests upon the
notion that the time-series is one in which each member has a next term.
And this seems inconceivable. For not only can you subdivide any finite
time, however small, into two mutually exclusive parts, but the point at
which the division is effected is itself a moment in the time-series
lying _between_ the beginning and the end of the original interval. Time
therefore must be continuous, and if causation is not equally
continuous, we must suppose that gaps of empty time are what separate
the first event, the cause, from the subsequent event, the effect. Yet
_if_ this could be regarded as a defensible doctrine on other grounds,
it would then follow that the assemblage of events A is not the totality
of conditions requisite for the occurrence of B. The “totality of
conditions,” _i.e._ the _cause_ as previously defined, would be the
events A _plus_ a certain lapse of empty time.[106] And so the cause
would once more turn out not to precede the effect, or we should have to
suppose the end of the interval of empty time included in it as
separated from the beginning of B by a second lapse, and so on
indefinitely.

(2) These difficulties, in a more or less clearly apprehended form, have
led many recent writers on inductive Logic to modify the definition
which was still satisfactory to Mill. Cause and effect, we are now told,
are not distinct events, but earlier and later stages in a continuous
process. The real business of science is not to discover “laws of
connection” between distinct events or “phenomena,” but to invent
general mathematical formulae by the aid of which we may trace the
course of continuous processes. The discovery of causes, from this point
of view, is reduced to the construction of formulæ which exhibit some
quantity as a function of a time-variable. Fully worked out, this view
of the nature of experimental science leads to the so-called
“descriptive” ideal of scientific explanation, advocated by such eminent
thinkers as Kirchhoff, Mach, and Ostwald among physicists, and, with
various modifications, Avenarius, Münsterberg, Royce, and James Ward
among recent philosophers. According to this doctrine, the ultimate
ideal of science, or at any rate of physical science, is simply the
description of the course of events by the aid of the fewest and
simplest general formulæ. _Why_ things happen as they do, it is now
said, is no proper question for science; its sole business is to enable
us to calculate _how_ they will happen. With the general epistemological
questions raised by this doctrine we must deal later in our third and
fourth books. At present we are concerned only with its bearing on the
notion of Causal Relation.[107]

The important point for our immediate purpose is that the reduction of
all events to continuous processes really does away with Causation
altogether, as is recognised by those adherents of the theory who openly
propose to expel the word “cause” from the language of science.[108] For
in a continuous process it is purely arbitrary where we shall mentally
draw the dividing line which is to mark the boundary between the
“earlier” and the “later” stage. What the descriptive formula, with the
aid of which we trace the course of the process by giving a series of
successive values to our time-variable presents, is not the “cause” of
the process but the “law” of it. Instead of looking upon the later
stages of the process as determined by the earlier, we are now looking
upon the process as a whole as the expression in detail of a single
principle. We have, in fact, abandoned the category of cause and effect
for that of Ground and Consequence. We are seeking the ground of the
whole process not in a set of temporally preceding events, but in its
own pervading principle.

From this point of view the one-sided dependence of effect on cause,
characteristic of the causal relation, disappears. Whether we shall
infer the later stages of the process from the earlier, or the earlier
from the later, depends simply upon our choice of positive or negative
values for our time-variable. For “descriptive” science, what we
suggested at first as a paradoxical possibility is the actual fact. The
past is determined by the future in precisely the same sense in which
the future is determined by the past, namely, that as both are stages of
the same continuous process, if once you know the principle of the
process you can start equally well with either and reason to the
other.[109] Thus, within the limits of experimental science itself, the
conception of causal relation has given way to the conception of events
as logically connected into a system in virtue of their underlying
ground or principle. For practical purposes experimental science has, in
its application of this conception, to be guided by two postulates,
neither of which can be metaphysically justified. It has to assume (_a_)
that the course of events is composed of a plurality of more or less
independent continuous processes, each of which has its own ground
within itself, at least to such an extent as to be capable of being
treated for our purpose as independent of others; (_b_) that the
underlying ground or grounds of all events can be adequately expressed
in terms of mathematical symbolism.

As to the first of these points, our discussion of the unity of Reality
convinced us that there must in the end be a single ground of all
existence, and therefore the complete reason of any partial process
cannot be entirely within itself. The independence of the various
processes must be relative, and even the belief that it is sufficient to
enable us to treat them for our own special purposes as self-contained
and independent, must be a postulate prompted by our practical needs,
and justified in the end by its success. The second point will engage
our attention more fully in subsequent chapters. At present one remark
upon it must suffice. The calculability of the laws of continuous
processes depends upon our ability to reduce them to numerical and
quantitative forms. Wherever we have the appearance, at any stage in a
process, of a new quality, we have in fact an apparent breach of
continuity, and it ceases to be in our power to exhibit the new stage of
the process as a mere transformation of what was already expressed in
former stages. Hence the success of natural science in reducing all
sequences of events to continuous processes depends upon the assumption
that we can establish equations between qualitatively different
magnitudes.

Now this assumption is even more evidently than the preceding a
postulate. We have to make it, if we are to calculate the course of
events, but we have no guarantee that it will succeed beyond the fact of
its actual success. If it fails anywhere, as we shall hereafter contend
that it does in the critical case of the sequence of psychical on
physical events, and _vice versâ_, two results will follow, one
practical, the other speculative. The practical consequence of the
failure is that in such cases we cannot apply the concept of continuous
process, and have to fall back upon the cruder notion of causal
sequence. Thus, in attempting to create a science of Psychophysics we
cannot hope to exhibit the whole of a psychophysical process as the
continuous realisation of a single principle; we must be content to
establish laws of causal connection between the physical and the
psychical sides of the process. The speculative consequence is that the
principle of Ground and Consequence is only imperfectly represented by
the conception of a continuous process, inasmuch as that conception is
only applicable where qualitative differences within the consequences of
a single ground can be disregarded. This hint will prepare us for
subsequent criticism of the concept of continuity when we come to deal
with the metaphysics of the time-process.[110]

#§ 8 (_b_). _The Indefinite Regress._ The defects of the causal
postulate as a principle of explanation may also be exhibited by showing
the double way in which it leads to the indefinite regress. The
indefinite regress in the causal series is an inevitable consequence of
the structure of time, and, as we please, may be detected both outside
and inside any causal relation of two events, or two stages of a
continuous process. For it follows from the structure of the time-series
(_a_) that there are an indefinite number of terms of the series between
any two members, between which there is a finite interval, and (_b_)
that there is also an indefinite number of terms before or after any
given member of the series. Like the series of real numbers, the
time-series, because it satisfies the definition of a continuous
infinite series, can have neither a first nor a last term, nor can any
member of it have a next term.[111] Applying this to the case of
Causation, we may reason as follows:—

(1) The same reasons which lead us to demand a cause A for any event B,
and to find that cause in an assemblage of antecedent events, require
that A should be similarly determined by another assemblage of
antecedent events, and that this cause of A should itself have its own
antecedent cause, and so on indefinitely. Thus the causal principle,
logically applied, never yields an intelligible explanation of any
event. Instead of exhibiting the transition A-B as the logical
expression of a coherent principle, it refers us for the explanation of
this transition to a previous instance of the same kind of transition,
and then to another, and so forth without end. But it is impossible that
what is not intelligible in one instance should become intelligible by
the mere multiplication of similar unintelligibilities.

(2) Similarly if we look within the transition A-B. This transition
being continuous must have its intermediate stages. A becomes B because
it has already become C, and the transition A-C-B is again “explained”
by showing that A became D which became C which became E which became B.
And each of the stages A-D, D-C, C-E, E-B can be once more submitted to
the same sort of analysis. But in all this interpolation of intermediate
stages there is nothing to show the nature of the common principle in
virtue of which the stages form a single process. We are, in fact,
trying to do what we try to do wherever we establish a relation between
terms, to answer a question by repeating it. And we decided at the end
of our last chapter that this kind of repetition is never an answer to
any question. How entirely it fails to answer the question we ask
whenever we look for a cause is obvious. We want to know why B exists,
and we are told that B exists because it is determined by the previous
existence of A. But why does A exist? Because of the previous existence
of C. And so ultimately the existence of everything depends on the
existence of something else, and this again on the existence of still
something else. If this is so, since nothing can exist until its cause
has existed, and the cause again not until its cause has existed, then,
as this unending series has no first term, nothing can ever come into
existence at all. This inevitable introduction of the indefinite regress
whenever we try to think out the causal principle to its logical
consequences, has sometimes been treated as proving the inherent
defectiveness of the human mind. What it proves rather is that Causality
is not a proper formulation of the real principle of the unity of all
experience.

A word may be said about the attempts which philosophers have made to
extricate themselves from the difficulty without giving up Causality as
an ultimate principle of explanation. The least philosophical method of
escape is that of arbitrarily postulating a first cause with no
preceding cause, which amounts to the same thing as a beginning of
existence or a first moment of time. This way out of the difficulty
obviously amounts to an arbitrary desertion of the causal principle at
the point where it becomes inconvenient to remain faithful to it.
Whatever the nature of the event you pitch upon as your “first cause,”
the causal principle, if logically valid at all, is just as applicable
here as anywhere else Your “first cause” must have had a previous cause,
or else the whole causal scheme must be, as we have contended that it
is, the illogical and imperfect perversion of a genuine principle of
systematic connection, useful and indeed indispensable in practice, but
quite indefensible in theory.

It would not help you out of the difficulty to distinguish between a
first event and a first moment of time, by postulating a first cause
with an indefinite lapse of empty time before it. For the causal
principle would then require you to look for the determining conditions
of the first event in the preceding lapse of empty time. But this lapse,
because merely empty, cannot contain the determining conditions for any
special occurrence in preference to others. This is why the conception
of a beginning of the causal series in time, with an empty lapse before
it, has always led to the insoluble riddle, “Why did God create the
world when He did, rather than at some other point of time?”

Nor can the difficulty be escaped by taking refuge in the continuity of
the stream of events. For (1) as we have seen, the recognition of events
as continuous processes necessarily leads to the surrender of the causal
principle as inadequate to express the real connection of facts.
Causality, as a special form of the category of Ground and Consequence,
must stand or fall with the view of occurrences as sequences of
discontinuous events. And (2) even apart from this consideration, the
appeal to continuity can at best only be worked as a rejoinder to the
internal analysis of a sequence into an infinite process. When it is
urged that, on the causal principle, there must be an infinite number of
intermediate stages between the cause and the effect in any given case,
it is possible to retort that the stages are not “really” distinct, but
only distinguished by an artificial abstraction, that the process is
actually one and continuous, and therefore does not involve an infinite
regress, except for the logician who erroneously construes it as
discontinuous. But with the external regress _in indefinitum_ you cannot
deal in this way. The absence of a beginning follows as necessarily from
the principle of explaining the later stages of a continuous process as
conditioned by the earlier, as it does when the stages are taken to be
distinct events. (This is easily seen from the simple consideration that
the time-variable in your formula for the successive stages of the
process may have an unlimited range of possible values from -[infinity]
to +[infinity].)

In short, whether the succession of events be taken as continuous or
not, the attempt to translate the axiom that whatever happens has its
ground in the nature of the whole system to which it belongs, into the
doctrine that the posterior in time is completely determined by and
dependent on the prior, leads straight to the infinite regress. And, as
we said in our last chapter, the occurrence of the infinite regress is
always a sign that there is imperfection somewhere in the thought which
sets it up. For it always implies the formal contradiction of the actual
summation by successive increments of an infinite series. Further
considerations on this point may be deferred till we come to treat of
the continuity of time.[112]

§ 9 (_c_). _The Plurality of Causes._ The indefinite regress may be
shown to be inherent in Causation by a different line of argument,
without appealing to the principle of the continuity of time. As the
reader is doubtless aware, it was a favourite doctrine of John Stuart
Mill, that whereas the same cause is always followed by the same
effect—in the absence of counteracting circumstances—the same effect
need not be preceded by the same cause. An effect may be “produced” on
different occasions by entirely different sets of antecedents. Thus
death may be due either to disease or to violence, and both the disease
and the violence may have very different forms, yet the result is the
same, namely, death. Heat may ensue from friction, percussion, chemical
combination, and so forth. This doctrine of the Plurality of Causes is
an obvious result of generalisation from the important practical
consideration that different means will often lead us to the same end,
so that where we cannot employ one we can often fall back on another.

Mill’s critics have not failed to point out that his doctrine is based
on the rather illogical combination of a concrete cause with an abstract
effect. He considers the “effect” in its utmost generality simply as a
state or quality, _e.g._, “heat,” “death,” and rightly contends that
this general state or quality may issue on different occasions from
different combinations of conditions. But he fails to observe that in
any concrete case this effect exists in a special form, and with special
modifications corresponding to the special character of the antecedents.
Death, for instance, may result from a thousand circumstances, but the
total effect in each case is never mere death, but death in some one
special shape. A man who is shot and a man who is drowned are both dead,
but one is dead with the special symptoms of death by drowning, the
other with those of death by shooting. The water will kill you and a
bullet will kill you, but death with a bullet-hole does not come from
drowning, nor death with one’s lungs filled with water from a gunshot.
If you take cause and effect at the same level of concreteness, they are
always strictly correlative. Any variation in the one must have a
corresponding variation in the other, for circumstances which vary
without affecting a result are by definition no part of its conditions.

So far Mill’s critics among the inductive logicians. But we can push the
argument a step further, and show that it leads logically to a dilemma.
(1) There cannot really be more than one “cause” for one “effect”; yet
(2) in any sense in which we can single out one “effect” from the rest
of the contents of the universe, and assign it its “cause,” there is
_always_ a possibility of the Plurality of Causes. We will consider the
alternative of this dilemma separately.

(1) Cause and effect must be strictly correlative. For to say that there
may be variations in the cause not followed by corresponding variations
in the effect, is to say that there can be conditions which condition
nothing; and to admit variation in the effect without variation in the
cause, is to allow that there are occurrences which are at once, as
effects, determined, and yet again are not determined, by the assemblage
of their antecedents. Thus Plurality of Causes is excluded by the very
conception of a cause as the totality of conditions. Following up this
line of thought further, we see that it leads to a perplexing result.
The “totality of conditions” is never a real totality. For there are no
such things as isolated effects and causes in the world of events. The
whole fact which we call an effect is never complete until we have taken
into account its entire connection with everything else in the universe.
And similarly, the whole assemblage of conditions includes everything
which goes to make up the universe. But when we have thus widened our
conception of the cause and the effect, both cause and effect have
become identical with one another and with the whole contents of the
universe. And thus Causation itself has disappeared as a form of
interconnection between the elements of Reality in our attempt to work
out its logical implications.

This is an inevitable consequence of the continuous interconnection of
all Reality established by our examination of the problem of the One and
the Many in Chapter II. In other words, you never have reached the full
cause of any event until you have taken into account the _totality_ of
its conditions, _i.e._ the totality of its connections with all the rest
of existence. But this totality cannot be obtained in the form
presupposed by the phrase “totality of conditions” as a plurality of
events. For to obtain it in this fashion would mean to sum an infinite
series. But when you abandon the form of the infinite series, cause and
effect alike become identical with the systematic whole of Reality.

(2) On the other hand, the _usefulness_ of the causal postulate depends
entirely upon our ability to establish single threads of Causality
within the stream of events, _i.e._ on our ability to assign particular
assemblages of events, less than the “totality,” to particular
subsequent events as their necessary and sufficient condition. Unless we
can do this we can formulate no rules for the practical employment of
means for the production of a desired result, and, as we have already
seen, it is the necessity of knowing the means to our ends which is the
primary, and indeed the sole, motive for the establishment of the causal
postulate. Now, to effect this assignation of particular causes to
particular effects, we have to make use of a distinction which is more
practically necessary than theoretically defensible. We distinguish
between indispensable conditions and accessory circumstances, which may
or may not be present without affecting the nature of the special result
in question.

Now it is clear that the making of this distinction depends upon the
separation of a certain part of the “total” stream of events from the
rest, and its isolation as “the special result in question.” And this
isolation, as we have seen, must always rest upon arbitrary abstraction.
When once this arbitrary abstraction of some one part or aspect of the
stream of events from its context has been made, we are compelled to
recognise the existence of the context from which we have abstracted by
saying that any effect may enter into or form part of a variety of
different larger effects, according to the nature of the context in
which it occurs. And, from the very principle of the complete
correlation of condition and conditioned, it follows that what we call
the special or partial effect will be preceded by varying conditions,
according as it enters into different larger wholes or contexts. Thus
any form of the causal postulate of which we can make effective use
necessitates the recognition of that very Plurality of Causes which we
have seen to be logically excluded by the conception of cause with which
science works. As we contended above, any form of the principle in which
it is true is useless, and any form in which it is useful is untrue.

The final result of our discussion, then, is that the causal postulate
according to which events are completely determined by antecedent events
leads to the belief that the stream of events is discontinuous. This
belief is inherently self-contradictory, and therefore ultimately
untrue. The principle of Ground and Consequence cannot therefore be
adequately represented by the causal postulate, however indispensable
that postulate may be in practice. Whether the conception of a
continuous stream of events affords any better formulation of the
principle of the systematic interconnection of all Reality, we shall be
better able to judge after the discussions of our third book. If it does
not, we shall have to recognise that the conception of temporal
succession itself is not adequate to express the way in which the Many
and the One of real existence are united, _i.e._ that time is not real,
but only phenomenal.

§ 10. A word may be said here as to the nature of the “necessity” which
we ascribe to the connection of cause and effect. There can be little
doubt that the origin of this “necessity” must be found in our own
feelings of constraint when our action is dictated from without. It is
clear, however, that we have no right to ascribe this feeling of
constraint to the event which is determined by its connection with the
rest of the system of Reality. All that is meant in science by the
“necessity” of the causal relation is that given the conditions the
result follows, and not otherwise. In other words, _if_ you assert the
existence of the conditions, you are logically bound to assert the
existence of the result. The constraint thus falls within ourselves, and
is of a hypothetical kind. So long as your purpose is to think
logically, you feel constraint or compulsion when, after asserting the
condition, you seek for any reason to escape asserting the result. It is
one of the conspicuous services of Hume to philosophy, that he for the
first time brought out clearly this subjective character of the
“necessity” of the causal relation, though it must be admitted that he
went on to complicate his argument by an admixture of error when he
sought to base the necessity of the logical inference from Ground to
Consequence on the psychological principle of Association.

§ 11. Before closing our discussion of Causality, we must briefly take
note of certain special difficulties by which the problem has been
complicated in the systems of some eminent philosophers. A distinction
has often been drawn between Transeunt and Immanent Causality. In so far
as the changes of state of one thing are regarded as occasions of change
of state in others, the relation has been technically called one of
Transeunt Causality; the determination of a thing’s change of state by
its own previous changes has, on the other hand, been named Immanent
Causality. As a consequence of this distinction, grave difficulties have
arisen in connection with the notion of Transeunt Causality. Such
Causality, _i.e._ the determination of the changes of one thing by the
changes of others, is of course an essential feature in the
pre-scientific view of the world of experience as a multiplicity of
interacting things.

For systematic Pluralism this conception inevitably presents insoluble
difficulties. For it is impossible to reconcile the ultimate absolute
independence of the various real things with the admission that the
sequence of states in any one depends upon sequences of states in any of
the others. If a plurality of things are ultimately independent of each
other, it is manifest that each must form a complete whole,
self-determined and containing the ground of its details entirely within
itself. Conversely, if a thing cannot be explained by a principle of
purely internal systematic connection, but requires for its complete
explanation reference to an outside reality with which it stands in
interconnection, its independence can be only partial. Hence Pluralism,
in its more consistent forms, has always sought to deny the reality of
Transeunt Causality, and to reduce all causal relations to the internal
determination of the states of a thing by its own previous states.
Historically, the principal devices which have been adopted for this
purpose are (_a_) Occasionalism, and (_b_) the theory of a
Pre-established Harmony.

(_a_) _Occasionalism._ Occasionalism has appeared in the history of
Philosophy as a professed solution of the special problem of the
apparent interaction between body and mind, taken as two entirely
disparate and independent realities, though it is equally applicable in
a wider sense to the more general problem of the apparent connection of
any two independent real things. The doctrine is most closely associated
with the names of the Cartesians, Arnold Geulincx and N. Malebranche,
but was in part also adopted by Berkeley as a consequence of his belief
in the pure passivity of non-mental things. Starting from the Cartesian
conception of mind and body as two entirely independent and disparate
kinds of reality, Geulincx and Malebranche were confronted by the
apparent fact that mental states lead to modifications of bodily state
in voluntary motion, and _vice versâ_, bodily states determine the
occurrence of mental states whenever a sensation follows upon a
stimulus.

The “natural view of the world” unhesitatingly accepts these cases as
instances of interaction or Transeunt Causality on exactly the same
level as the origination of change of state in one body by change in
another, and Descartes himself had acquiesced in this interpretation.
But such a view, as his successors saw, is quite incompatible with the
alleged disparateness and independence of the two orders of existence,
the bodily and the mental. Geulincx and Malebranche accordingly took
refuge in the doctrine that the interaction is only apparent. In reality
there is a complete solution of continuity wherever the series of
changes in the one order terminates and that in the other begins. What
really happens, they taught, is that God adapts the one series to the
other. On the occurrence of the bodily stimulus, God intervenes to
produce the sensation or emotion which is required to harmonise our
action with our environment. Similarly, on the occurrence of a volition,
God interferes to set the corresponding movement going in our bodily
organism.

Thus the change in the one order is merely an occasion for the
intervention of God, who is the actual cause of the corresponding change
in the other. Within each order the series of changes once initiated are
then supposed to be causally connected. The divine interference only
comes in where the two orders come into contact. Berkeley adopted half
of this doctrine without the complementary half. Inasmuch as, according
to him, physical or non-mental things are mere complexes of
presentations, or, in his own terminology, “ideas,” and ideas are purely
inert, the real cause of every sensation must be God, who thus directly
intervenes to give us an indication of the further sensations we shall
receive according to the action we take on the present presentation.
Transeunt Causality in the reverse direction, the immediate origination
of bodily movement by volition, Berkeley seems to have admitted without
criticism as a self-evident fact.[113]

It will not be necessary here to discuss the half-hearted version of
Occasionalism adopted by Berkeley. It is clear that the admission of
direct origination of bodily change by mental cannot be consistently
combined with the denial of all Transeunt Causality in the reverse
direction. If all physical existence, my own body included, is nothing
more than an inert complex of presentations, it is just as hard to see
how it can be the recipient of mentally originated change as to see how
it can originate mental change. What is not in any sense active cannot
be passive, for passivity is simply repressed and thwarted activity.

We confine ourselves, then, to Occasionalism of the thorough-going type.
Now, against such Occasionalism there is the obvious objection that it
transforms the whole course of our existence into one long succession of
miracles, a point upon which Leibnitz is fond of insisting in his
criticisms of Malebranche. And the doctrine is not really consistent
with itself for two reasons. (1) It is clear that, according to any
possible definition of Causation, the doctrine of Occasionalism involves
causal interaction between God on the one hand and both the supposedly
disparate orders of reality on the other. Changes in either order
definitely determine the intervention of God to originate definitely
determined changes in the other order. Thus God’s internal
determinations are at once causes and effects of changes in either
order. But if, _e.g._, a material change of state can be the cause of a
determination in God, the whole basis of the denial that a change in the
material order can originate change in another order of reality, is
swept away. The net result of the theory is simply to re-establish the
transeunt action of the two orders on each other by means of a
roundabout circuit through the mind of God.

What Geulincx and Malebranche really had in mind was the simple
reflection that we cannot tell _how_ a physical change can bring about a
mental change, or _vice versâ_.[114] But this problem is not advanced in
the least by introducing God as a third factor. How a change in the one
order can bring about a determination in the mind of God, and how again
God brings about the corresponding change in the other order, are simply
two insoluble problems of the same kind as that they were intended to
explain. After the introduction of God as third factor in the causal
process, the fact still remains as before, that certain definite changes
in the one order ensue upon definite changes in the other, and this is
precisely the fact which is denoted by the name of Transeunt Causality.

Of course the problem would alter its character if God were conceived as
another expression for the total system of Reality. The doctrine of
Occasionalism would then become simply a statement of the view that no
two things are really independent, and that it is in virtue of their
inclusion in a larger systematic whole that what we call separate things
can influence each other. But, in spite of numerous passing utterances
which point to this view, it is quite certain that Occasionalism was
seriously intended by its authors as a solution of the problem of
Causality on strictly traditional theistic lines.

(2) A second defect of the doctrine lies in the failure of its
originators to extend it to _all_ cases of causal relation. It is a mere
prejudice when Geulincx and Malebranche allow themselves to assume that
the sequence of physical change on preceding physical change, or mental
change on preceding mental change, is more self-explanatory than the
sequence of a mental change on a physical. In both cases we can
ascertain that one state definitely follows a previous one; in neither
can we answer the ultimately unmeaning question, by what machinery this
sequence is brought about. For any answer must obviously consist in the
interpolation of an intermediate link, and with regard to the production
of this intermediate link the same question arises, and thus we come to
the indefinite regress, the invariable indication that we have been
asking an unmeaning question.

(_b_) _The Pre-established Harmony._ More philosophical was the attempt
of Leibnitz to reconcile Pluralism with the apparent interaction of
things. According to Leibnitz, every ultimately real thing or monad is a
self-contained whole; it contains, therefore, in itself the ground of
the sequence of its own states. Hence there can be no real origination
of change in one monad by the occurrence of change in another. The life
of every monad must consist purely in the development of its own
internal nature. As Leibnitz phrases it, there are no windows in the
monads through which states and qualities can fly from one to another.
Yet some account must be taken of the apparent fact that, since the
world of experience is not a chaos, the changes in one thing seem to be
connected by definite law with the changes in others.

Now, according to Leibnitz, this apparent interaction can only be
accounted for, if we decline to tolerate the perpetual miracle of
Occasionalism, by the theory of a Pre-established Harmony between
monads. If the whole of the independent monads are of such a nature that
each, while actually following the law of its own development, behaves
in the way required by the internal development of all the rest, then,
though each is really self-contained, there will be the appearance of
interaction. Leibnitz illustrates the possibility of such a harmony by
the case of two clocks which keep time with each other, without either
the actual regulation of the one by the other, or the maintenance of a
connection between them, simply because each is properly constructed;
and again, by the case of a number of musicians playing from the same
music but concealed from each other’s observation, who keep time and
tune simply because each is playing his own score correctly.

Probably this is the most satisfactory hypothesis which can be devised
for the conciliation of apparent interaction with a radical Pluralism.
But its logical defects are apparent on the face of it. When we ask to
what the harmony between the internal states of the several monads is
ultimately due, Leibnitz hesitates between two answers. It is due,
according to one account, to the choice of God, who in His wisdom saw
_fit_ to establish the best of all the possible worlds. But at the same
time it was God’s recognition of the harmony between the monads of this
special world-system which led Him to give it the preference over other
antecedently possible systems, and to bring it rather than any other
from mere possibility into actual existence.

Now it seems clear that, if the creative activity of God is to be taken
seriously, the relation of God to the system must be one of Transeunt
Causality. But if Transeunt Causality is admitted in the single case of
God’s attitude towards the monads, it no longer seems obvious why it
should be denied as regards the attitudes of the monads among
themselves. For there is now at least one property of each monad of
which the ground lies not in itself but in God, namely, its actual
existence;[115] and the principle that every monad is the ground of all
its own properties once being deserted, there remains no further reason
for denying interaction. If, on the other hand, we lay stress on the
view that the harmony is no mere result of an arbitrary creative act,
but is a property contained in the concept of the world of monads,
thought of as merely possible, why may we not equally well think of a
world of interacting and interconnected and therefore not ultimately
independent things as possessing equal claims to realisation? The
Pluralism of Leibnitz, from which his denial of Transeunt Causality
logically follows, seems to rest upon nothing better than uncriticised
prejudices.[116]

§ 12. We may briefly indicate the view as to the problem of Transeunt
Causality which is involved in our discussion of the causal postulate.
For any purpose for which it is possible and desirable to think of the
world as a plurality of things, Transeunt Causality must be maintained.
For precisely because the things in the world in the end form a
connected system, the complete ground of the states of a thing cannot
lie in itself but only in the whole system. In any sense in which there
are a plurality of things, and in which the principle of ground and
consequence can be approximately represented by the causal determination
of subsequent occurrences by anterior occurrences, we must be prepared
to find that the states of one thing appear among the conditions of the
subsequent states of other things.

But again, since the apparently separate things are not entirely
independent, but are the detailed self-expression of a single system,
Transeunt Causality must in the end be appearance. Inasmuch as all
interconnection between things depends upon their inclusion in the
single system of Reality, it may be said that, when you take the whole
into account, all Causality is ultimately immanent. But again, as we
have already seen, Immanent Causality is an imperfect way of expressing
the systematic connection of all existence according to the principle of
Ground and Consequence. Fully thought out, Immanent Causality, as the
determination of one state of the whole by a preceding state, is
transformed into the concept of the interconnection of the various
states by the purely logical principle that they form together the
detailed expression of a single coherent principle of structure. And
thus all Causality is finally imperfect appearance.

A point of some interest is the following. As we have seen, only
individual experiences can in the end possess the kind of relative
independence and internal unity which thought seeks to express in the
notion of a thing. We may add that just in the degree to which any
existence has this individuality, and thus forms a self-contained whole,
will its behaviour have its ground within the thing itself. Hence the
more completely individual a thing is, the more will the conditions upon
which its states depend appear when we apply the postulate of Causality,
to be included in other states of the same thing. Thus the more
individuality a thing has, the more fully will it appear to exhibit
Immanent as distinguished from Transeunt Causality in its internal
structure, that is, the less will be the modifications that structure
undergoes in its intercourse with other things. If we like to denote the
maintenance of unchanged internal structure against instigations to
change from without by the term “empirical activity,” we may express our
result by saying that the more individual a thing is, the more
empirically active it is.

When we come to deal with the special problems of moral and social life,
we shall have to face further questions as to the connection of causal
determination with moral freedom and responsibility, and again with
conscious purposive action for ends. Our previous discussion will then
be found to have cleared the way for these more complex questions, by
removing the difficulties which arise when the causal postulate is
mistaken for an axiomatic principle of the interpretation of the
systematic nature of Reality.

_Consult further_:—B. Bosanquet, _Essentials of Logic_, pp. 164, 165;
_Logic_, vol. i p. 253 ff., vol. ii. p. 212 ff.; F. H. Bradley,
_Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 5 (Motion and Change), 6 (Causation), 7
(Activity), 8 (Things); H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i. chaps. 4
(Becoming and Change), 5 (Nature of Physical Action); L. T. Hobhouse,
_Theory of Knowledge_, pt. 2, chaps. 8, 15 (for discussion of
“Plurality” of Causes); Karl Pearson, _Grammar of Science_, chaps. 3 and
4; B. Russell, _Philosophy of Leibniz_, chaps. 4, 11 (Pre-established
Harmony); James Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, pt. 1, lectures 2-6;
Hume’s famous discussion of Causation (_Treatise of Human Nature_, bk.
i. pt. 3, §§ 3-15) seems to me to have lost little of its value, and to
be still perhaps the most important single contribution of modern
Philosophy to the systematic discussion of Causality.

-----

Footnote 100:

For a discussion of the same point in dealing with _energy_, see
Professor Schuster, _British Association Report_, 1892, p. 631.

Footnote 101:

W. M‘Dougall in _Mind_ for July 1902, p. 350.

Footnote 102:

See the admirable remarks of Bosanquet in _Companion to Plato’s
Republic_, pp. 275, 276.

Footnote 103:

On the category of Ground and Consequent and the principle of
Sufficient Reason, consult Bosanquet, _Logic_, bk. i. chap. 6, and bk.
ii. chap. 7.

Footnote 104:

It is no answer to this suggestion to urge that the present, being
real, cannot be conditioned by the future, which is unreal. Such a
rejoinder commits the metaphysical _petitio principii_ of taking for
granted that only the present is real. It is obvious that one might
say with equal cogency that the past, being over and gone, is now
unreal and therefore cannot influence the real present.

Footnote 105:

For a fuller explanation of what is meant by continuity, consult
Dedekind, _Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen_, specially §§ 3-5, or
Lamb’s _Infinitesimal Calculus_, chap. 1. Readers who have been
accustomed to the treatment of continuity by the older philosophical
writers should specially remark (1) that continuity is properly a
characteristic of _series_, and (2) that though continuity implies
indefinite divisibility, the reverse is not, as was sometimes assumed
by earlier writers, true. The series of rational numbers is a familiar
illustration of endless divisibility _without_ continuity.

Footnote 106:

There would arise further difficulties as to whether the magnitude of
this lapse is a function of A, or whether it is the same in all cases
of causal sequence. But until some one can be found to defend such a
general theory of causal sequence it is premature to discuss
difficulties of detail.

Footnote 107:

For the English reader the best sources of information as to the
“descriptive” theory of science are probably volume i. of Professor
Ward’s _Naturalism and Agnosticism_; and Mach, the _Science of
Mechanics_ (Eng. trans.). Students who read Gennan may advantageously
add Avenarius, _Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Princip des
kleinsten Kraftmasses_. Professor J. A. Stewart is surely mistaken
(_Mind_, July 1902) in treating the doctrine as a discovery of
“idealist” metaphysicians. Whatever may be thought of some of the uses
to which “idealists” put the theory, they cannot claim the credit of
its invention.

Footnote 108:

Cf. Mach, _op. cit._, p. 483 ff.; Pearson, _Grammar of Science_, chap.
4.

Footnote 109:

_E.g._, eclipses can be calculated equally well for the future or the
past.

Footnote 110:

_Infra_, Bk. III. chap. 4. It will be enough to refer in passing to
the curious blunder which is committed when the principle of Causality
is confounded with the doctrines of the Conservation of Mass and
Energy. That the principle of Causality has nothing to do with these
special physical theories is manifest from the considerations: (1)
That it is at least not self-evident that all causal relation is
physical. Philosophers have indeed denied that one mental state
directly causes another, but no one has based his denial on the
assertion that there can be no causality without mass and energy. (2)
The principle of Causality, as we have seen, is a postulate. If we are
ever to intervene successfully in the course of events, it must be
possible with at least approximate accuracy to regard events as
determined by their antecedents. The doctrines of conservation of mass
and energy are, on the contrary, empirical generalisations from the
observed behaviour of material systems. Neither science nor practical
life in the least requires them as an indispensable condition of
success. In practical life they are never appealed to, and the ablest
exponents of science are most ready to admit that we have no proof of
their validity except so far as it can be established by actual
observation. In short, they are largely _a posteriori_, while the
principle of Causality is, as already explained, _a priori_. See
_infra_, Bk. III. chap. 6, § 6.

Footnote 111:

Neither can have a first term, because each has two opposite _senses_,
positive and negative in the one case, before and after in the other.

Footnote 112:

I suppose I need not remind my reader that when a number is spoken of
as the actual sum of an infinite series (as when 2 is called the sum
of the series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... to infinity), the word _sum_
is used in a derivative and improper sense for the limiting value
assumed by the sum of _n_ terms as _n_ increases indefinitely. See
Lamb, _Infinitesimal Calculus_, p. 11.

Footnote 113:

For the various views here summarised, see as original sources,
Geulincx, _Metaphysica Vera_, Pars Prima, 5-8; Malebranche,
_Entretiens sur la Metaphysique et sur la Religion_, 7th dialogue;
Berkeley, _New Theory of Vision_, pp. 147, 148; _Principles of Human
Knowledge_, §§ 25-33, 51-53, 57, 150; _Second Dialogue between Hylas
and Philonous_.

Footnote 114:

Geulincx expresses the principle in the following formula (_op. cit._,
pt. 1, 5): quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis.

Footnote 115:

Not that existence can intelligibly be treated as a property; on this
point Kant’s famous criticism of the “ontological proof” seems
conclusive. But _from the point of view of Leibnitz_ it must be
imagined as an additional predicate, somehow added by the creative act
of God to those already contained in the concept of the world as
“possible.”

Footnote 116:

For Leibnitz’s doctrine consult further, _The Monadology etc., of
Leibniz_, edit. by R. Latta, Introduction, pts. 2 and 3, and
translations of _Monadology_, _New System of the Communication of
Substances_, with the _First_ and _Third Explanations_ of the New
System. Also see the elaborate criticisms of B. Russell, _The
Philosophy of Leibniz_, chap. 4 and following chapters.

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BOOK III

COSMOLOGY—THE INTERPRETATION
OF NATURE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

§ 1. Distinction between the experimental sciences and a Philosophy of
Nature and Mind. The former concerned with the description, the
latter with the interpretation, of facts. § 2. Cosmology is the
critical examination of the special characteristics of the physical
order. Its main problems are: (1) the problem of the nature of
Material Existence; (2) problem of the justification of the concept
of the Mechanical Uniformity of Nature; (3) problems of Space and
Time; (4) problem of the Significance of Evolution; (5) problem of
the Place of descriptive Physical Science in the System of Human
Knowledge.

§ 1. In our two remaining Books we shall have to deal with the more
elementary of the problems created by the apparent existence of two
orders of Reality, a physical and a psychical, which again at least seem
to stand in reciprocal interaction. In the present Book we shall discuss
some of the leading characteristics which everyday thought and
scientific thought respectively assign to the physical order, and shall
ask how these characteristics compare with those we have seen ground to
ascribe to Reality, _i.e._ we shall attempt to form a theory of the
place of physical existence in the whole system of Reality. In the
Fourth Book we shall discuss in the same way some of the leading
characteristics of the psychical order as currently conceived, and the
nature of its connection with the physical order. Our treatment of these
topics will necessarily be imperfect and elementary for more reasons
than one: not only are the facts of which some account must be taken so
numerous and complicated that they would require for their mastery
something like an encyclopædic acquaintance with the whole range of the
experimental sciences, physical and psychological, but their adequate
interpretation, especially on the cosmological side, would demand a
familiarity with the ultimate foundations of mathematical theory which
is rarely possessed either by the experimentalist or by the
metaphysician. The utmost we can hope to accomplish in this part of our
work is to establish one or two broad results as regards general
principles: any suggestions we may make as to the details of
interpretation must be avowedly tentative.

We must be careful to distinguish the task of a Philosophy of Nature and
a Philosophy of Mind from those of the experimental sciences which deal
directly with the fact of the physical and psychical orders. The
fundamental business of the latter is, as we have already seen, the
discovery of descriptive formulæ by the aid of which the various
processes which make up the physical and psychical orders may be
depicted and calculated. The fewer and simpler these formulæ, the more
they economise the labour of calculation, the more completely do the
experimental sciences perform the work for which we look to them. And so
long as our formulæ adequately accomplish this work of calculation, it
is indifferent for the experimental sciences whether the language in
which they are couched represents a “reality” or not. The “atoms,”
“forces,” and “ethers” of our physical, the “sensations” of our
psychological formulæ, might be as purely symbolic creations of our own
imagination as the “imaginary quantities” of mathematics, without their
unreality in any way interfering with their scientific usefulness. In
the words of an eminent physicist, “the atomic theory plays a part in
physics similar to that of certain auxiliary concepts in mathematics,
... although we represent vibrations by the harmonic formula, the
phenomena of cooling by exponentials, falls by squares of times, etc.,
no one will fancy that vibrations _in themselves_ have anything to do
with the circular functions, or the motion of falling bodies with
squares” (Mach, _Science of Mechanics_, p. 492). When it is asserted
that the usefulness of a scientific hypothesis, such as, _e.g._, the
atomic theory or the hypothesis of the existence of an etherial
undulating medium, of itself proves the real existence of things
corresponding to the concepts employed by the hypothesis, the same
fallacy is committed as when it is contended that if an algebraical
calculus is generally capable of geometrical interpretation, every step
in its operations must be interpretable.

The work of the Philosophy of Nature and of Mind only begins where that
of the experimental sciences leaves off. Its data are not particular
facts, as directly amassed by experiment and observation, but the
hypotheses used by experimental science for the co-ordination and
description of those facts. And it examines these hypotheses, not with
the object of modifying their structure so as to include new facts, or
to include the old facts in a simpler form, but purely for the purpose
of estimating their value as an account of ultimately real existence.
Whether the hypotheses are adequate as implements for the calculation of
natural processes is a question which Philosophy, when it understands
its place, leaves entirely to the special sciences; whether they can
claim to be more than useful formulæ for calculation, _i.e._ whether
they give us knowledge of ultimate Reality, is a problem which can only
be dealt with by the science which systematically analyses the meaning
of reality, _i.e._ by Metaphysics. We may perhaps follow the usage of
some recent writers in marking this difference of object by a difference
in terminology, and say that the goal of experimental science is the
Description of facts, the goal of Metaphysics their Interpretation. The
difference of aim is, however, not ultimate. Description of facts, when
once we cease to be content with such description as will subserve the
purpose of calculation and call for description of the fact as it really
is, of itself becomes metaphysical interpretation.

The chief danger against which we must guard in this part of our
metaphysical studies is that of expecting too much from our science. We
could never, of course, hope for such a complete interpretation of facts
as might be possible to omniscience. At most we can only expect to see
in a general way how the physical and again how the psychical order must
be thought of if our view as to the ultimate structure of Reality is
sound. For an exact understanding of the way in which the details of
physical and psychical existence are woven into the all-embracing
pattern of the real, we must not look. And the value of even a general
interpretation will of course depend largely upon our familiarity with
the actual use the various sciences make of their hypotheses. With the
best goodwill in the world we cannot hope to avoid all misapprehensions
in dealing with the concepts of sciences with which we have no practical
familiarity.

Though this general caution is at least equally applicable to the
amateur excursions of the student whose mental training has been
confined to some special group of experimental sciences into the field
of metaphysical criticism, it would be a good rule for practice if every
student of Metaphysics would consider it part of his duty to make
himself something more than an amateur in at least one branch of
empirical science; probably Psychology, from its historical connection
with philosophical studies, presents unique advantages for this purpose.
And conversely, no specialist in experimental science should venture on
ultimate metaphysical construction without at least a respectable
acquaintance with the principles of Logic, an acquaintance hardly to be
gained by the perusal of Jevons’s _Elementary Lessons_ with a supplement
of Mill.

§ 2. Cosmology, then, means the critical examination of the assumptions
involved in the recognition of the physical as a distinct order of
existence, and of the most general hypotheses employed by popular
thought and scientific reflection respectively for the description of
specially physical existence. It is clear that this very recognition of
a distinction between the physical and other conceivable forms of
existence implies a degree of reflective analysis more advanced than
that embodied in the naïve pre-scientific view with which we started in
our last two chapters. In the simple conception of the world of
existence as consisting of the changing states of a plurality of
interacting things, there was not as yet any ground for a distinction
between the psychical and the purely physical. That there really exists
a widespread type of thought for which this distinction has never
arisen, is put beyond doubt by the study of the psychology of the child
and the savage. Both, as we know, draw no hard-and-fast line between the
animated and the inanimate, and the savage, in his attempts to account
for the phenomena of life, does so habitually by supposing the physical
organism to be tenanted by one or more lesser organisms of the same
order of existence. The “soul” he ascribes to things is simply a smaller
and consequently less readily perceptible body within the body.

For civilised men this conception of all existence as being of the same
order, an order which we might describe from our own more developed
standpoint as at once animated and physical, has become so remote and
inadequate, that we find it hard to realise how it can ever have been
universally accepted as self-evident truth. Physical science, and under
its guidance the current thought of civilised men, has come to draw a
marked distinction between the great majority of sensible things, which
it regards as purely physical, and a minority which exhibit the presence
of “consciousness.” Thus has arisen a theory of the division of
existence into two great orders, the physical and the psychical, which
so dominates our ordinary thought about the world, that all the efforts
of philosophers, both spiritualist and materialist, to reduce the two
orders once more to one seem powerless to make any impression on the
great majority of minds.

When we ask what are the distinguishing marks of the physical order as
currently conceived, the precise answer we obtain will depend on the
degree of scientific attainments possessed by the person to whom our
question is addressed. But in the main both current science and everyday
thought, so far as it has reflected on the problem, would probably agree
as to the following points. (_a_) Physical existence is purely
_material_ or _non-mental_, or again is _unconscious_. The exact
significance of these predicates is probably rarely clear even to those
who make the freest use of them. On the face of it, such epithets convey
only the information that existence of the physical kind differs in some
important respect from existence of a mental kind; the nature of the
difference they leave obscure. Reflection, however, may throw some light
on the matter.

The distinction between persons and animals on the one side and mere
things on the other seems to rest in the last resort on an important
practical consideration. Among the things which, according to the naïve
Realism of the pre-scientific theory, form my environment, there are
some which regularly behave in much the same general way in response to
very different types of behaviour on my own part. There are others again
which behave differently towards me according to the differences in my
behaviour towards them. In other words, some things exhibit special
individual purposes, dependent in various ways on the nature of my own
individual purposes, others do not. Hence for practice it becomes very
important to know what things can be counted on always to exhibit the
same general type of behaviour, and what cannot, but require individual
study before I can tell how they will respond to different purposive
behaviour of my own. It is on this practical difference that the
distinction of mental and conscious from purely physical and unconscious
existence seems to be based. We shall probably not be far wrong in
interpreting the _unconsciousness_ of purely material existence to mean
that it exhibits no traces of purposive individuality, or at least none
that we can recognise as such. More briefly, the physical order consists
of the things which do not manifest recognisable individuality.

(_b_) Closely connected with this peculiarity is a second. The physical
order is made up of events which conform rigidly to certain universal
_Laws_. This is an obvious consequence of its lack of purposive
individuality. The elements of which it is composed, being devoid of all
purposive character of their own, always behave in the same surroundings
in the same regular uniform way. Hence we can formulate precise general
Laws of their behaviour. Originally, no doubt, this uniformity of the
physical order is thought of as a point of contrast with the irregular
behaviour of purposive beings, who respond differently to the same
external surroundings according as their own internal purposes vary.
With the growth of Psychology as an experimental science of mental
processes there inevitably arises the tendency to extend this concept of
uniform conformity with general Law to the processes of the psychical
order, and we are then confronted by the famous problem how to reconcile
scientific law with human “freedom.” The same antithesis between the
apparently regular and purposeless behaviour of the elements of the
physical order and the apparently irregular and purposive behaviour of
the members of the psychical order is also expressed by saying that the
sequence of events in the physical order is _mechanically_ determined by
the principle of Causality, whereas that of the psychical order is
_teleological_, _i.e._ determined by reference to _end_ or purpose.

(_c_) Every element of the physical order fills a position in _space_
and in _time_. Hence any metaphysical problems about the nature of space
and time are bound to affect our view of the nature of the physical
order. Here, again, there is a point of at least possible contrast
between the physical and the psychical. As the accumulation of
experience makes it increasingly clearer that the bodies of my
fellow-men and my own body, in so far as it is an object perceived like
others by the organs of the special senses, exhibit in many respects the
same conformity to certain general laws, and are composed of the same
constituent parts as the rest of the sensible world, such animated
bodies of purposive agents have to be included along with the rest of
sensible existence in the physical order. The individual’s purposive
individuality has now to be thought of as residing in a distinct factor
in his composition of a kind foreign to the physical order, and
therefore imperceptible by the senses, _i.e._ as a _mind_ or _soul_ or
_stream of consciousness_ in the current psychological sense. Such a
mind or soul or stream of consciousness is then usually regarded as not
filling a series of positions in space, and sometimes as not filling a
series of positions in time.

(_d_) The physical order, as thus finally constituted by the
introduction of the concept of an imperceptible soul or mind, now
comprises all sensible existence[117] as an aggregate of events in time
and space, linked together by the principle of Causality, and exhibiting
conformity with general law. To this conception recent science has made
an important addition in the notion of a continuous _evolution_ or
_development_ as manifesting itself throughout the series. So that we
may ultimately define the physical order as a body of events occupying
position in time and space, conforming to general laws with rigid and
undeviating uniformity, and exhibiting continuous evolution.[118]

From these general characteristics of the physical order, as conceived
by current science and current popular thought, arise the fundamental
problems of Cosmology. We have to discuss—(1) the real nature of
material existence, _i.e._ the ultimate significance of the distinction
between the two orders, and the possibility of reducing them to one; (2)
the justification for the distinction between mechanical and
teleological processes, and for the conception of the physical order as
rigidly conformable to uniform law; (3) the leading difficulties of the
conceptions of time and space, and their bearing on the degree of
reality to be ascribed to the physical order; (4) the philosophical
implications of the application of the notion of evolution or
development to the events of the physical order; (5) finally, we ought
perhaps to deal very briefly and in a very elementary fashion with the
problem of the real position of descriptive physical science as a whole
in its relation to the rest of human knowledge.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 26
(pp. 496-497, 1st ed.); H. Lotze, _Outlines of Metaphysic_, pp. 77-79;
J. S. Mackenzie, _Outlines of Metaphysics_, bk. iii. chap. 2; J. Ward,
_Naturalism and Agnosticism_. lect. 1.

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Footnote 117:

_I.e._ existence of the _same kind_ as that perceived by the senses,
whether actually so perceived or not. In this sense the solid
impenetrable extended atoms of Newton or Locke are “sensible”
existence, inasmuch as their properties are the same in kind as
certain perceptible properties of larger masses, though they are not
themselves actually perceptible.

Footnote 118:

Of course the evolution must be mere subjective appearance if, as is
sometimes assumed, the processes of the physical order are one and all
purely mechanical. But this only shows that the current concept of the
physical order is not free from inconsistencies.

-----

CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF MATTER

§ 1. The physical order, because dependent for its perceived qualities
on the sense-organs of the percipient, must be the appearance of a
more ultimate reality which is non-physical. § 2. Berkeley’s
criticism is fatal to the identification of this reality with
“material substance.” The logical consequence of Berkeley’s doctrine
that the _esse_ of sensible things is _percipi_ would be the
subjectivist view that the physical order is _only_ a complex of
presentations. § 3. But this is clearly not the case with that part
of the physical order which consists of the bodies of my fellow-men.
These have an existence, as centres of feeling, over and above their
existence as presentations to my senses. § 4. As the bodies of my
fellows are connected in one system with the rest of the physical
order, that order as a whole must have the same kind of reality
which belongs to them. It must be the presentation to our sense of a
system or complex of systems of experiencing subjects; the apparent
absence of life and purpose from inorganic nature must be due to our
inability to enter into a direct communion of interest with its
members. § 5. Some consequences of this view.

§ 1. In the preceding chapter we have very briefly indicated the nature
of the steps by which reflective thought comes to distinguish sharply
between a physical and a psychical order of existence. The physical
order, when the concept has been brought into its complete shape by the
inclusion of my own body and all its parts, is thought of as a system
comprising all the bodies in the universe, that is, all the existences
which are of the same kind as those which I directly perceive by means
of the special senses.[119] Now, with regard to the whole physical order
thus conceived two things seem fairly obvious upon the least reflection,
that it does not depend for its _existence_ upon the fact of my actually
perceiving it, and that it does depend upon my perception for all the
_qualities_ and _relations_ which I find in it. Its _that_ appears
independent of the percipient, but its _what_, on the other hand,
essentially dependent on and relative to the structure of the perceiving
organ. As we have already seen, the familiar experience of the
variations in perception which accompany differences in the permanent
structure or temporary functioning of the organs of sense led, very
early in the history of Philosophy, to the recognition of this
relativity, so far as the so-called “secondary” qualities, _i.e._ those
which can only be perceived by one special sense-organ, are concerned.
We have also seen sufficiently (in Bk. II. chap. 4) that the same
consideration holds equally good of those “primary” qualities which are
perceptible by more senses than one, and have probably for that reason
been so often supposed to be unaffected by this relativity to a
perceiving organ.

Without wasting the reader’s time by unnecessary repetition of our
former reasoning, it may be worth while to point out here how this
thorough-going relativity of the qualities of the physical order to a
percipient organ leads directly to the indefinite regress, the
apparently invariable consequence of all contradictions in Metaphysics,
when we try to take those qualities as independently real. I perceive
the properties of physical existence by special sense-organs, and the
properties as perceived are conditioned by the structure of those
organs. But each sense-organ is itself a member of the physical order,
and as such is perceived by and dependent for its perceived qualities
upon another organ. This second sense-organ in its turn is also a member
of the physical order, and is perceived by a third, or by the first
organ again. And there is no end to this mutual dependence. The physical
order, as a whole, must be a “state” of my nervous system, which is
itself a part of that order. We shall see more fully in our final Book,
when we come to discuss the problem of Mind and Body, that this
contradiction is an inevitable result of the inconsistency involved in
the inclusion of my own body in the physical order, an inconsistency
which is, in its turn, a necessary consequence of the hard-and-fast
separation of the two orders of existence.[120]

Considerations of this kind have led to the general recognition that the
physical order must be regarded as phenomenal, as the manifestation to
sense-perception of a reality which is in its own nature inaccessible to
sense-perception, and therefore, in the strictest sense of the words,
not physical. When we ask, however, how this non-physical reality of
which the physical order is the phenomenal manifestation to our senses,
is to be thought of, we find ourselves at once plunged into the same
difficulties which we have already met, in a more general form, in
discussing the concept of Substance. Popular thought, and science so far
as it is content to accept the notions of popular thought without
criticism, have commonly fallen back on the idea of the non-phenomenal
ground of the physical order as an unperceived “substratum.” To this
substratum it has given the name of _matter_, and has thus interpreted
the physical order as the effect produced by the causal action of an
unperceived matter upon our sense-organs, or rather, to speak with more
precision, upon _their_ unknown material substratum. Frequently, as
might have been expected, the attempt has been made to identify this
substratum with those of the known qualities of the physical order which
appear least liable to modification with the varying states of the
percipient organs, and lend themselves most readily to measurement and
calculation, the so-called “primary” qualities of mechanical science.
This is the standpoint adopted by Newton and, in the main, by Locke, and
largely through the influence of their work still remains the most
familiar to the ordinary English mind. But the inconsistencies we have
already found inherent in such a conception of Substance as is here
presupposed, so inevitably make themselves felt upon any serious
examination, that the doctrine regularly appears in the history of
thought as a mere temporary halting-place in the advance to the more
radical notion of matter as the entirely unknown non-phenomenal
substratum of the sensible properties of bodies.

§ 2. This latter notion is again manifestly open to all the objections
previously brought against the more general concept of substance as an
unknown substratum or support of properties. It is from these objections
that Berkeley’s famous criticism of the concept of matter, the most
original attempt at a constructive theory of the real nature of the
physical order in the history of English Philosophy, starts. Berkeley
first takes the identification of material substance with the primary
qualities of body, which Locke had made current in English speculation,
and shows, by insisting upon the relativity of perceived quality to
percipient organ, that it is untenable. Having thus driven his opponent
to surrender this identification, and to define matter as the unknown
substratum of the physical order, he proceeds to argue that this notion
of an unknown substratum is both useless and unintelligible. It is
useless, because our knowledge of the actual properties and processes of
the physical order can neither be extended nor made clearer by the
addition of an unknowable; it is unintelligible, because we can give no
account to ourselves of the nature of the “support” supposed to be
bestowed by the substratum or the properties.

Material substance being thus dismissed as an unmeaning fiction, what is
left as the reality of the physical order? According to Berkeley,
nothing but the actual presentations, or “ideas,” in which the
percipient subject is aware of the properties of bodies. A body is
simply such a complex of presentations to a percipient; except as so
presented it has no existence. As Berkeley is fond of putting it, the
_esse_ of the material thing is simply _percipi_, the fact of its being
presented. But just when we expect Berkeley to accept the complete
subjectivist contention that bodies are simply “states of the
percipients’ consciousness” and nothing more, he remembers that he has
to account both for the fact that we cannot perceive what we please and
where we please, but that our perceptions form an order largely
independent of our own choice, and for the deep-seated conviction of the
common-sense mind that things do not cease to exist when my perception
of them is interrupted. To reconcile his theory with these apparently
conflicting facts, he has recourse, as is the custom of philosophers and
others in a difficulty, to divine assistance. The continued existence of
the physical world in the intervals of perception, and its systematic
character and partial independence of our volition, he explains by the
hypotheses that God produces perceptions in us in a fixed order, and
that God continues to be aware of the system of presentations which I
call the physical world, when my perception of it is suspended. The same
explanation would, of course, have to be invoked to account for the
existence of physical realities which no human subject perceives.[121]

It is fairly obvious that the two halves of Berkeley’s theory will not
fit together into a coherent whole. If the whole _esse_ of physical
things is merely _percipi_, there can be no reason why I should suppose
them to exist at all except in so far as and so long as they are
presented to my perception. The whole hypothesis of an omnipresent
divine perception which remains aware of the contents that have vanished
from my own perception, thus becomes purely gratuitous. It also labours
under the disadvantage of being, on Berkeley’s theory, internally
inconsistent. For if it is necessary to invoke the agency of God to
account for the occurrence of presentations to my experience, it is not
clear why we have not to suppose a second deity who causes the series of
presentations in the experience of God, and so on indefinitely. On the
other hand, if God’s experience may be taken as uncaused, it is not
clear why my own experience might not have been taken so in the first
instance, and the introduction of God into the theory avoided. Thus the
logical outcome of the doctrine that the _esse_ of physical things is
merely _percipi_, would have been either Solipsism, the doctrine
according to which I have no certain knowledge of any existence except
my own, everything else being a mere state or modification of myself; or
the Humian scepticism, which resolves my own existence, as well as that
of the external world, into a mere sequence of fleeting mental
processes. Conversely, if I have adequate reason to believe that any
member of the physical order whatever is more than a presentation, and
has an existence in some sense independent of my perception, I have no
right to declare of any member of that order, unless for special
reasons, that its being consists _merely in_ being perceived.

§ 3. Why, then, did Berkeley, as a matter of fact, accept neither the
solipsist nor the sceptical conclusion? Why does he, after all, credit
the members of the physical order with an existence independent of the
fact of my perceiving them, and thus introduce a patent contradiction
into his system? It is not hard to see the reasons by which he must have
been influenced. The whole physical order cannot be dismissed as a mere
subjective illusion, because there are some members of it which
undoubtedly have an existence independent of the fact of being perceived
by my sense-organs. Such members are my own body and the bodies of my
fellow-men.

Both my own body and those of my fellow-men, as they are perceived by
the various special senses, belong to the physical order, and share its
qualities. But over and above its existence as a member of the perceived
physical order, my own body has further another quite different kind of
existence. It is, in so far as I perceive its parts, as I do other
bodily existence, by the sensations of the various special sense-organs,
a complex of presentations, like everything else in the physical world.
But my body is not merely an object presented to me by the organs of the
special senses; it is also something which I feel as a whole in common
or organic sensation, and in the changing organic thrills of my various
emotional moods. This unique feeling of my body as a whole accompanies
every moment of my conscious life and gives each its peculiar tone, and
there seems to be no doubt that it forms the foundation of the sense of
personal identity. If we recollect the essentially teleological
character of feeling, we shall be inclined to say that my body as thus
apprehended is nothing other than myself as a striving purposive
individual, and that my experience of it is the same thing as the
experience of my purposive attitudes towards my environment. It is, in
fact, this experience of my body as apprehended by immediate feeling,
that Psychology describes as the “subject” of the various “mental
states” of which it formulates the laws. For Metaphysics, it does not
seem too much to say, this double existence of my own body, as a
presented object about which I have knowledge in the same way as about
everything else, and as an immediately felt unity, affords the key to
the whole problem of the “independent” existence of a reality beyond my
own presentations. To see how this comes about, we must first consider
the influence it has on our conception of one very special part of the
physical order, the bodies of our fellows.

The bodies of our fellow-men are, of course, from one point of view
complexes of presentations which we receive through our sense-organs; so
far their _esse_, as Berkeley would have said, is _percipi_. But all
practical communion with my fellows through the various institutions of
society is based upon the conviction that, over and above their
existence as presentation-complexes, or contents of my perceptive
states, the bodies of my fellows have the same kind of existence as
directly apprehended in immediate feeling which I ascribe to my own. In
other words, all practical life is a mere illusion, unless my fellow-men
are, like myself, centres of purposive experience. By the existence
independent of my own perception which I ascribe to them, I mean
precisely existence as feeling purposive beings. Hence, unless all
social life is an illusion, there is at least one part of the physical
order, external to myself, of which the _esse_ is not mere _percipi_,
but _percipere_, or rather _sentire_. If my fellow-men are more than
complexes of presentations or “ideas in my head,” then the subjectivist
reduction of all reality to states of my “consciousness” breaks down, at
least for this part of the physical order. Hence the acceptance or
rejection of the subjectivist theory will ultimately depend on the
nature of the evidence for the independent existence of human feelings
and purposes beyond my own.

On what grounds, then, do we attribute such “independent” existence as
experiencing subjects to our fellows? According to the current
subjectivist explanation, we have here a conclusion based on the
argument from the analogy between the structure of my own body, as
presented in sense-perception, and those of others. I infer that other
men have a mental life like my own, because of the visible resemblances
between their physical structure and my own, and this inference receives
additional support from every fresh increase in our anatomical and
physiological knowledge of the human frame. But, being an argument from
analogy, it can never amount to a true scientific induction, and the
existence of human experience, not my own, must always remain for the
subjectivist a probability and can never become a certainty.

I am convinced that this popular and superficially plausible view is
radically false, and that its logical consequence, the belief that the
real existence of our fellows is less certain than our own, is a grave
philosophical error. That the argument from analogy is no sufficient
basis for the belief in human experience beyond my own, can easily be
seen from the following considerations:—(1) As ordinarily stated, the
data of the supposed inference do not actually exist. For what I
perceive is not, as the subjectivist assumes, three terms—my own mental
life, my own anatomical structure, and the anatomy of my neighbour, but
two, my own mental life and my neighbour’s anatomy. If I cannot be sure
of the reality of my neighbour’s experience until I have compared the
anatomy and physiology of his organism with that of my own, I shall have
to remain in doubt at least until science can devise a mechanism by
which I can see my own nervous system. At present one of the terms on
which the analogical argument is said to be based, namely, my own
internal physical structure, has to be mostly taken on trust. It would
be little less than the truth to invert the subjectivist’s position, and
say that, until science can devise means for seeing our own brains, we
infer the resemblance of our own anatomy to our neighbour’s from the
previously known resemblance of his inner experience and ours.

(2) And even supposing this difficulty already surmounted, as it
conceivably will be in the future, there is a still more serious flaw in
the presumed analogical inference. If I once have good ground for the
conviction that similarity of inner experience is attended by similarity
of physical structure, then of course I can in any special case treat
the degree of structural resemblance between one organism and another as
a sufficient reason for inferring a like degree of resemblance between
the corresponding inner experiences. But upon what grounds is the
general principle itself based? Obviously, if my own inner experience is
the only one known to me originally, I have absolutely no means of
judging whether the external resemblances between my own organism and
yours afford reason for crediting you with an inner experience like my
own or not. If the inference by analogy is to have any force whatever in
a particular case, I must already know independently that likeness of
outward form and likeness of inner experience at least in some cases go
together. The plausibility of the usual subjectivist account of the way
in which we come to ascribe real existence to our fellows, is simply due
to its tacitly ignoring this vital point.

How, then, do we actually learn the existence of feeling purposive
experience outside our own? The answer is obvious. We learn it by the
very same process by which we come to the clear consciousness of
ourselves. It is a pure blunder in the subjectivist psychology to assume
that somehow the fact of my own existence as a centre of experience is a
primitive revelation. It is by the process of putting our purposes into
act that we come to be aware of them as our purposes, as the meaning of
our lives, the secrets of what we want of the world. And, from the very
fact of our existence in a society, every step in the execution of a
purpose or the satisfaction of a want involves the adjustment of our own
purposive acts to those of the other members of our social whole. To
realise your own ends, you have to take note of the partly coincident,
partly conflicting, ends of your social fellows, precisely as you have
to take note of your own. You cannot come to the knowledge of the one
without coming by the same route and in the same degree to the knowledge
of the other. Precisely because our lives and purposes are not
self-contained, self-explaining wholes, we cannot possibly know our own
meaning except in so far as we know the meaning of our immediate
fellows. Self-knowledge, apart from the knowledge of myself as a being
with aims and purposes conditioned by those of like beings in social
relations with myself, is an empty and senseless word.

The recent psychological studies of the part which imitation plays in
all learning make this result still more palpably manifest. For they
reveal the fact that, to an enormous extent, it is by first repeating
without conscious aim of its own the significant purposive acts of
others that a child first comes to behave with conscious significance
itself. It is largely by learning what others mean when they utter a
word or execute a movement that the child comes to know his own meaning
in using the same word or performing the same movement. Thus we may
confidently say that the reality of purposive significant experience
which is not my own is as directly certain as the reality of my own
experience, and that the knowledge of both realities is inevitably
gained together in the process of coming to clear insight into my own
practical aims and interests. The inner experience of my fellows is
indubitably real to the same degree as my own, because the very
existence of my own purposive life is meaningless apart from the equal
existence of theirs.[122]

§ 4. We may now apply the results obtained in the previous section to
the general question as to the “independent” existence of the physical
order. In doing so we observe two consequences of the highest
importance. (1) Now that we have found that at least a part of that
order, namely, the bodies of our fellow-men, are not mere complexes of
presentations in our own experience, but have a further existence as
themselves experiencing subjects, and are so far “independent” of their
actual presentation in our own experience, we can no longer conclude,
from the dependence of the physical order for its sensible properties
upon presentation to ourselves, that it has no further existence of its
own. If one part of that order, which as presented stands on the same
footing with the rest, and is, like it, dependent on presentation for
its sensible properties, is certainly known to be more than a mere
presentation-complex, the same _may_ at least be true of other parts. We
can no longer assert of any part of the physical order, without special
proof, that its _esse_ is merely _percipi_.

We may go a step further. Not only _may_ other parts of the physical
order possess a reality beyond the mere fact of being presented to our
sense-perception, but they _must_. For (_a_) we have to take note, for
the obtaining of our own practical ends, of the factors in our
_material_ environment precisely as we have to take note of the
purposive behaviour not our own which forms our _social_ environment.
Just as our own inner life has no coherent significance except as part
of a wider whole of purposive human life, so human society as a system
of significant conduct directed to the attainment of ends, cannot be
understood without reference to its non-human surroundings and
conditions. To understand my own experience, reference must be made to
the aims, ideals, beliefs, etc. of the social whole in which I am a
member; and to understand these, reference has again to be made to
geographical, climatic, economical, and other conditions. Thus of the
physical order at large, no less than of that special part of it which
consists of the bodies of my fellows, it is true to say that its
existence means a great deal more than the fact of its presentation.
Unperceived physical existence must be real if I am myself real, because
my own inner life is unintelligible without reference to it.

(_b_) This conclusion is further strengthened by the evidence supplied
by the various sciences, that human life forms part of a great system
characterised by evolution or development. If one part of a connected
historical development is more than a complex of presentations, the
other stages of that development cannot possibly be mere
presentation-complexes. Against any “Idealism” which is mere
Subjectivism or Presentationism calling itself by a less suspicious
name, it would be a sound and fair argument to contend that it reduces
evolution to a dream, and must therefore be false.[123]

It cannot, then, be true of the physical order as a whole, that it has
no reality beyond the fact of its presentation to my senses. Elements in
it not so presented must yet have reality, inasmuch as my own inner life
requires the recognition of their reality as a fundamental condition of
the realisation of my own “subjective” ends. As the facts of
hallucination, “suggestion,” and subjective sensation show, what appears
to us as an element in the physical order _may_ sometimes have no
reality beyond the fact of its appearance; there _may_ be presented
contents of which it would be true to say that their _esse_ is
_percipi_. But the very possibility of distinguishing such hallucinatory
presentations from others as illusory, is enough to prove that this
cannot be true of the whole physical order. It is precisely because
physical existence in general is something more than a collective
hallucination, that we are able in Psychology to recognise the
occurrence of such hallucinations. As has been already observed, you are
never justified in dismissing an apparent fact of the physical order as
mere presentation without any further reality behind it, unless you can
produce special grounds for making this inference based upon the
circumstances of the special case.

(2) The second important consequence of our previous conclusion is
this,—We have now seen what was really meant, in the crucial case of our
fellow-men, by maintaining an existence “independent” of the fact of
presentation to our sense-organs. Their “independent” existence meant
existence as centres of experience, as feeling, purposive beings. The
whole concept of “independent” existence was thus social in its origin.
We have also seen that the grounds on which an “independent” existence
must be ascribed to the rest of the physical order are essentially of
the same kind as those on which we asserted the “independent” existence
of our fellow-men. It appears patent, then, that “independent” existence
must have the same general sense in both cases. It can and must mean the
existence of centres of sentient purposive experience. If we are serious
in holding that the _esse_ of the physical order, like that of ourselves
and our fellows, is not mere _percipi_, we must hold that it is
_percipere_ or _sentire_. What appears to us in sense-perception as
physical nature must be a community, or a complex of communities of
sentient experiencing beings: behind the appearance the reality[124]
must be of the same general type as that which we, for the same reasons,
assert to be behind the appearances we call the bodies of our fellows.

This conclusion is not in the least invalidated by our own inability to
say what in particular are the special types of sentient experience
which correspond to that part of the physical order which lies outside
the narrow circle of our own immediate human and animal congeners. Our
failure to detect specific forms of sentience and purpose in what we
commonly call “inorganic” nature, need mean no more than that we are
here dealing with types of experience too remote from our own for
detection. The apparent deadness and purposelessness of so much of
nature may easily be illustrated by comparison with the apparent
senselessness of a composition in a language of which we are personally
ignorant. Much of nature presumably appears lifeless and purposeless to
us for the same reason that the speech of a foreigner seems senseless
jargon to a rustic who knows no language but his own.

It would be easy, but superfluous, to develop these ideas more in detail
by the free use of imaginative conjecture. The one point of vital
principle involved is that on which we have already insisted, that
existence “independent” of sense-perception has only one intelligible
meaning. Hence it must have this same meaning whenever we are compelled
to ascribe to any part of the perceived physical order a reality which
goes beyond the mere fact of its being perceived. The assertion that the
physical order, though dependent for its perceived qualities upon the
presence of a percipient with sense-organs of a particular type, is not
dependent on any such relation for its existence, if it is to have any
definite meaning at all, must mean for us that that order is phenomenal
of, or is the appearance to our special human sense-organs of, a system
or complex of systems of beings possessing the same general kind of
sentient purposive experience as ourselves, though conceivably
infinitely various in the degree of clearness with which they are aware
of their own subjective aims and interests, and in the special nature of
those interests.

§ 5. We may end this chapter by drawing certain conclusions which follow
naturally from the acceptance of this doctrine. (1) It is clear that the
result we have reached by analysis of what is implied in the
“independent” existence of the physical order agrees with our previous
conclusions as to the general structure of Reality. For we saw in our
last Book that it seemed necessary to hold not only that Reality as a
whole forms a single individual experience, but also that it is composed
of members or elements which are themselves sentient experiences of
varying degrees of individuality. And in our discussion of the unity of
the thing we saw reason to hold that nothing but a sentient experience
can be individual; thus we had already convinced ourselves that if there
are things which are more than complexes of presentations arbitrarily
thrown together for the convenience of human percipients in dealing with
them as unities, those things must be sentient experiences on subjects
of some kind. We have now inferred from the actual consideration of the
physical order that it does, in point of fact, consist of things of this
kind. Our result may thus be said to amount in principle to the logical
application to physical existence of the previously ascertained
conclusion, that only what is to some degree truly individual can be
real.

It is interesting to contrast with this consequence of our metaphysical
attempt to interpret the course of physical nature, the result which
inevitably follows from consistent adherence to the procedure of
descriptive science. The whole procedure of descriptive science depends
upon our willingness to shelve, for certain purposes, the problem
wherein consists the reality of the physical order, and to concentrate
our interest upon the task of adequately and with the greatest possible
economy of hypothesis describing the system of presented contents in
which it reveals itself to our senses. For purely descriptive purposes,
our sole interest in the physical order is to know according to what
laws of sequence one presented content follows upon another. Hence, so
long as we can establish such laws of connection between presented
contents, it is for purely scientific purposes indifferent how we
imagine the Reality in which the sequence of presentation has its
ground. Whether we think of it as a system of finite subjects, the will
of a personal Deity, a complex of primary qualities, or an unknown
substratum, or whether we decline to raise any question whatever about
the matter, the results are the same, so long as our sole object is to
exhibit the sequence of presented sense-contents as regulated by laws
which admit of calculation. Science can go its way in entire
indifference to all these alternative metaphysical interpretations of
the Reality which is behind the phenomenal order.

The logical consequence of this absorption in the problem of describing
the phenomenal sequence of events, apart from inquiry into their ground,
is that the more thoroughly the task is carried out the more completely
does individuality disappear from the physical order as scientifically
described. Everyday thought looks on the physical order as composed of
interacting things, each of which is a unique individual; current
science, with its insistence on the uniform behaviour of the different
elements of the material world, inevitably dissolves this appearance of
individuality. In the more familiar atomic theories, though the
differences between the behaviour of the atoms of different elements are
still retained as ultimate, the atoms of the same element are commonly
thought of as exact replicas of each other, devoid of all individual
uniqueness of behaviour. And in the attempts of contemporary science to
get behind atomism, and to reduce all material existence to motions in a
homogeneous medium, we see a still more radical consequence of the
exclusive adoption of an attitude of description. Individuality has here
disappeared entirely, except in so far as the origination of
differential motion in a perfectly homogeneous medium remains an
ultimate inexplicability which has to be accepted as a fact, but cannot
be reconciled with the theoretical assumptions which have led to the
insistence upon the homogeneity of the supposed medium.

The logical reason for this progressive elimination of individuality
from scientific descriptions of the processes of the physical order
should now be manifest. If all individuality is that of individual
subjects of experience, it is clear that in disregarding the question of
the metaphysical ground of the physical order we have already in
principle excluded all that gives it individuality from our purview; the
more rigorously logical our procedure in dealing exclusively with the
phenomenal contents of the physical order, the less room is left for any
recognition of an element of individuality within it. Our purpose to
describe the phenomenal logically involves description in purely general
terms. It is only when, in Metaphysics, we seek to convert description
of the phenomenal into interpretation of it as the appearance to sense
of a more ultimate Reality, that the principle of the individuality of
all real existence can come once more to its rights.

(2) It is perhaps necessary at this point to repeat, with special
reference to the interpretation of the physical order, what has already
been said of all interpretation of the detail of existence by reference
to its ground. We must be careful not to assume that lines of division
which we find it convenient for practical or scientific purposes to draw
between things, correspond to the more vital distinctions between the
different individual subjects of experience which we have seen reason to
regard as the more real existences of which the physical order is
phenomenal. This is, _e.g._, an error which is committed by confident
theories of the animation of matter which attribute a “soul” to each
chemical atom. We must remember that many of the divisions between
things which we adopt in our descriptive science may be merely
subjective demarcations, convenient for our own special purposes but
possibly not answering to any more fundamental distinctions founded on
the nature of the realities of the physical order themselves. It does
not in the least follow from our view of nature as the manifestation to
our senses of a system of sentient individuals, that the relations
between those individuals are adequately represented by the relations
between the different factors of the material world as it is constructed
in our various scientific hypotheses.

Thus, _e.g._, our own self-knowledge and knowledge of our fellows show
that in some sense there is a single experience corresponding to what,
for physical science, is the enormous complex of elements forming the
dominant centres of the human nervous system. But apart from our direct
insight into human experience, if we only knew the human nervous system
as we know a part of inorganic nature, we should be quite unable to
determine that this particular complex was thus connected with an
individual experience. In general we have to admit that, except for that
small portion of physical nature in which we can directly read purposive
experience of a type specially akin to our own, we are quite unable to
say with any confidence how nature is organised, and what portions of it
are “organic” to an individual experience. This caution must be
constantly borne in mind if we are to avoid the abuse of our general
theory of the meaning of the physical order in the interests of
“spiritualistic” and other superstitions. It may also serve to guard
against over-hasty “Philosophies of Nature,” like those of Schelling and
Hegel, which start with the unproved assumption that approximation to
the human external form of organisation is a trustworthy indication of
the degree in which intelligent experience is present in physical
nature.

(3) One more point may receive passing notice. It is clear that if
physical nature is really a society or a number of societies[125] of
experiencing subjects, we must admit that, from the special character of
our human experience with its peculiar interests and purposes, we are
normally debarred from social communion with any members of the system
except those who are most akin in their special type of purposive life
to ourselves. Of the vast majority of the constituents of the physical
order it must always be true that, while we may be convinced, on grounds
of general metaphysical theory, that they possess the character we have
ascribed to them, we have no means of verifying this conclusion in
specific cases by the actual direct recognition of the individual life
to which they belong, and consequent establishment of actual social
relations with them. Yet it does not follow that we are always
absolutely debarred from such direct social relations with extra-human
sentient life. The “threshold of intercommunicability” between physical
nature and human intelligence may conceivably be liable to fluctuations
under conditions at present almost entirely unknown. Conceivably the
type of experience represented in literature by the great poets to whom
the sentient purposive character of physical nature has appealed with
the force of a direct revelation of truth, and known in some degree to
most men in certain moods, may depend upon a psychological lowering of
this threshold. It is thus at least a possibility that the poet’s
“communion with nature” may be more than a metaphor, and may represent
some degree of a social relation as real as our more normal relations
with our human fellows and the higher animals. It may be true that in
the relations of man with nature, as in his relations with man, it is
the identity of purpose and interest we call love which is the great
remover of barriers.

(4) It should hardly be needful to point out that such a view of the
meaning of nature as has been defended in this chapter is in no way
opposed to, or designed to set artificial restrictions on, the
unfettered development of descriptive physical science. Whatever our
view of the ultimate nature of the physical order, it is equally
necessary on any theory for the practical control of natural processes
in the service of man to formulate laws of connection between these
processes. And the work of formulating those laws can only be
satisfactorily done when the analysis of the physical order as a system
of sense-contents is carried on with complete disregard of all
metaphysical problems as to its non-phenomenal ground. It would not even
be correct to say that, if our metaphysical interpretation is valid, the
view of nature presented in descriptive physical science is _untrue_.
For a proposition is never untrue simply because it is not the whole
truth, but only when, not being the whole truth, it is mistakenly taken
to be so. If we sometimes speak in Philosophy as though whatever is less
than the whole truth must be untrue, that is because we mean it is
untrue _for our special purposes_ as metaphysicians, whose business is
not to stop short of the whole truth. For purposes of another kind it
may be not only true, but _the_ truth.[126]

Our metaphysical interpretation of the physical order is no more
incompatible with full belief in the value and validity for _their own
purposes_ of the results of abstract descriptive science, than the
recognition of the singleness and purposiveness of a human experience
with the equal recognition of the value of physiological and anatomical
investigation into the functions and mechanism of the human body. Of
course a man, as he really exists, is something quite different from the
physiologist’s or anatomist’s object of study. No man is a mere walking
specimen of the “human organism”; every man is really first and foremost
a purposive sentient agent. But this consideration in no way affects the
practical value of anatomical and physiological research into the
structure of the man as he appears in another man’s system of
sense-presentations. What is true in this case is, of course, equally
applicable in all others.

We have yet to discuss the most serious stumbling-block in the way of
the idealist interpretation of nature, the apparent conformity of its
processes to rigid laws of sequence, which at first sight might seem to
exclude the possibility of their being really the acts of purposive
subjects. This difficulty will form the topic of our succeeding chapter.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 22; L.
T. Hobhouse, _Theory of Knowledge_, pt. 3, chap. 3; H. Lotze,
_Metaphysic_, bk. ii. chaps. 5, 6; H. Münsterberg, _Grundzüge der
Psychologie_, i. pp. 65-92; K. Pearson, _Grammar of Science_, chap. 2
(The Facts of Science), 8 (Matter) [mainly written from the
“phenomenalist” standpoint, but with unconscious lapses into a more
materialistic view]; J. Royce, Nature, Consciousness, and
Self-Consciousness” (in _Studies of Good and Evil_); _The World and the
Individual_, Second Series, Lect. 4; J. Ward, _Naturalism and
Agnosticism_, Lects. 1-5, 14, 19. Of the older philosophical literature,
Descartes, _Meditation_ 6; Leibnitz, _Monadology_ and _New System_;
Locke, _Essays_, bk. iv. chap. 11; Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism,” in
the second edition of the _Critique of Pure Reason_, in addition to the
already cited works of Berkeley will probably be found most important.

-----

Footnote 119:

This definition of the physical order approximates very closely to
that adopted by Prof. Münsterberg in his _Grundzüge der Psychologie_,
vol. i. pp. 65-77. Prof. Münsterberg defines a _physical_ fact as one
which is directly accessible to the perception of a plurality of
sentient individuals, as opposed to the psychical fact which can be
directly experienced only by one individual. It must be remembered, of
course, that my body as directly experienced in “common sensation” and
“emotional mood” belongs to the psychical order. It is only my body as
perceptible by other men that is a member of the physical order.

Footnote 120:

Cf. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 22, pp. 260-267 (1st
ed.). The attempts which have been made to exempt “primary” qualities
from this relativity do not seem to demand serious criticism. The
argument in the text applies as directly to extension and shape as to
colour or smell. It is not defensible to contend, as Mr. Hobhouse
does, that qualities, whether primary or secondary, depend on the
percipient organ only for their _perception_, not for their existence.
The contention rests upon taking two aspects of experience which are
always given together, the _that_ and the _what_ of a sense-content,
and arguing that because these two aspects of a single whole can be
distinguished, therefore the one can exist in actual separation from
the other. It would be quite as logical to infer by the same method
and from the same premisses that there can be a perceptive state
without any content, as that the contents can exist as we know them,
apart from the state.

Footnote 121:

See particularly the detailed statement of his contention and the
elaborate examination of objections in the _Three Dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous_, which form a commentary on the briefer
exposition of _Principles of Human Knowledge_, §§ 1-134.

Footnote 122:

See the fuller exposition of this line of argument in Royce, _Studies
in Good and Evil_, essay on “Nature, Consciousness and
Self-Consciousness,” to which I am largely indebted throughout the
present chapter, and for a detailed criticism of the alleged
“analogical” inference the closely related reasoning of my own essay
on “Mind and Nature” in _International Journal of Ethics_, October
1902. The similar but briefer criticism in Royce, _The World and the
Individual_, Second Series, lecture 4, “Physical and Social Reality,”
p. 170, I had not had the opportunity to study when the above was
written. For the whole subject of imitation, see in particular
Professor Baldwin’s _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_.

Footnote 123:

For a study of the significance of the “partial independence” of the
physical world on my will as a factor in producing belief in its
“external reality,” see Stout, _Manual of Psychology_,^3 bk. iii. pt.
2, chaps. 1-2, “The Perception of External Reality.”

Footnote 124:

The doctrine of degrees of reality must be borne in mind throughout
this discussion. The reality of which the physical order is phenomenal
may itself be phenomenal of a higher reality.

Footnote 125:

_Societies_ would be the more natural supposition. We have no reason
to deny that the various types of non-human intelligence may be cut
off from social intercourse with each other, as they are from
intercourse with ourselves.

Footnote 126:

That is, there are degrees of truth as well as of reality, and the two
do not necessarily coincide. The degree of truth a doctrine contains
cannot be determined apart from consideration of the purpose it is
meant to fulfil. For the special purposes of Metaphysics, the purpose
of thinking of the world in a finally consistent way, whatever is not
the whole truth is untrue. But what the metaphysician regards as the
lesser truth may be the higher truth relatively to other purposes than
his own. Compare the doctrine of Dr. Stout’s essay on “Error” in
_Personal Idealism_.

-----

CHAPTER III

THE MEANING OF LAW

§ 1. The popular conception of the physical order as exhibiting a rigid
mechanical conformity to general _laws_, conflicts with our
metaphysical interpretation. § 2. Our interpretation would, however,
admit of the establishment of averages or approximately realised
uniformities by the statistical method, which deals with occurrence
_en bloc_ to the neglect of their individual detail. § 3.
“Uniformity” in nature is neither an axiom nor an empirically
verifiable fact, but a postulate. A consideration of the methods
actually employed for the establishment of such uniformities or
“laws” of nature shows that we have no guarantee that actual
concrete cases exhibit _exact_ conformity to law. § 4. Uniformity is
a _postulate_ arising from our need of practical rules for the
control of nature. It need not for this purpose be exact, and in
point of fact our scientific formulae are only exact so long as they
remain abstract and hypothetical. They do not enable us to determine
the actual course of an individual process with certainty. § 5. The
concept of the physical order as _mechanical_ is the abstract
expression of the postulate, and is therefore essential to the
empirical sciences which deal with the physical order. § 6.
Consideration of the character of genuine machines suggests that the
mechanical only exists as a subordinate aspect of processes which,
in their full nature, are intelligent and purposive.

§ 1. In our view of the underlying reality of the physical order, as
explained in the last chapter, we have scarcely gone further, except in
the explicitness of our phraseology, than we should be followed by many
who profess a complete disbelief in metaphysical construction and an
exclusive devotion to positive natural science. From the side of
positive science we have often been reminded that no hard-and-fast line
can logically be drawn between the organic and the inorganic, that we
are not entitled to assume that the continuity of evolution ceases when
we are no longer able to follow it with our microscopes, that we are,
with the eye of scientific faith, to discern in the meanest particle of
matter the “promise and potency” of all life, and so forth. All which
statements seem to be confused ways of suggesting some such conception
of the physical order as we have attempted to put into more precise and
logical form. It is not until we come to deal with the problem indicated
by the title of this chapter that our most serious difficulties begin.
We have to face the objections which may be urged against our view of
the physical order on the strength of the principle known in inductive
Logic as the “Uniformity of Nature.”

The events of the physical order, it may be urged, cannot be expressions
of the more or less conscious purposes and interests of individual
centres of experience, and that for a simple reason. How a purposive
agent will behave is always a mystery, except to those who actually
understand his purposes. It is impossible, apart from actual insight
into those purposes, to infer from the mere examination of his past
behaviour what his behaviour in the future will be. For the special
characteristic of purposive action is its power to find new ways of
response to stimulus. Hence it is that we rightly regard the power to
learn by experience, that is, to acquire more and more _appropriate_
reactions to stimulus, as the test of a creature’s intelligence. Where
there is no progressive adaptability there is no ground to assume
intelligence and purpose. Hence again the impossibility of calculating
beforehand with any certainty what course the behaviour of an
intelligent being will take, unless you are actually aware of the
purposes he is seeking to realise.

Now, except in the case of the organic world, it may be urged, we do not
find progressive _adaptability_ in Nature. The inorganic constituents of
the physical order always react with absolute uniformity in the same way
upon the same environment. Their behaviour exhibits absolutely
undeviating conformity to general routine laws of sequence, and can
therefore be calculated beforehand, provided that the resources of our
mathematics are adequate to deal with the problems it presents, with
absolute exactitude and certainty. That this routine uniformity exists
in physical nature is, in fact, a fundamental principle in the logic of
inductive science. Every indication of sentience and purpose is thus
absent from physical nature, outside the world of living organisms; it
is a realm of rigid conformity to laws of sequence. And these sequences,
because absolutely without exception and incapable of modification, are
purely _mechanical_, _i.e._ non-purposive and non-intelligent. Nature
is, in fact, a complicated _mechanism_, in which every event follows
from its conditions with undeviating _necessity_.

Views of this kind are often supposed to be logically necessitated by
the principles of physical science. It is manifest that if they are
sound our whole preceding interpretation of the physical order is
invalidated. For this reason, as well as because of the far-reaching
consequences often drawn from them as to human freedom and moral
responsibility, it will be necessary to examine their foundation in some
detail.

§ 2. The main problems confronting us in this examination will then
be—(1) How far is calculable uniformity of sequence really incompatible
with the presence of purpose and intelligence? (2) Have we any real
ground for ascribing _such_ uniformity to the actual sequences of
physical nature? (3) if not, What is the real logical character of the
principle of the so-called uniformity of nature? (4) and What amount of
truth is contained in the conception of the physical order as a
_mechanism_? Into the problem suggested by the popular contrast between
the _necessity_ of mechanical sequence and the _freedom_ of purposive
action, it will be needless to enter at any length. For, as we saw in
dealing with the popular view of necessary causal relation, the
necessity of a mechanical sequence is a purely subjective and logical
one. The sequence is necessary only in the sense that _we_ are
constrained, so long as we adhere to the purpose of thinking logically,
to affirm the consequent when we affirm the antecedent. True _necessity_
is always compulsion, and therefore, so far from being opposed to
purposive action, can only exist where an actual purpose is overruled or
thwarted.[127] So long as we are dealing solely with phenomenal sequence
in the physical order, necessity is a mere anthropomorphic name for
routine undeviating uniformity of sequence.

(1) _Calculable Uniformity and Intelligent Purpose._ It is sometimes
assumed that all successful _prediction_ of a thing’s behaviour is
incompatible with the ascription of intelligence or purpose to the
thing. Thus it has been argued, and continues to be argued in moral
philosophy of a popular type, that if we are intelligent beings with
purposes of our own, it must always be impossible for an onlooker to
predict how we shall behave in circumstances which have not yet arisen.
This extreme view of the incompatibility of calculability with
intelligent purpose, however, manifestly rests on a double confusion. To
begin with, those who assert this view commonly make the mistake of
supposing that _prediction_ of the future stands somehow on a different
logical level from _calculation_ of the past from present data.
Prediction of my future behaviour is supposed somehow to conflict with
my character as a purposive being in a way in which inference as to my
past behaviour does not. This is, of course, an elementary fallacy in
Logic. The conditions required for the successful inference of the
absent from the present are identical in the two cases, as we have
already seen in dealing with the problems of Causality. Precisely the
same kind of insight is requisite to judge how a given man must have
behaved in a certain situation in his past history as are needed to
determine how he will behave in a situation which is yet to arise. We
may thus dismiss from consideration the special case of _prediction_,
and confine ourselves to the general question, how far the general
calculability of the course of a process is incompatible with its
purposive and intelligent character.

An answer to this question is at once suggested by reflection upon our
ordinary attitude towards such attempts to calculate the course of our
own behaviour.[128] It is by no means every such calculation that we
resent. So far from being affronted by the assumption that our conduct
exhibits sufficient uniformity to admit of calculation, we expect our
personal friends to have sufficient reliance on its uniformity to assume
with confidence that we shall certainly do some things and refuse to do
others, that we must have acted in certain ways and cannot have acted in
others. “You ought to know me better than to suppose me capable of that”
is between friends a tolerably keen expression of reproach, “I know I
can count on you to do it,” a common expression of confidence. On the
other hand, we should certainly resent the assumption on the part of a
comparative stranger of such a knowledge of our character as would
warrant confident calculation of our conduct, and if the calculation was
avowedly drawn not from personal knowledge at all, but from general
propositions of Psychology or Anthropology, we should pretty certainly
feel that a more than accidental success threatened our moral
individuality.

Now, what is the explanation of this difference of feeling? Manifestly
it must be sought in the great difference between the grounds on which
the calculation is based in the two cases. In the first case we expected
and welcomed the calculation, because we felt it to be founded upon our
friend’s personal acquaintance with the guiding interests and purposes
of our life; it was an inference based upon insight into our
_individual_ character. In the other case we resented the success of the
calculation, because we assumed it to be made in the absence of any such
personal insight into our individual purposes and interests, on the
basis of mere general propositions about human nature. We rightly feel
that the regular success of calculation of this second sort is
inconsistent with the ascription of any reality to our individual
character. If all our actions can be calculated from general theorems in
a science of human nature, without taking individual purpose into
account, then the apparent efficacy of individual interests and purposes
in determining the course of our history must be an empty illusion; we
cannot be truly intelligent agents, seeing that we never really do
anything at all.

Thus we see that it seems necessary to draw a marked distinction between
two types of calculability. Calculation based on insight into individual
character and purpose is so far from being inconsistent with
purposiveness and intelligence, that the more coherent and systematic
the purposes by which a life is controlled, the more confident does such
calculation become. Calculation without such special knowledge, and
based upon mere general propositions, on the other hand, cannot be
regularly successful where one has to deal with the behaviour of
individual purposive beings.[129]

Now, the difficulty as to our interpretation of the physical order as
the presentation to our sense of a system of intelligent purposive
beings, is that the successes of physical science seem at first sight to
show that just this “mechanical” calculation of the course of events
from observed sequence, without insight into underlying individual
purpose, _is_ possible when we are dealing with physical nature. For, on
the one hand, we ourselves admitted that if physical nature is permeated
by individual purposes, we do not know what those purposes in detail
are; and, on the other, it is undeniable that physical science, which
systematically disregards their presence, has been signally successful
in the past, and may be expected to be even more successful in the
future, in detecting uniformities in physical nature, and so submitting
it to exact calculation. Hence it might be thought that the actual
success of the empirical sciences cannot be reconciled with the
principles of our metaphysical interpretation of the course of nature.

We must, however, draw a very important distinction. There is one method
by which uniformities of a certain kind can be detected in the behaviour
of purposive intelligent beings, without insight into the nature of
their individual purposes—the method of statistical averages. Thus,
though it would be quite impossible to say with certainty of any
individual man that he will shoot himself or will get married, except on
the strength of insight into his individual character and interests, we
find by experience that it is possible to say, within a certain narrow
range of error, what percentage of Englishmen will shoot themselves or
will get married in the year. The percentage is, of course, rarely or
never precisely realised in any one year, but the longer the period of
years we take for examination, the more exactly do the deviations from
the average in individual years compensate one another. The explanation
is, of course, that on the whole the incentives to marriage or suicide,
in a reasonably stable state of society, remain constant from year to
year, so that by taking an average of several years we can eliminate
results which are due to individual peculiarities of temperament and
situation, and obtain something like a measure of the degree in which
the general conditions of social existence impose a certain common trend
or character on the interests and purposes of individuals.

Two things are at once noticeable in connection with all uniformities
obtained by the method of averages. One is that the result formulated in
the statistical law is always one to which the actual course of events
may reasonably be expected to conform within certain limits of
deviation, never one to which we have a right to expect absolute
conformity. Not only is the actual number of marriages, _e.g._, in any
one year, usually slightly above or below the average percentage
computed, _e.g._, for a ten years’ period, but as we compare one longer
period with others, the average percentage for the longer period itself
fluctuates. It is only in the “long run,” that is, in the impossible
case of the actual completion of an interminable series, that the
computed average would be exactly realised. As every one who has to deal
with averages in any form knows, precise realisation of the computed
average within a finite series of cases would at once awaken suspicions
of an error somewhere in our calculations. Thus the uniformities of this
kind are never absolutely rigid; they are ideal limits to which the
actual course of events is found to approximate within certain limits of
divergence.

The second point is that the existence of such a uniformity never
affords logical ground for confident affirmation as to the actual event
in a particular concrete case. To revert to our illustration, just as we
have no right to infer from the approximately constant percentage of
marriages per year in a given society, that this precise percentage will
be realised in any one special year, so we have still less right to
infer that a particular member of that society will or will not marry.
Nothing but insight into the character, situation, and interests of this
special member of society can give me the right to judge with confidence
how he will actually behave. Similarly, it is possible to say within
certain limits of error how many persons over sixty years of age may be
expected to die in the next twelve months, but it would be the height of
logical presumption to infer that a particular man will die during the
year, except on the strength of special information about his pursuits,
habits, and general state of health.[130] Thus our general conclusion
must be, that calculation and the establishment of uniformities is
possible, without insight into individual purpose, but that the
uniformities thus obtained are always variable and approximate, and
afford no safe ground for inference as to special concrete cases.

§ 3. (2) _Uniformity in Physical Nature._ The existence of ascertainable
uniformities in physical nature, then, will not conflict with our
general interpretation of the physical order, provided that these
uniformities are of the type just illustrated by reference to ordinary
social statistics. On the other hand, the exact and rigid conformity of
the actual course of concrete events with such uniform general “laws,”
would certainly be inconsistent with the presence of teleological
adaptation to ends. A reign of rigid routine conformity to general law
cannot co-exist with individual purposive life. Now, it is commonly
assumed, and we shall shortly see that the assumption is both necessary
and justified as a practical methodological postulate, that the “reign
of law” in physical nature is absolute. But are there any grounds for
recognising this assumption as more than a possibly unrealised postulate
made for human practical purposes? I think it is easy to show that there
are none whatever, and that the conception of a nature devoid of purpose
and sentience, and swayed absolutely by mechanical “laws,” is simply a
metaphysical nightmare of our own invention.

To begin with, it is clear that the undeviating conformity of the actual
course of any concrete process to scientific “law” cannot be verified as
an empirical fact by observation or experiment. For in no observation or
experiment can we ever deal with the whole of any concrete actual event
or process. We have always, for the purposes of our observation, to
select certain of the general aspects of the process, to which we attend
as the “relevant factors” or “conditions” of the result, while we
disregard other aspects as “immaterial” or “accidental” circumstances.
And this artificial abstraction, as we saw in discussing Causality,
though indispensable for our practical purposes, is logically
indefensible. Again, within the aspects selected for attention, all that
experiment can establish is that the deviation from uniform law, if
there is any deviation, is not sufficiently great to affect our
measurements and calculations. But how far our standards of measurement
are from rigid precision may be readily learned from the chapter on
physical standards in any good work on the logic of the inductive
sciences.[131] Our failure to detect deviation from law is absolutely
worthless as evidence that no deviation has taken place.

Thus, if the absolute uniformity of natural processes is more than a
practical postulate, it must be an axiom, that is, it must be implied in
the very notion of those processes as elements in a systematic whole.
But it should at once be clear that we have no more ground for asserting
such uniformity as an axiom, than we had for treating the causal
postulate as axiomatic. It is by no means implied in the concept of a
systematic whole that its parts shall be connected by uniform law. For
the unity of the system may be teleological, that is, the parts may be
connected by the fact that they work together to realise the same end,
to execute the same function. In that case the behaviour of any one part
will depend on the demands laid upon it by the plan which the working of
the system fulfils. As these demands vary from time to time, the
behaviour of the part under consideration will then vary
correspondingly, though to all appearance its surroundings may, for a
spectator who fails to grasp the end or purpose realised by the system,
be identical.[132] This is actually the case with those systematic
wholes in which human insight can directly detect unity of purpose or
aim. A man with definite purposes before him does not react in a
uniformly identical way upon situations which, apart from their relation
to his purpose, would be pronounced identical. He learns, for instance,
from previous failure in the same circumstances, and so acquires the
power to react on them in a way better adapted to the obtaining of his
end. Or his progressive execution of his purpose, where there has been
no failure, may require different conduct on the two occasions. To speak
with strict logical accuracy, the situations, relatively to his special
purpose, are never identical, though it may be no difference could be
detected in them apart from that relation to this peculiar purpose.
Relatively to the system of intelligent purposes which realises itself
through the circumstances, every situation is, properly speaking,
unique.

Now, if we consider the methods by which the uniformities called “laws”
of nature are actually formulated, we may see ground to conclude that
they may one and all be uniformities of the approximate non-exact type.
In many cases, if not all, these uniformities have manifestly been
obtained by statistical methods. Thus, for example, when it is said that
all the atoms of a given chemical element are absolutely alike, _e.g._,
that every atom of oxygen has the atomic weight 16, there is absolutely
no valid ground for regarding this uniformity as actually realised
without deviation in individual cases. If the atom should prove, as it
may, to be no more than a convenient device of our own, useful for
computing the behaviour of sensible masses but with no real existence of
its own, it is of course evident that there can be no question of the
real conformity of individual cases to the law. But even if there really
are indivisible bodies answering to our conception of atoms, still we
have to remember that we have no means of dealing with the individual
atom directly. We infer its properties indirectly from the behaviour of
the sensible masses with which we can deal more directly. Hence, at
most, the statement that the atom of oxygen has a certain weight means
no more than that we can for our practical purposes disregard any
possible individual divergences from this value. The oxygen atoms, if
they really exist, might actually fluctuate in individual atomic weight
about an average; yet, so long as we cannot deal with them individually
but only in bulk, these fluctuations, if only sufficiently small, would
produce no appreciable effect on our results, and would therefore
properly be treated in our science as non-existent. Conceivably, then,
such chemical uniformities may afford no safer ground for precise
statements about the weight of the individual atom, than anthropological
statistics do for precise statement about the actual height, weight, or
expectation of life of an individual man. And we can readily see that a
non-human observer with senses incapable of perceiving the individual
differences between one man and another, might be led from the apparent
uniformity of behaviour exhibited by large collections of human beings
to the same sort of conclusions which we are tempted to make about
atoms.[133]

Similarly with other cases of apparently rigid uniformity. As any one
who has worked in a laboratory knows,[134] such results are in actual
practice obtained by taking the mean of a long series of particular
results and treating the minor divergences from this mean as
non-existent because they are negligible for all practical purposes. In
other words, the apparently rigid conformity of natural processes to
uniform law is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we are
debarred by various limitations of a subjective kind from following the
course of any process in its individual detail, and have therefore to
make all our inferences from the observation and comparison of series of
processes sufficiently extended for individual differences to neutralise
each other. But in all this there is absolutely no warrant for the
conclusion that the course of any one individual process is absolutely
uniform with that of any other. There is room within the uniformity got
by these methods of comparison for an infinite variety of individual
detail, of which our scientific constructions take no account, either
because our means of observation are insufficient to detect it, or
because, when detected, it is of no significance for the original object
of our science—practical success in interference with the course of
events.

It is easy to point out some of the conditions upon which failure to
detect actually existing individual deviations from uniformity may
depend. Professor Royce has, in this connection, laid special stress
upon one such condition, the limitation of what he calls the time-span
of our attention. We are unable, as the student of Psychology knows, to
attend to a process as a whole if its duration exceeds or falls short of
certain narrow limits. Now, there seems no foundation in the nature of
the attentive process for the special temporal limitations to which it
is subject in our own experience, and we have no means of denying the
possibility that there may be intelligent beings whose attention-span is
much wider, or again, much more contracted, than our own. One can even
conceive the possibility of a being with a power of varying the span of
attention at will. Now, it is clear that if we could so vary our
attention-span as to be able to take in as single wholes processes which
are at present too rapid or too slow to be perceived by us in their
individual detail, such a purely subjective change in the conditions of
our own attention might reveal individuality and purpose where at
present we see nothing but routine uniformity. In the same way, we can
readily understand that a being with a much wider attention-span than
our own might fail to see anything but purposeless routine in the course
of human history. Supposing that we are placed in the midst of a
universe of intelligent purposive action, it is clear that we can only
hope to recognise the nature of that action in the case of beings who
live, so to say, at the same rate as ourselves. A purposive adaptation
to environment with consequent deviation from uniformity in reaction
would necessarily escape our notice if it took place with the rapidity
of the beat of a gnat’s wing, or again, if it required centuries for its
establishment.[135]

Other similar subjective conditions which would necessarily cut us off
from the recognition of purposive fresh adaptations widely different
from those which occur in our own life, are the limitations of our power
of attending to more than a certain number of presentations
simultaneously; and again, the restriction of our sense-perception to a
few types, and the impossibility of perceiving contents belonging to
those types when they fall below or above the lower and upper
“thresholds” of sensibility. These considerations do not, of course,
positively prove that the routine uniformity of natural processes is
only subjective appearance, but they are sufficient to show that there
is no valid reason for taking it to be more, and in conjunction with our
previous positive argument for the sentient individuality of all real
existence, they suffice to bring our general interpretation of the
physical order under Mr. Bradley’s canon that “What must be and can be,
that _is_.”

§ 4. (3) What, then, are we to make of the principle of the “Uniformity
of Nature”? Any principle which does actual work in science must somehow
be capable of justification, and if our interpretation of the physical
order really conflicts with a fundamental scientific principle, it must
contain fallacy somewhere. Fortunately, there is no real conflict. In
dealing with the principle of Uniformity, we must distinguish very
carefully between the sense in which it is actually required for the
purposes of science and the sense which has been put upon it in the set
of metaphysical doctrines popularly but illogically deduced from the
actual procedure of the sciences. As we have seen already, it is
impossible to affirm the principle of Uniformity as an axiom of
systematic thought. It is also not capable of verification as an
empirical truth. Its logical character must therefore be that of a
postulate, an assumption defensible on the ground of practical
usefulness, but only so far as it actually succeeds.

Now, this is precisely the place which the principle fills in the actual
procedure of the sciences. We have absolutely no means of showing that
the concrete course of Nature is strictly uniform, as has already been
seen. But also, we have no need, for our scientific ends, that it should
be uniform. All that we require is that natural processes, when dealt
with in the bulk, should exhibit no divergence from uniform routine
except such as we may neglect for the purposes of practical calculation
and control of the course of events. The actual success of the empirical
sciences shows that this demand for approximate uniformity is actually
fulfilled with sufficient closeness for all our practical purposes. That
it would be so fulfilled we could have had no theoretical means of
divining before putting it to the actual test. In this sense the
principle, like that of Causality may be said to be a postulate made _a
priori_ and in advance of experience. But, once more like the principle
of Causality, it could not be presumed to be trustworthy unless the
subsequent results of its employment vindicated it; it cannot,
therefore, be _a priori_ in the Kantian sense of being known to be true
independent of empirical verification.[136]

This result is confirmed by consideration of the way in which the
principle of uniform law is actually applied to concrete cases.
Scientific laws, as we all know, are purely general and abstract. They
state not what _will_ happen, but what _would_ happen providing that
certain specified conditions and no others were operative in determining
the result. In this abstract form they are, of course, statements of
exact and absolute uniformities. But in this abstract form they cannot
be directly applied to the calculation of the actual course of any
process. To take, for instance, an example which has been used by
Professor Ward.[137] We learn in Mechanics that equilibrium is
maintained on the lever when the moments of the weights about the
fulcrum are equal and opposite. As an abstract generalisation this is a
statement of a rigid uniformity. But in order that it may be universally
true, we must suppose the conditions implied in the formulation of the
proposition to be fulfilled. The lever itself must be absolutely rigid,
and must be weightless; it must be of absolutely uniform structure, the
fulcrum must be a mathematical point, in order that friction may be
excluded, and so forth. Similarly, the weights must be thought of as
mere masses without any further difference of quality, and thus only
capable of affecting the lever through the one property of their weight;
their attachments, again, must be of ideal tenuity, or fresh
complications will be introduced. But when all these conditions have
been taken into account, the principle has become so abstract as to
amount to the tautology that what only operates by its mass and its
distance from the fulcrum will not operate by any other property.

In any actual case, the course of events will be liable to be affected
by all the conditions which had to be excluded from the abstract
formulation of the principle. No actual lever will be weightless or
incapable of being bent or broken; its construction will never be
uniform. Actual loads, again, may influence the behaviour of a lever
differently according to their bulk, their chemical composition, the
nature of their attachments. At an actual fulcrum there will be some
degree of friction between the lever-bar and its support, and so on. In
actual fact, any or all of these circumstances may affect the behaviour
of the lever bar when the loads are suspended from it. Consequently, it
is quite impossible to apply the mechanical generalisation with
certainty to determine the course of events in a concrete case.

What holds good in this instance holds good in all similar cases of the
“laws” of nature. In so far as these laws are really exact they are all
hypothetical, and deal only with the problem. What would be the course
of a physical sequence, assuming its complete ground to be contained in
the conditions enumerated in the enunciation of the law? That is, they
all, in so far as they are absolute, are different forms of the
tautological proposition, that where there is nothing to make any
difference between two cases, there will be no difference. But the
moment we apply our laws to the calculation of the actual course of an
individual process, we have to recognise that the condition for their
rigid exactness is absent; in the individual process there are always
aspects not comprised in the conditions for which the law was
enunciated, and nothing but actual experience can inform us whether the
presence of these aspects will perceptibly affect the result in which we
are interested. As applied to the study of an individual process, the
principle of Uniformity is thus a postulate, like the principle of
Causality, which can only be justified by its actual success.

Again, like the principle of Causality, the principle of Uniformity may
be successful to different degrees, according to the special nature of
the processes for which it is assumed. As the causal postulate rested on
the assumption that a selection from the antecedents of an event may for
practical purposes be treated as equivalent to its complete ground, so
the more general postulate of Uniformity rests on the assumption that
individual purpose may be left out of account in assigning the ground of
a process. It does not follow that these postulates will receive the
same amount of empirical justification for all departments of the
physical order. There may well be certain processes in which the
individual purposive character is so prominent that, even for our
practical purposes, we cannot safely calculate their course without
taking their end or purpose into consideration. In that case the
principle of Uniformity and that of Causality would, for this part of
the physical order, lose their practical value. It is a popular belief
that such a failure of these practical postulates actually takes place
where we come to deal with the conscious volitions of human agents. The
problem is one which must be kept for fuller consideration in our next
Book, but we can at present make two general statements.

(1) Such a failure of the postulates of Causality and Uniformity in
application to a particular sphere would not involve a breach of the
fundamental logical principle of Ground and Consequence, since, as we
have seen sufficiently already, both postulates impose special
restrictions on that principle for which the nature of the principle
itself affords no warrant. It would thus not be an unthinkable or
logically untenable position to hold that no general laws of human
action can be formulated.

(2) While this extreme denial of the possibility of laws of human action
is logically possible, the actual success of those sciences which deal
with human behaviour in the statistical way forbids us to accept it. The
success of these sciences shows that human behaviour, considered in the
gross, does exhibit certain approximate uniformities. But there seems to
be no means of proving that all aspects of human behaviour would show
such uniformity if considered in gross in the same fashion. It is at
least conceivable that some social activities would fail to exhibit
approximation to an average value, no matter how extended the area and
period taken as the basis of investigation. We might conceivably have to
admit that there are departments of social life for which no “laws” can
be formulated. If we disregard this possibility in practice, the reason
is a methodological one. It is our _interest_ to discover such
uniformities, and therefore, as failure _may_ only mean a temporary
check to the success of our investigations, we properly make it a rule
of method to assume that it is no more than this. We treat all sequences
as capable, by proper methods, of reduction to uniformity, for the same
reason that we treat all offenders as possibly reclaimable. We desire
that they should be so, and we cannot prove they are not so, and we
therefore behave as if we knew they were so.

A word may be said as to the nature of the practical need upon which the
postulate of Uniformity is based. As we have previously seen, the allied
postulate of Causality arose from the practical need of devising means
for the control of natural processes. But the causal postulate alone is
not enough to satisfy this need. For even if we can assume that every
event is determined, sufficiently for practical purposes, by its
antecedents, and thus that the knowledge of those antecedents, when
obtained, is a knowledge of the means to its production, our practical
command over the production of the event is not yet assured. For we can
have no general confidence in our power to produce the event by
employing the ascertained means, so long as it is possible that the
result may on each occasion be affected by variations too minute for our
detection, or for other reasons not accessible to our perception. We
need to be assured that what seems the same to us is, for practical
purposes, the same, and so that the employment of the _same_ means may
be trusted to lead to the same result. This is the condition which is
expressed in an abstract form by the principle of Uniformity, which
states that the course of natural processes conforms to general laws; in
their actual application to the concrete processes of actual nature
these laws are properly practical rules for the production of effects,
and their inviolability means no more than that we may successfully
treat as the same, in their bearing on the results in which we are
interested, things which appear the same in relation to certain
standards of comparison. As we have seen, the validity of this
assumption could never have been known _a priori_; it can only be said
to be actually valid where actual use has justified it. At the same
time, it is clearly a principle of method to assume the universal
applicability of our practical postulates wherever it is to our interest
that they should be applicable, as explained in the last paragraph. This
is why we rightly assume the applicability of the postulates in spheres
where the successful establishment of general uniformities has not
hitherto been effected, so long as no positive reason can be shown why
they should not apply. We shall find this last reflection suggestive
when we come to deal with the ethical difficulties which have been felt
about the application of the postulates of Uniformity and Causality to
voluntary action.

It is of course clear that our reduction of Uniformity to a mere
practical postulate does not introduce any element of pure “chance” into
the actual order of existing things. “Chance” is a term with more than
one meaning, and its ambiguity may easily lead to misapprehensions.
Chance may mean (_a_) any sequence for which our actual knowledge cannot
assign the ground. In this sense chance, as another name for our own
mere ignorance, must of course be recognised by any theory which does
not lose sight of the fact of human ignorance and fallibility.

Or again, chance may mean (_b_) a sequence of which the ground is
partially understood. We may know enough of the ground of the sequence
to be able to limit the possibilities to a definite number of
alternatives, without knowing enough to say which alternative completely
satisfies the conditions in a special case. It is in this sense that we
speak of the “chances” of any one of the alternative events as capable
of computation, and make the rules for their computation the object of
special mathematical elaboration in the so-called “Theory of
Probability.”

(_c_) Finally, chance may mean “pure” chance, the existence of something
for which there is no “ground” whatever, as it stands in no organic
interconnection with a wider system of real existence. Chance in this
last sense is, of course, absolutely excluded by our conception of the
systematic unity of the real as expressed in the principle of Ground and
Consequence, as an ultimate axiom of all consistent thought. Our denial
of the absolute validity of the principles of Causality and Uniformity
would only amount to the admission of “pure” chance into things if we
accepted those principles as necessary consequences of the axiom of
Ground and Consequence. If they are mere practical postulates, which
present the axiom of Ground under artificial restrictions for which
there is no logical justification in the axiom itself, the admission
that they are not ultimately true in no way conflicts with full
recognition of the thorough systematic unity of existence; it merely
means that the view of the nature of that unity assumed by our practical
postulates, though eminently useful, is inadequate.

We may here conveniently recapitulate our results. On metaphysical
grounds, we felt compelled to regard the physical order as the
manifestation to our special sensibility of a system of interconnected
beings with sentient and purposive experiences like ourselves. The
apparent purposelessness and deadness of the greater part of that order
we explained as intelligible on the supposition that the subjective
purposes and interests of many of its members are too unlike our own for
our recognition. We then saw that if nature consists of such sentient
experiences, the apparent domination of it by absolute law and
uniformity cannot be the final truth. Such uniformity as there is must
be approximate, and must result from our having to deal in bulk with
collections of facts which we cannot follow in their individual detail,
and will thus be of the same type as the statistical uniformities
established by the anthropological sciences in various departments of
human conduct. Next, we saw that the uniformities we call the “laws” of
nature are, in fact, of this type; that they represent average results
computed from a comparison of large collections of instances with which
we cannot, or cannot so long as we adhere to our scientific purpose,
deal individually, are only absolute while they remain hypothetical, and
never afford ground for absolute assertion as to the course of concrete
events.

We further saw that the only uniformity science requires of the actual
course of nature is uniformity sufficiently close to enable us, for our
special purposes, to neglect the individual deviations, and that the
principle of Uniformity itself is not a logical axiom but a practical
postulate, expressing the condition necessary for the successful
formulation of rules for practical intervention in the course of events.
Finally, while we saw that we have no _a priori_ logical warrant for the
assumption that such rules can be formulated for all departments of the
physical order, we are bound on methodological grounds to assume that
they can, unless we have special positive reasons for believing the
contrary. Thus the universality of a postulate of uniformity does not
mean that it is universally _true_, but that it has universally to be
made wherever we have an interest in attempting the formulation of
general rules.

§ 5. (4) _The Conception of the Physical Order as a Mechanism._ The
conception of nature as rigidly conformable to general laws, finds its
completest expression in the view of the whole physical order as a
complicated _mechanism_.

It is not easy to say just how much is always implied when we hear of a
“purely mechanical” theory of the world or of physical processes.
Sometimes all that is meant is that the theory in question treats the
principle of rigid uniformity according to general laws as an ultimate
axiom. Sometimes, again, a “mechanical view” of the world is taken to
mean, in a narrower sense, one which regards all the chemical,
electrical, and other processes of the physical order as merely
complicated cases of change of configuration in a system of mass
particles. In this narrower sense the “mechanical” theory of the
physical world is another name for the somewhat crude form of realist
Metaphysics according to which nothing exists but moving masses,
everything in the form of secondary qualities being a subjective
illusion. Both the wider and the narrower form of the mechanical view
agree in treating the processes of physical nature as unintelligent and
unconscious, and regarding them as completely determined by antecedent
conditions, without reference to any end or purpose which they effect.
The theory owes the epithet “mechanical” to the analogy which is then
supposed to subsist between the physical order and the various machines
of human construction, in which the various constituent parts similarly
execute movements determined by relation to the remaining parts, and not
by any consciousness of an end to be attained.[138]

It is of course manifest that, so understood, the mechanical view of
physical processes is forced upon us by our practical needs wherever it
is requisite to formulate rules for successful intervention in the
course of nature. If we are to intervene with success in the course of
events, that course must, as we have already seen, be capable of being
regarded as approximately uniform, otherwise we can have no security
that our intervention according to rule and precedent will have a
uniform and unambiguous result. Hence, if we are to formulate general
rules for practical intervention, we must be able to treat the course of
things as—to all intents and purposes—mechanical. And, on the contrary,
if there are processes which cannot be even approximately regarded as
mechanical, our power of framing general rules for the practical
manipulation of events cannot extend to those processes. The limits of
the mechanical view of events are likewise the limits of empirical
science and of the general precepts of the practical arts.

We see this admirably exemplified in the study of human natures. The
behaviour of large aggregates of human beings, as we have already
learned, exhibits approximate uniformity, at least in many respects, and
may thus be treated as to all intents and purposes mechanical in those
respects. Hence it is possible to have a number of empirical sciences of
human nature, such as Ethnology and Sociology, in which those
uniformities are collected and codified, and to base on these sciences a
number of general prudential maxims for the regulation of our behaviour
towards our fellow-men considered in the abstract. But when we come to
deal with the actual conduct of concrete human individuals, the
mechanical view, as we have seen, fails us. What a concrete individual
will do can only be inferred with certainty from the knowledge of his
interests and purposes; there can thus be no general science of
individual character, and consequently no general rules of prudence for
behaviour towards an individual fellow-man. It is not to the so-called
sciences of human nature, but to personal experience of the individual
himself, we have to go for the knowledge how to regulate our conduct
towards the actual individuals with whom life brings us into direct and
intimate personal relation. Philosophical reflection upon the nature and
limits of scientific knowledge fully confirms the verdict passed by the
practical sense of mankind on the doctrinaire pedantry which seeks to
deduce rules for dealing with actual individuals from anything but
concrete understanding of individual character and purpose.

The mechanical view of physical processes is thus an indispensable
postulate of the various empirical sciences which seek to describe those
processes by the aid of general formulæ. Hence the protests which are
sometimes urged against the use of mechanical interpretations in
descriptive science are really in spirit no more than the expression of
a personal distaste for the whole business of scientific generalisation
and description. If there are to be sciences of physical processes at
all, these sciences must be mechanical, in the wider acceptation of the
term. It does not, however, follow because the mechanical view of
physical processes is a necessity for our empirical sciences, that this
view is consequently ultimately true. As we have learned already, when
we pass from the statement that the processes of the physical order may,
for the purpose of description by general formulæ, and the invention of
practical methods for their production, be treated as to all intents
mechanical, to the very different assertion that the physical order
really is rigidly mechanical, we have deserted empirical science for
dogmatic Metaphysics, and our metaphysical dogma must stand or fall by
its own ultimate coherency and intelligibility as a way of thinking
about Reality. The usefulness of the mechanical interpretation for other
purposes is no evidence whatever of its value for the special purpose of
the metaphysician.[139]

§ 6. Our previous discussion has already satisfied us that, as
Metaphysics, the postulate of Uniformity upon which the mechanical view
of the physical order rests, is unintelligible and therefore
indefensible. But we may supplement the discussion by one or two
reflections which throw into striking relief the inadequacy of that
concept of the physical order as a huge self-acting machine which is so
often offered us to-day as the last word of scientific thought. In the
mechanical metaphysical theories two points always receive special
emphasis. The physical order, according to the thorough-going exponents
of the doctrine, is a mechanism which is (_a_) self-contained and
self-acting, and (_b_) entirely devoid of internal purpose.

Now, in both these respects the supposed world-machine differs
absolutely from the real machines upon analogy with which the mechanical
theory is in the last resort based. Every real machine is, to begin
with, the incarnation of the internal purpose of a sentient being. It is
something which has been fashioned for the express object of attaining a
certain result, and the more perfect its structure the greater is the
impossibility of understanding the principle of construction without
comprehension of the result it is devised to effect. Why the various
parts have precisely the shape, size, strength, and other qualities they
have, you can only tell when you know what is the work the maker of the
machine intended it to do. In so far as this is not the case, and the
structure of the machine can be explained, _apart_ from its specific
purpose, by consideration of the properties of the material, the
patterns of construction consecrated by tradition, and so forth, it must
be regarded as an imperfect realisation of its type. In a perfect
machine the character and behaviour of every part would be absolutely
determined by the demands made on that part by the purpose to be
fulfilled by the working of the whole; our inability ever to produce
such a perfect mechanical structure causes all our actual machines to be
imperfect and inadequate representations of the ideal we have before us
in their construction.

Thus a true machine, so far from being purposeless, is a typical
embodiment of conscious purpose. It is true that the machine, once set
going, will continue to work according to the lines embodied in its
construction irrespective of the adequacy with which they effect the
realisation of the maker’s purpose. A watch, once wound up, will
continue to go, though the indication of the lapse of time may, under
fresh circumstances, cease to meet the interests of its maker or owner;
and again, if the construction of the watch was faulty, it will not
properly execute the purpose for which it was made. The machine has in
itself no power of fresh purposive adaptability by which to modify the
purpose it reflects, or to remedy an initial defect in its execution.
But this merely shows that the purpose exhibited in the machine’s
construction originated outside the machine itself, and that the
originator had not the power to carry out his purpose with complete
consistency. It does not in the least detract from the essentially
teleological and purposive character of the machine _quà_ machine.

This brings us to our second point. Just as no true machine is
purposeless, so no true machine is self-acting. Not only are all
machines in the end the product of designing intelligence, but all
machines are dependent upon external purposive intelligence for control.
They require intelligence to set them going, and they require it
equally, in one form or another, to regulate and supervise their
working. However complicated a piece of machinery may be, however
intricate its provisions for self-regulation, self-adjustment,
self-feeding, and so forth, there is always, if you look carefully
enough, a man somewhere to work it. The obvious character of this
reflection has unfortunately not prevented metaphysicians from drawing
strange inferences from their own neglect of it.

Closer reflection upon the true character of machinery would thus
suggest a very different interpretation of the analogy between the
uniformities of the physical order and the regular working of our
machines from that adopted by the “mechanical” view of nature, as
elaborated into a metaphysical doctrine. It would lead us to conceive of
the apparently mechanical as playing everywhere the same part which it
fulfils in our own system of social life. We should think of the
mechanical as filling an indispensable but subordinate place in
processes which, in their complete character, are essentially
teleological and purposive. Teleological action obviously depends for
its success upon two fundamental conditions. It requires the
establishment of types of reaction which remain uniform so long as their
maintenance satisfies the attainment of the end towards which they are
directed, and at the same time the power of modifying those types of
reaction from time to time so as to meet fresh situations encountered or
created in the progressive attainment of that end. In our own individual
physical life these two conditions are found as the power to form
habits, and the power to initiate spontaneously fresh response to
variation in the environment. In so far as our dominant interests can be
best followed by the uniform repetition of one type of reaction,
attention is diverted from the execution of the reaction which becomes
habitual, semi-conscious, and, as we correctly say, “mechanical,” the
attention being thus set free for the work of initiating the necessary
fresh modifications of habitual action. Our various industrial and other
machines are devices for facilitating this same division of labour. The
machine, once properly constructed and set in action, executes the
habitual reaction, leaving the attention of its supervisor free to
introduce the requisite relatively novel variations of response
according to new situations in the environment.

There is nothing to prevent our interpreting the mechanical uniformities
exhibited by the physical order in terms of this analogy. We should then
have to think of the “laws” or “uniformities” in physical nature as
corresponding to the habitual modes of reaction of the sentient beings
of whose inner life the physical order is phenomenal; these uniformities
would thus be essentially teleological in their own nature, and would
also stand in intimate interrelation with the spontaneous initiation of
fresh responses to variations in the environment on the part of the same
sentient beings. Habit and spontaneity would mutually imply each other
in nature at large as they do in our own psychical life, and the
“mechanical” would in both cases be simply the lower level to which
teleological action approximates in proportion as attention ceases to be
necessary to its execution.

This conception would harmonise admirably with the result of our
previous inquiry into the kind of evidence by which the existence of
uniform “laws of nature” is established. For it would be an inevitable
consequence of those subjective limitations which compel us to deal in
bulk with processes we are unable to follow in their individual detail,
that our observation of the physical order should reveal the broad
general types of habitual response to typical external conditions, while
failing to detect the subtler modifications in those responses answering
to special variations in those conditions. Just so the uniformities
ascertained by the statistical study of human nature are simply the
exhibition on a large scale of the leading habitual reactions of human
beings upon typical external situations, as disentangled from the
non-habitual spontaneous responses to fresh elements in the external
situation with which they are inseparably united in any concrete life of
individual intelligent purpose.

There seems no objection to this conception of “laws of nature” as being
the formulæ descriptive of the habitual behaviour of a complex system of
sentient beings, beyond that based on the allegation that these “laws”
are absolute, exact, and without exception. We have seen already that
physical science has no means of proving this allegation, and no need
whatever to make it, the whole doctrine of “rigid,” “unvarying”
conformity to law being a mere practical postulate falsely taken by a
certain school of thinkers for an axiom. We have also seen that the
notion of rigid unvarying law is fundamentally irreconcilable with the
only intelligible interpretation we were able to give to the conception
of the real existence of the physical order. Thus we have no reason to
accept it as true, and the fullest ground for dismissing it as false.
But for the unintelligent superstition with which the “laws of nature”
are worshipped in certain quarters, it would indeed have been
unnecessary to deal at such length and with such reiteration with so
simple a matter.

One suggestion, already made in slightly different words, may be once
more emphasised in conclusion. Even among human beings the relative
prominence of fresh spontaneous adaptations and habitual reactions in
the life of the individual fluctuates greatly with the different
individuals. The “intelligence” of different men, as gauged by their
power of fresh adaptive modification of established habits of reaction,
ranges over a great variety of different values. If we could acquire the
same kind of insight into the individual purposes of non-human agents
that we have into those of our immediate fellows, we should presumably
find an even wider range of differences in this respect. In principle we
have no means of setting any definite limits to the range in either
direction. We can conceive a degree of attentive control of reaction so
complete that every reaction represents a fresh stage in the realisation
of an underlying idea, so that intelligence is everything and habit
nothing; and again, we can conceive a state of things in which mere
habit is everything and intelligent spontaneity nothing. Somewhere
between these ideal limits all cases of finite purposive intelligence
must be comprised, and it would be easy to show that neither limit can
be actually reached by finite intelligence, though there may be
indefinite approximation to either.[140]

_Consult further_:—H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i. Introduction X.
(Eng. trans., vol. i. p. 18), bk. ii. chaps. 7, 8 (Eng. trans., vol.
ii. pp. 66-162); E. Mach, _The Science of Mechanics_, pp. 481-504
(Eng. trans.); K. Pearson, _Grammar of Science_, chaps. 3 (The
Scientific Law), 9 (The Laws of Motion); J. Royce, “Nature,
Consciousness, and Self-consciousness” (in _Studies of Good and
Evil_); J. Stallo, _Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics_, chaps.
1, 10-12 (metaphysical standpoint, “Phenomenalist”); J. Ward,
_Naturalism and Agnosticism_, part 1, lects. 2-5.

-----

Footnote 127:

Speaking strictly, all necessity would appear to arise from the
presence of conflicting purposes or interests in the _same_
experience. _E.g._, the logical necessity of affirming the conclusion
when the premisses are affirmed, implies (1) the presence of the
general purpose to think logically; (2) the presence of some purpose
or interest which, if gratified, would demand the affirmation of a
result inconsistent with the previously affirmed premisses; (3) the
repression of this affirmation by the dominant purpose (1). I believe
that careful analysis will reveal these same elements in every genuine
case of necessitation. _I.e._ the mere defeat of my purpose is not
true necessitation unless it is defeated by a second interest or
purpose which I also identify with myself. Thus all necessity would
ultimately be self-imposed. This is not without its bearing on Ethics,
as we shall see.

Footnote 128:

Compare with what follows, F. H. Bradley, _Ethical Studies_, Essay 1,
and _infra_, Bk. IV. chap. 4.

Footnote 129:

Our ordinary calculations as to the behaviour of our fellow-men,
beyond the circle of our own intimates, seem to involve a mixture of
the two types. We base our conclusions partly on conjectures drawn
from the observed past acts of our fellows as to their special
interests and purposes, partly on generalisations as to the purposes
and interests which are most widely operative in human life. Practical
men never allow themselves to forget that the conclusions thus
obtained are problematical in the highest degree. The whole course of
our investigation will go to show that the notion of a deductive
science of human nature, by which the concrete conduct of an
individual man might be inferred with certainty from physiological and
psychological generalities, is a ridiculous chimera. See _infra_, Bk.
IV. chap. 4.

Footnote 130:

It will be recollected that the approximate constancy of such social
statistics has been, foolishly enough, brought forward as an alleged
disproof of moral freedom. The more vulgar forms of the necessitarian
argument have even been pushed to the inference that, if the number of
suicides up to December 31 has been one less than the average in some
given year, some one _must_ kill himself before the day is out to make
up the percentage. What must happen if the number has been one _more_
than the average we are never told.

Footnote 131:

Compare Mach, _Science of Mechanics_, p. 280 ff. (Eng. trans.);
Jevons, _Principles of Science_, chaps. 13, 14.

Footnote 132:

Compare Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i. Introduction X., chap. 3, § 33
(Eng. trans., vol. i. pp. 18, 90-93); bk. i. chap. 7, § 208 ff. (Eng.
trans., vol ii. pp. 88-91).

Footnote 133:

See the full exposition of this view in Ward, _Naturalism and
Agnosticism_, vol. i. lecture 4, on which the present paragraph is
founded. Cf. J. T. Merz, _History of European Thought_, vol. i. pp.
437-441.

Footnote 134:

My remark is founded more particularly upon the methods by which
quantitative uniformities are obtained in the investigations of
Psychophysics. I have no direct acquaintance with first-hand
experimentation in other spheres, but the method by which it is made
to yield general uniformities seems to be of the same kind.

Footnote 135:

Cf. Mr. H. G. Wells’s tale, _The New Accumulator_.

Footnote 136:

Compare once more the passage already quoted from Lotze, _Metaphysic_,
i. 3. 33.

Footnote 137:

See _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. i. lecture 2, and compare the
elaborate proof given by Mach, _Science of Mechanics_, pp. 9-23, that
all the so-called demonstrations of the general theory of the lever
are mere reductions of the more complicated to the simplest cases of a
relation which ultimately depends for its recognition on nothing more
cogent than the evidence of the senses.

Footnote 138:

For some comments upon the “mechanical view” in the narrower and more
special sense, see Chapter VI. of the present Book. It may be
convenient, for the sake of precision, to call this more special form
of the mechanical view the “mechanistic” theory of nature.

Footnote 139:

Psychology ought probably to be excluded from the sciences for which
the mechanical view is fundamental. But Psychology does not deal with
any part of the physical order. See the present writers review of
Münsterberg’s “Grundzüge der Psychologie” in _Mind_ for April 1902;
and cf. _infra_, Bk. IV. chaps. 1, 2.

Footnote 140:

Compare with the argument of this chapter, Royce, “Nature,
Consciousness, and Self-consciousness,” in _Studies of Good and Evil_;
and “Mind and Nature,” by the present writer in _International Journal
of Ethics_, October 1902. The inveterate prejudice that “laws of
nature,” to be of scientific use, must be rigidly exact uniformities
is so strong, that it may be worth while, even after the preceding
discussion of general principles, to assist the reader by reminding
him of the elementary fact that the most familiar quantities involved
in our scientific formulæ (π, _e_, the vast majority of second and
third roots, of logarithms of the natural numbers, of circular
functions of angles, etc.) are incapable of exact evaluation. This of
itself renders a scientific law, in the form in which it can be
applied to the determination of actual occurrences, merely
approximate, and thus shows that _exact_ uniformity is unnecessary for
the practical objects of the empirical sciences.

-----

CHAPTER IV

SPACE AND TIME

§ 1. Are time and space ultimately real or only phenomenal? § 2. The
space and time of _perception_ are limited, sensibly continuous, and
consist of a quantitative element together with a _qualitative_
character dependent on relation to the _here_ and _now_ of immediate
individual feeling. § 3. _Conceptual_ space and time are created
from the perceptual data by a combined process of synthesis,
analysis, and abstraction. § 4. They are unlimited, infinitely
divisible, and there is valid positive ground for regarding them as
mathematically continuous. Thus they form infinite continuous series
of positions. They involve abstraction from all reference to the
_here_ and _now_ of immediate feeling, and are thus homogeneous,
_i.e._ the positions in them are indistinguishable. They are also
commonly taken to be unities. § 5. Perceptual space and time cannot
be ultimately real, because they involve reference to the _here_ and
_now_ of a finite experience; conceptual space and time cannot be
ultimately real, because they contain no principle of internal
distinction, and are thus not individual. § 6. The attempt to take
space and time as real leads to the difficulty about qualities and
relations, and so to the indefinite regress. § 7. Space and time
contain no principle of unity; there may be many space and time
orders in the Absolute which have no spatial or temporal connection
with each other. § 8. The antinomies of the infinite divisibility
and extent of space and time arise from the indefinite regress
involved in the scheme of qualities and relations, and are insoluble
so long as the space and time construction is taken for Reality. §
9. The space and time order is an imperfect phenomenal manifestation
of the logical relation between the inner purposive lives of finite
individuals. Time is an inevitable aspect of finite experience.
_How_ space and time are transcended in the Absolute experience we
cannot say.

§ 1. The problems which arise for the metaphysician from the fact that
the physical order, as it is presented to our senses, consists of
elements having position in space and time, are among the oldest and
most perplexing of all the riddles suggested by the course of our
experience. Adequate discussion of them would demand not only far more
space than we are at liberty to bestow on the topic, but such a
familiarity with the mathematical theory of order and series as is
scarcely possible to any one but an original mathematician. All that we
can do in the present chapter is to deal very superficially with one or
two of the leading problems, more with a view to indicating the nature
of the questions which Metaphysics has to face, than of providing
definite answers to them.

The fundamental problem for Metaphysics is, of course, whether space and
time are ultimate Realities or only appearances; that is, would the
whole system of Reality, as directly apprehended by an absolute
all-containing experience, wear the forms of extension and succession in
time, or is it merely a consequence of the limitations of our own finite
experience that things come to us in this guise? It may indeed be urged
that the contents of the universe must form an order of some sort for
the absolute experience, in virtue of their systematic unity, but even
so it is not clear that order as such is necessarily spatial or
temporal. Indeed, most of the forms of order with which we are
acquainted, both in everyday life and in our mathematical studies,
appear to be, properly speaking, both non-spatial and non-temporal.
Thus, _e.g._, it is seemingly by a mere metaphor that we speak of the
“successive” integers of the natural number-series, the “successive”
powers of an algebraical symbol, the “successive” approximations to the
value of a continued fraction, in language borrowed from the temporal
flow of events, the true relation involved being in the first two cases
the non-temporal one of logical derivation, and in the third the equally
non-temporal one of resemblance to an ideal standard. The full solution
of the metaphysical problem of space and time would thus involve (1) the
discrimination of spatial and temporal order from other allied forms of
order, and (2) a decision as to the claim of this special form of order
to be ultimately coherent and intelligible.

The problem thus presented for solution is often, and usually with
special reference to the Kantian treatment of space and time in the
_Transcendental Æsthetic_, put in the form of the question whether space
and time are subjective or objective. This is, however, at best a
misleading and unfortunate mode of expression which we shall do well to
avoid. The whole distinction between a subjective and an objective
factor in experience loses most of its significance with the abolition,
now effected by Psychology, of the vicious Kantian distinction between
the “given” in perception and the “work of the mind.” When once we have
recognised that the “given” itself is constituted by the movement of
selective attention, it becomes impossible any longer to distinguish it
as an objective factor in knowledge from the subjective structure
subsequently raised upon it. Kant’s adherence to this false
psychological antithesis so completely distorts his whole treatment of
the “forms of intuition,” that it will be absolutely necessary in a
brief discussion like our own to deal with the subject in entire
independence of the doctrines of the _Æsthetic_, which unfortunately
continue to exercise a disproportionate influence on the current
metaphysical presentment of the problem.[141] It should scarcely be
necessary to point out that the metaphysical questions have still less
to do with the psychological problems, so prominent in recent science,
of the precise way in which we come by our perception of extension and
succession. For Metaphysics the sole question is one not of the origin
but of the logical value of these ideas.

It is of fundamental importance for the whole metaphysical treatment of
the subject, to begin by distinguishing clearly between space and time
as forms of _perception_, and space and time as _conceptual_ forms in
which we construct our scientific notion of the physical order. One
chief source of the confusions which beset the Kantian view is the
neglect of Kant and most of his followers to make this distinction with
sufficient clearness. We cannot insist too strongly upon the point that
the space and the time of which we think in our science as containing
the entire physical order, are not space and time as directly known to
us in sense-perception, but are concepts elaborated out of the space and
time of direct perception by a complicated process of synthesis and
analysis, and involving abstraction from some of the most essential
features of the space and time of actual experience. The following brief
discussion may serve to illustrate the general nature of the relation
between the two forms of space and time, and to exhibit the leading
differences between them.

§ 2. _Perceptual Space and Time._ Both space and time, as we are aware
of them in immediate perception, are (1) _limited_. The space we
actually behold as we look out before us with a resting eye is always
terminated by a horizon which has a more or less well-defined outline;
the “specious present,” or portion of duration of which we can be at any
time aware at once as an immediately presented content, has been shown
by elaborate psychological experimentation to have a fairly well-defined
span. Whatever lies outside this “span of attention” belongs either to
the no longer presented past or to the not yet presented future, and
stands to the sensible present much as the space behind my back to the
actually beheld space before my eyes. Of course, in either case the
limits of the actually presented space or time are not absolutely
defined. To right and left of the line of vision the visible horizon
gradually fades off into the indistinctly presented “margin of
consciousness”; the “sensible present” shades away gradually at either
end into the past and the future. Yet, though thus not absolutely
defined, sensible space and time are never boundless.

(2) Perceptual space and time are both internally _sensibly continuous_
or unbroken. Concentrate your attention on any lesser part of the
actually seen expanse, and you at once find that it is itself an expanse
with all the characteristics of the wider expanse in which it forms a
part. Space as actually seen is not an aggregate of _minima visibilia_
or perceptual points in which no lesser parts can be discriminated; so
long as space is visually or tactually perceived at all, it is perceived
as containing lesser parts which, on attending to them, are found to
repeat the characteristics of the larger space. So any part of the
“specious present” to which special attention can be directed, turns out
itself to be a sensible duration. Perceived space is made of lesser
spaces, perceived time of lesser times; the “parts” not being, of
course, actually distinguished from each other in the original percept,
but being _capable_ of being so distinguished in consequence of varying
movements of attention.

(3) On investigating the character of our actual perception of space and
time, it appears to contain two aspects, which we may call the
quantitative and the qualitative. On the one hand, whenever we perceive
space we perceive a certain magnitude of extension, whenever we perceive
time we perceive a longer or shorter lapse of duration. Different spaces
and different times can be quantitatively compared in respect of the
bigness of the extension or the duration comprised in them. On the other
hand, the percept of space or time is not one of mere extension or
duration. It has a very different _qualitative_ aspect. We perceive
along with the magnitude of the extension the _form_ of its outline.
This perception of spatial form depends in the last resort upon
perception of the _direction_ assumed by the bounding line or lines.
Similarly, in dealing with only one dimension of perceived space, we
never perceive _length_ (a spatial magnitude) apart from the perception
of _direction_ (a spatial quality). The same is true of the perception
of time. The lapses of duration we immediately perceive have all their
special direction-quality; the “specious present” is essentially a
simultaneously presented _succession_, _i.e._ a transition from before
to after. It must be added that, in perceptual space and time, the
directions thus perceived have a unique relation to the perceiving
subject, and are thus all qualitatively distinct and irreversible.
Direction in space is estimated as right, left, up, down, etc., by
reference to axes through the centre of the percipient’s body at right
angles to each other, and is thus for any given moment of experience
uniquely and unambiguously determined. Direction in time is similarly
estimated with reference to the actual content of the “focus of
consciousness.” What is actually focal is “now,” what is ceasing to be
focal is “past,” what is just coming to be focal is “future” in its
direction.[142]

This is perhaps the most fundamental and important peculiarity of the
space and time of actual perception. All directions in them are
unambiguously determined by reference to the _here_ and _now_ of the
immediate experience of an individual subject. As a consequence, every
individual subject has his own special perceptual space and time;
Geometry and Mechanics depend, to be sure, on the possibility of the
establishment of correspondences between these spatial and temporal
systems, but it is essential to remember that, properly speaking, the
space and time system of each individual’s perception is composed of
directions radiating out from his unique _here_ and _now_, and is
therefore individual to himself.[143]

§ 3. _The Construction of the Conceptual Space and Time Order of
Science._ For the purposes of practical life, no less than for the
subsequent object of scientific description of the physical order, it is
indispensably necessary to establish equations or correspondences
between the individual space and time systems of different percipients.
Apart from such correspondences, it would be impossible for one subject
to translate the spatial and temporal system of any other into terms of
his own experience, and thus all practical intercourse for the purpose
of communicating directions for action would come to an end. For the
communication of such practical directions it is imperative that we
should be able mentally to reconstruct the spatial and temporal aspects
of our experience in a form independent of reference to the special
_here_ and _now_ of this or that individual moment of experience. Thus,
like the rest of our scientific constructions, the establishment of a
single conceptual space and time system for the whole of the physical
order is ultimately a postulate required by our practical needs, and we
must therefore be prepared to face the possibility that, like other
postulates of the same kind, it involves assumptions which are not
logically defensible. The construction is valuable, so far as it does
its work of rendering intercommunication between individuals possible;
that it should correspond to the ultimate structure of Reality any
further than the requirements of practical life demand is superfluous.

The main processes involved in the construction of the conceptual space
and time of descriptive science are three,—synthesis, analysis,
abstraction. (_a_) _Synthesis._ Psychologically speaking, it is
ultimately by the active movements of individual percipients that the
synthesis of the individual’s various perceptual spaces into one is
effected. As attention is successively directed, even while the body as
a whole remains stationary, to different parts of the whole expanse
before the eye, the visual space which was originally “focal” in
presentation becomes “marginal,” and the “marginal” focal by a sensibly
gradual transition. When to the movements of head and eyes which
accompany such changes in attention there are added movements of
locomotion of the whole body, this process is carried further, and we
have the gradual disappearance of originally presented spaces from
presentation, accompanied by the gradual emergence of spaces previously
not presented at all. This leads to the mental construction of a wider
space containing _all_ the individual’s different presentation-spaces,
the order in which it contains them being determined by the felt
direction of the movements required for the transition from one to
another.

As we learn, through intercommunication with our fellows, of the
existence for their perception of perceptual extension never directly
presented to our own senses, the process of synthesis is extended
further, so as to comprise in a single spatial system all the
presentation-spaces of all the individual percipients in an order once
again determined by the direction of the movements of transition from
each to the others. Finally, as there is nothing in the principle of
such a synthesis to impose limits upon its repetition, we think of the
process as capable of indefinite continuance, and thus arrive at the
concept of a space stretching out in all directions without definite
bounds. This unending repetition of the synthesis of perceived spaces
seems to be the foundation of what appears in theory as the Infinity of
Space.

Precisely similar is the synthesis by which we mentally construct a
single time system for the events of the physical order. _Now_ means for
me the content which occupies the centre of attentive interest. As
attention is concentrated on the different stages in the realisation of
an interest, this centre shifts; what was central becomes first marginal
and then evanescent, what was marginal becomes central. Hence arises the
conception of the events of my own inner life as forming a succession of
moments, with a determinate order, each of which has been a _now_, or
point of departure for directions in perceptual time, in its turn. As
with space so with time, the intrasubjective intercourse of man with man
makes it possible for me mentally to extend this conceptual synthesis of
moments of time so as to include _nows_ belonging to the experience of
others which were already past before the first _now_ of their
experiences which I can synchronise with a _now_ of my own, and again
_nows_ of their experiences relatively to which the last _now_ which
synchronises with one of my own is past. The indefinite repetition of
such a synthesis leads, as before with space, to the thought of a
duration reaching out endlessly into past and future, and thus gives us
the familiar concept of the Infinity of Time.[144]

(_b_) _Analysis._ Equally important is the part played by mental
_analysis_ in the formation of the conceptual space and time system. As
we have already seen, successive attention to lesser parts of a
presented extension, or a presented lapse, reveals within each lesser
part the same structure which belongs to the whole, and thus establishes
the _sensible continuity_ of space and time. In actual fact, the process
of attending successively to smaller and yet smaller portions of space
and time cannot, of course, be carried on indefinitely, but we can
conceptually frame to ourselves the thought of the indefinite repetition
of the process beyond the limits arbitrarily imposed on it by the span
of our own attention. Thus, by an act of mental analysis, we arrive at
the concept of space and time as _indefinitely divisible_, or possessed
of no ultimately unanalysable last parts, which is an indispensable
pre-requisite of Geometry and Dynamics.

This indefinite divisibility of conceptual space and time is not of
itself enough, as is often supposed, to establish their _continuity_ in
the strict mathematical sense of the word; their continuity depends upon
the further assumption that whatever divides a series of positions in
space or events in time unambiguously into two mutually exclusive
classes, is itself a position in the space or event in the time series.
This assumption does not seem to be absolutely requisite for all
scientific treatment of the problems of space and time,[145] but is
demanded for the systematic establishment of the correspondence between
the spatial and temporal series and the continuous series of the real
numbers. Moreover, it seems impossible to assign any positive content to
the notion of a something which should bisect the spatial or temporal
order without occupying a position in that order. Hence we seem
inevitably led by the same analytical process which conducts us to the
conception of the spatial and temporal orders as infinite series to
think of them also as continuous series in the strict sense of the term.
The alternative conception of them as discontinuous, if not absolutely
excluded, does not seem to be called for by any positive motive, and is
incompatible with the complete execution of the purposes which demand
application of the number-series to a spatial or temporal content.

(_c_) _Abstraction._ The part played by abstraction in the formation of
the conceptual space and time order out of the data of perception is
often overlooked by theorists, but is of fundamental importance, as we
shall see immediately. We have already learned that the most significant
fact about the time and space order of individual experience is that its
directions are _unique_, because they radiate out from the unique _here_
and _now_ of immediate feeling. In the construction of the conceptual
space and time order we make entire abstraction from this dependence on
the immediate feeling of a subject. Conceptual space contains an
infinity of positions, but none of them is a _here_; conceptual time an
infinity of moments, but none of them is a _now_. As the time and space
of the conceptual order are taken in abstraction from the differences
between individual points of view, no one point in either can be
regarded as having more claim than any other to be the natural “origin
of co-ordinates” with reference to which directions are estimated. We
shall have repeated opportunity in the remainder of this chapter to
observe how important are the consequences of this abstraction.

Abstraction also enters in another way into the construction by which
conceptual space and time are created. Actual perceived space and time
are indeed never empty, but always filled with a content of “secondary”
qualities. In other words, they are always one aspect of a larger whole
of fact. Extension is never perceived apart from some further visual or
tactual quality of the extended, temporal lapse never perceived without
some change in presented content, however slight. But in constructing
the conceptual space and time system, we abstract altogether from this
qualitative aspect; we think solely of the variety of positions and
directions in time and space without taking any account of the further
qualitative differences with which they are accompanied in concrete
experience. Thus we come by the notion of an _empty_ space and an
_empty_ time as mere systems of positions into which various contents
may subsequently be put.

Strictly speaking, the notion of an empty space or an empty time is
unmeaning, as the simple experiment of thinking of their existence is
sufficient to show. We cannot in thought successfully separate the
spatial and temporal aspects of experience from the rest of the whole to
which they belong and take them as subsisting by themselves, any more
than we can take timbre as subsisting apart from musical pitch or
colour-tone from saturation. We can, however, confine our attention to
the spatial-temporal system of positions without taking into account the
special secondary properties of the extended and successive. It is from
this logical abstraction that the illusion arises when we imagine an
empty set of spatial and temporal positions as having first to exist in
order that they may be subsequently “filled” with a variety of
contents.[146]

§ 4. _Characteristics of the Conceptual Time and Space Order._ The
following characteristics of the conceptual space and time created by
the construction we have just examined, call for special notice.
Conceptual space and time are necessarily taken, for reasons already
explained, to be _unlimited_, and _indefinitely divisible_. Though it
does not seem inevitable that they should be _continuous_, we appear to
be unable to attach any positive meaning to the notion of their
discontinuity, and, in the practical need for the application to them of
the complete number-series, we have a valid positive ground for taking
them as continuous. But space and time are thus resolved, in the process
of their conceptual construction, into _continuous infinite series_ of
which the terms are spatial and temporal positions or points. Unlike the
_parts_ of perceptual space and time, these conceptual terms are not
themselves spaces or times, as they contain no internal multiplicity of
structure. Conceptual space and time are thus not wholes or aggregates
of parts, but systems of relations between terms which possess no
quantitative character.

Between any two terms of the spatial, or again of the temporal, series
there is one unique relation, which is completely determined by the
assignment of the terms, their _distance_. In the temporal series, which
has only one dimension, you can only pass from any one given term to any
other through a series of intermediate terms which is once and for all
determined when the initial and final terms are given, hence nothing is
required beyond the terms themselves to fix their distance. The spatial
series is multi-dimensional, _i.e._ you can pass from any one term in it
to any second by an indefinite variety of routes through intermediate
terms, but it is still true that there is one and only one such route
which is completely determined when the terms in question are known,
namely, the straight line passing through both. This straight line
constitutes the unique _distance_ of the two points from each
other.[147] Thus the genuine concept of which those of space and time
are species is not that of _magnitude_ or _quantity_, but of _serial
order_.

Further, and this is a point of fundamental difference between
conceptual space and time, and the spaces and times of immediate
perception, any one position in either order, taken by itself, is
qualitatively indistinguishable from any other. All points of space, all
moments of time, are alike, or, as it is also phrased, conceptual space
and time are _homogeneous_ throughout. It is not until you take at least
two terms of the spatial or temporal series and consider the relation
they determine, that distinction becomes possible. This homogeneity of
conceptual space and time is an inevitable consequence of the
abstraction from the immediate feelings of the individual subject of
experience involved, as we saw, in the process of their construction. In
our actual perception of spatial and temporal extension, that part of
perceived space and time which stands in direct unity with immediate
feeling is qualitatively distinguished as the _here_ and _now_ from all
the rest, and thus does not depend upon the specification of a second
spatial or temporal position for its recognisability. _Here_ is where
_I_ am, _now_ is _this_ felt present. And similarly, every other part of
the actually presented space and time gets a unique qualitative
character from its special relation to this _here_ and _now_; it is
right or left, behind or in front, before or after. When we abstract
altogether from the unique relation with individual experience which
thus makes the _here_ and _now_ of perception, as we do in constructing
our conceptual space and time order, every position alike becomes the
mere possibility of a _here_ or a _now_, and as such mere possibilities
the various positions are indistinguishable. Practically, this
homogeneity is important as the indispensable condition for the
quantitative comparison of different portions of extension or duration.

An apparently inevitable consequence of the homogeneity of conceptual
space and time is the _relativity_ of spatial and temporal position. As
we have seen, positions in conceptual space and time are not
distinguishable until you take them in pairs. In other words, to fix one
position in space or one date you have to give its relation to another
position or date, and similarly to fix this you must specify a third,
and so on indefinitely. To say _where_ A is means to say how you get to
it from B, and B again is only known by the way it is reached from C,
and so on without end. Logically, this is a simple consequence of the
nature of space and time as conceptually analysed into endless series.
To specify any term in the series you must give the unique relation it
bears to some other term, its logical _distance_. And, in a series which
has neither first nor last term, this second term cannot be defined
except by its logical distance from a third. In actual perception this
difficulty is avoided, owing to the fact that immediate feeling gives us
the _here_ and _now_ from which all our directions are measured. But in
conceptual space or time there is nothing to distinguish any one here
which we may take as our “origin of co-ordinates,” or any one now which
we take as our present from any other, and hence the endless regress
seems inevitable.

It follows, of course, that in conceptual space and time there is no
principle by which to distinguish different directions. In perception
they can be distinguished as right and left, up and down, and so forth.
But since what is right to one percipient is left to another, in
conceptual space, where complete abstraction is made from the presence
of an individual percipient, there is neither right nor left, up nor
down, nor any other qualitative difference between one direction and
another, all such differences being _relative_ to the individual
percipient. When we wish to introduce into conceptual space distinctions
between directions, we always have to begin by arbitrarily assigning
some standard direction as our point of departure. Thus we take, _e.g._,
an arbitrarily selected line A—————B as such a standard for a given
plane, and proceed to distinguish all other directions by the angle they
make with A B and the _sense_ in which they are estimated (whether as
from B to A or from A to B). But both the line A B and the difference of
sense between A B and B A can only be defined by similar reference to
some other standard direction, and so on through the endless regress.

Similarly with conceptual time. Here, as there is only one dimension,
the difficulty is less obvious, but it is no less real. In conceptual
time there is absolutely no means of distinguishing before from after,
past from future. For the past means the direction of our memories, the
direction qualified by the feeling of “no longer”; the future is the
direction of anticipation and purposive adaptation, the direction of
“not yet.” And, apart from the reference given by immediate feeling to
the purposive life of an individual subject, these directions cannot be
discriminated. In short, conceptual time and space are essentially
relative, because they are systems of relations which have no meaning
apart from qualitative differences in the terms which they relate; while
yet again, for the purpose of the conceptual construction which yields
them, the terms have to be taken as having no character but that which
they possess in right of the relations.[148]

One other feature of the space and time construction is sufficiently
important to call for special mention. Space and time are commonly
thought of as _unities_ of some kind. All spatial positions, it is
usually assumed, fall within one system of space-relations; all dates
have their place in one all-inclusive time. This character of unity
completes the current conception of the spatial and temporal order. Each
of those orders is a unity, including all possible spatial or temporal
positions; each is an endless, infinite, continuous series of positions,
which all are purely relative. There are other peculiarities, especially
of the current concepts of space, with which it is not necessary to deal
here, as they are of an accidental kind, not arising out of the
essential nature of the process by which the conception is constructed.
Thus it is probably a current assumption that the number of dimensions
in space is three and no more, and again that the Euclidean postulate
about parallels is verified by its constitution. As far as perceptual
space is concerned, those assumptions depend, I presume, upon empirical
verification; there seems to be no reason why they should be made for
the conceptual space-order, since it is quite certain that a coherent
science of spatial relations can be constructed without recourse to
them.[149]

§ 5. The question now is, whether the whole of this spatial and temporal
construction is more than imperfect, and therefore contradictory,
appearance. I will first state in a general form the arguments for
regarding it as appearance, and then proceed to reinforce this
conclusion by dealing with some special difficulties. Finally, I propose
to ask whether we can form some positive conception of the higher order
of Reality of which the spatial and temporal series are phenomenal.

That the space and time order is phenomenal and not ultimate, can, I
think, be conclusively shown by a general argument which I will first
enunciate in principle and then develop somewhat more in detail. An
all-comprehensive experience cannot apprehend the detail of existence
under the forms of space and time for the following reason. Such an
experience could be neither of space and time as we perceive them, nor
of space and time as we conceptually reconstruct them. It would not be
of perceptual space and time, because the whole character of our
perceptual space and time depends upon the very imperfections and
limitations which make our experience fragmentary and imperfect.
Perceptual space and time are for me what they are, because I see them,
so to say, in perspective from the special standpoint of my own
particular _here_ and _now_. If that standpoint were altered, so that
what are actually for me _there_ and _then_ became my _here_ and _now_,
my whole outlook on the space and time order would suffer change. But
the Absolute cannot look at the space and time order from the standpoint
of my _here_ and _now_. For it is the finitude of my interests and
purposes which confine me in my outlook to this _here_ and _now_. If my
interests were not bound up in the special way in which they are with
just this special part or aspect of the life of a wider whole, if they
were co-extensive with the life of that whole, every place and every
time would be my _here_ and _now_. As it is, _here_ is where my body is,
_now_ is this particular stage in the development of European social
life, because these are the things in which I am primarily _interested_.
And so with all the other finite experiences in which the detail of the
absolute experience finds expression. Hence the absolute experience,
being free from the limitations of interest which condition the finite
experiences, cannot see the order of existence from the special
standpoint of any of them, and therefore cannot apprehend it under the
guise of the perceptual space and time system.

Again, it cannot apprehend existence under the forms of space and time
as we conceptually reconstruct them. For Reality, for the absolute
experience, must be a complete individual whole, with the ground of all
its differentiations within itself. But conceptual space and time are
constructed by deliberate abstraction from the relation to immediate
experience implied in all individuality, and consequently, as we have
just seen, they contain no real principle of internal distinction, their
constituent terms being all exactly alike and indistinguishable. In
short, if the perceptual time and space systems of our concrete
experience represent individual but imperfect and finite points of view,
the conceptual space and time of our scientific construction represents
the mere abstract possibility of a finite point of view; neither gives a
point of view both individual and infinite, and neither, therefore, can
be the point of view of an absolute experience. An absolute experience
must be out of time and out of space, in the sense that its contents are
not apprehended in the form of the spatial and temporal series, but in
some other way. Space and time, then, must be the phenomenal appearance
of a higher reality which is spaceless and timeless.

§ 6. In principle, the foregoing argument appears to me to be complete,
but, for the sake of readers who care to have its leading thought more
fully developed, it may be re-stated thus. Perceptual space and time
cannot be ultimately real as they stand. They are condemned already by
the old difficulty which we found in the notion of reality as made up of
qualities in relation. Perceptual space and time are aggregates of
lesser parts, which are themselves spaces and times; thus they are
relations between terms, each of which contains the same relation once
more in itself, and so imply the now familiar indefinite regress.[150]
Again, when we try in our conceptual space and time construction to
remedy this defect by reducing space and time altogether to mere systems
of relations, the difficulty turns out to have been merely evaded by
such a process of abstraction. For, so long as we keep rigidly to our
conceptual construction, the terms of our relations are
indistinguishable. In purely conceptual space and time, as we have seen,
there is no possibility of distinguishing any one direction from any
other, since all are qualitatively identical.

Indeed, it is obvious from first principles that when the sets of terms
between which a number of relations of the same type holds are
indistinguishable, the relations cannot be discriminated. To distinguish
directions at all, we must, in the end, take at least our starting-point
and one or more standard directions reckoned from it—according to the
number of dimensions with which we are dealing—as independently given,
that is, as having recognisable qualitative differences from other
possible starting-points and standard directions. (Thus, to distinguish
before and after in conceptual time, you must at least assume some
moment of time, qualitatively recognisable from others, as the epoch
from which you reckon, and must also have some recognisable qualitative
distinction between the direction “past” and the direction “future.”)
And with this reference to qualitative differences we are at once thrown
back, as in the case of perceptual time and space, on the insoluble old
problem of Quality and Relation. The assumed starting-point and standard
directions _must_ have qualitative individuality, or they could not be
independently recognised and made the basis for discrimination between
the remaining directions and positions: yet, because of the necessary
homogeneity of the space and time of conceptual construction, they
_cannot_ have any such qualitative individuality, but must be
_arbitrarily_ assumed. They will therefore themselves be capable of
determination only by reference to some other equally arbitrary
standard, and thus we are once more committed to the indefinite regress.
The practical usefulness of these constructions thus depends on the very
fact that we are not consistent in our use of them. In all practical
applications we use them to map out the spatial and temporal order of
events as seen in perspective from a standpoint which is, as regards the
conceptual time and space order itself, arbitrary and indistinguishable
from others.

§ 7. Instead of further elaborating this general argument, a task which
would be superfluous if its principle is grasped, and unconvincing if it
is missed, I will proceed to point out one or two special ways in which
the essential arbitrariness of the spatial and temporal construction is
strikingly exemplified. To begin with, a word may be said about the
alleged _unity_ of space and time. It is constantly taken for granted,
by philosophers as well as by practical men, that there can be only
_one_ spatial and one temporal order, so that all spatial relations, and
again all temporal relations, belong to the same system. Thus, if A has
a spatial relation to B and C to D, it is assumed that there must be
spatial relations between A and C, A and D, and B and C, B and D.
Similarly if A is temporally related with B, and C with D. This view is
manifestly presupposed in the current conception of Nature, the
“physical universe,” the “physical order,” as the aggregate of all
processes in space and time. But there seems to be no real logical
warrant for it. In principle the alleged unity of all spatial and
temporal relations might be dismissed, on the strength of the one
consideration that space and time are not individual wholes, and
therefore can contain no principle of internal structural unity. This is
manifest from the method by which the space and time of our conceptual
scheme have been constructed. They arose, as we saw, from the indefinite
repetition of a single type of relation between terms in which we were
unable to find any ultimately intelligible principle of internal
structure. But unity of structure cannot be brought into that which does
not already possess it by such mere endless repetition. The result of
such a process will be as internally incoherent and devoid of structure
as the original data. Hence space and time, being mere repetitions of
the scheme of qualities in relation, cannot be true unities.

This becomes clearer if we reflect on the grounds which actually warrant
us in assigning position in the _same_ space and the _same_ time to a
number of events. For me A and B are ultimately in the same space when
there is a way of travelling from A to B; they are in the same time when
they belong to different stages in the accomplishment of the same
systematic purposes. Thus in both cases it is ultimately from relation
to an identical system of purposes and interests that different sets of
positions or events belong to one space or one time. The unity of such a
space or time is a pale reflection in abstract form of the unity of a
life of systematic purpose, which is one because it has unique
individual structure. It is in this way, from the individual unity of
the purpose and interests of my ordinary waking life, that I derive the
right to refer its experiences to a single space and time system.
Similarly, it is in virtue of the inclusion of my own and my
fellow-men’s purposes in a wider whole of social systematic purpose that
I can bring the space and time relations of their experience into one
system with my own. And again, the sensible occurrences of the physical
order belong to one space and time with the space and time relations of
human experience, because of the varying ways in which they condition
the development of our own inner purposive life. But there are cases,
even within our own conscious life, where this condition appears to be
absent, and in these cases we do not seem to be able to make
intelligible use of the conception of a single time or a single space.

Take the case of our dreams. The events of my dreams stand in spatial
and temporal relations within the dream itself, but there would be no
sense in asking what are the spatial relations between the places seen
in my dreams and the places marked on the map of England; or what are
again the temporal relations between the events of last night’s dream
and those of this morning, or those of the dreams of last week.
Precisely because there is usually no systematic identity of purpose
connecting the dream with the waking life or with other dreams, the time
and space of the dream have no position with respect to the time and
space system of waking life, nor those of one dream with relation to
those of another.[151] Of course, it may be said that the dream-space
and dream-time are “imaginary,” but the problem cannot be got rid of by
the use of an epithet. To call them imaginary is merely to say that they
are not systematically connected with the time and space of waking life,
not to disprove their genuineness as actual space and time
constructions.

Similarly, if there are intelligent purposes of which our human
purposive life is debarred from taking account as such, as we urged that
there must be behind the phenomenal physical order, the time and space
within which those purposes are conceived and executed would have no
place in _our_ spatial and temporal system. The phenomenal events of the
physical order would fall within our system, but not the life of inner
purpose of which that order is the manifestation to our senses.
Ultimately, in fact, all spaces and all times could only form one
spatial and temporal system on condition that the infinite absolute
experience views all its contents in spatial and temporal form; then the
various space and time systems corresponding to the purposes of the
various groups of finite individuals would finally, for the infinite
individual, form one great system of time and space relations. But we
have already seen that the infinite experience cannot comprehend its
contents in spatial or temporal forms.

We infer, then, that there may be—indeed, if our interpretation of the
physical order is valid, there must be—a plurality of spaces and times
within the Real. Within any one such space or time all its members are
spatially and temporally interrelated, but the various spaces are not
themselves related in space, nor the various times before or after one
another in time. Their relation is the purely logical one of being
varying modes of the expression in a finite detail of the underlying
nature of the ultimate Reality.[152] For the absolute experience they
must be all at once and together, not in the sense of being in “one
space and time,” but in the sense of forming together the systematic
embodiment of one coherent ground or principle.

§ 8. Similar consequences, as to the phenomenal character of space and
time, follow from the consideration of the familiar Kantian antinomies
founded upon the concept of spatial and temporal infinity. Space and
time must be externally boundless and internally indefinitely divisible,
and yet again cannot be either. Freed from unessential accessories, the
argument for either side of the antinomy may be stated thus. Space and
time must be boundless because all spatial and temporal existence means
spatial and temporal relation to a second term, itself similarly related
to a third term. For precisely the same reason both must be indefinitely
divisible. Yet again, they can be neither, since only the individual
exists, and within such an interminable network of relations between
terms which are nothing but the supporters of these relations there is
no principle of individual structure.[153] Thus the Kantian antinomies
are a simple consequence of the old difficulty about quality and
relation. Space and time must be mere relations, and the terms of those
relations therefore qualitatively indistinguishable; again, since they
are relations they cannot be relations between nothings or, what is the
same thing, between terms with no individual character. As in all cases
where the problem of relation and quality arises, it then conducts us to
the indefinite regress.

So long as we continue to look upon space and time as real, we have
therefore to choose between two equally illogical alternatives. We must
either arbitrarily refuse to continue the indefinite regress beyond the
point at which its difficulties become apparent, as is done by the
assertion that space and time have finite bounds or indivisible parts,
or we must hold that the absolute experience actually achieves the
summation of an unending series. With the recognition that space and
time are phenomenal, the result of a process of construction forced on
us by our practical needs, but not adequately corresponding to the real
nature of individual existence, the difficulty disappears. Both sides of
the antinomy become relatively true, in the sense that for our practical
purposes we must be content to adopt now the one and again the other;
both become ultimately untrue in the sense that space and time, being
constructions of our own, are _really_ neither finite nor infinite
series, but are the one or the other according to the purposes for which
we use our construction.

§ 9. If spatial and temporal position and direction must thus in the end
be appearance, phenomenal of some more individual reality, we have
finally to ask, Of what are they the appearance? It is not enough to say
“of ultimate Reality,” or “of the Absolute.” _Ultimately_ this is, no
doubt, true of space and time, as it is of everything else, but we
desire further to know if they are not _proximately_ the appearance of
some special features of the inner physical life of the lesser
individuals which compose the Absolute. We naturally look for some third
term, in the nature of finite individuality, to mediate between the
structureless abstract generality of space and time relation, and the
perfect individual structure of the spaceless and timeless Absolute
Individual. We want, in fact, to connect the spatial and temporal form
which our experience wears, with some fundamental aspect of our nature,
as beings at once individual and finite.

Nor is it particularly difficult to make the connection. When we
remember that space and time, as they actually condition our perception
and movement, are the space and time which radiate out from an unique
_here_ and _now_ of immediate feeling, it is fairly evident that the
spatial and temporal aspect of our experience is, as already suggested,
a consequence of that limitation of our attentive interests which
constitutes our finitude. It is the narrowness of my interests, or at
least of those which are sufficiently explicit to rise into the “focus”
of consciousness, that is reflected in the distinction of my _here_ from
all the _theres_ which are around me. _Here_ is where my body is,
because of the specially intimate connection of the realisation of my
interests and purposes with those events in the phenomenal physical
order which I call the state of my body. Were my interests widened so as
to embrace the whole scheme of the universe, I should no longer perceive
the contents of that universe as dispersed through space, because I
should no longer have as my special standpoint a _here_ to which other
existence would be _there_.

My special standpoint in space may thus be said to be phenomenal of my
special and peculiar interests in life, the special _logical_ standpoint
from which my experience reflects the ultimate structure of the
Absolute. And so, generally, though the conclusion can for various
reasons not be pressed in respect of every detail of spatial appearance,
the spatial grouping of intelligent purposive beings is phenomenal of
their inner logical affinity of interest and purpose. Groups of such
beings, closely associated together in space, are commonly also
associated in their peculiar interests, their special purposes, their
characteristic attitude towards the universe. The local contiguity of
the members of the group is but an “outward and visible sign” of an
“inward and spiritual” community of social aspiration. This is, of
course, only approximately the case; the less the extent to which any
section of mankind have succeeded in actively controlling the physical
order for the realisation of their own purposes, the more nearly is it
the truth that spatial remoteness and inner dissimilarity of social
purposes coincide. In proportion as man’s conquest over his non-human
environment becomes complete, he devises for himself means to retain the
inner unity of social aims and interests in spite of spatial separation.
But this only shows once more how completely the spatial order is a mere
imperfect appearance which only confusedly adumbrates the nature of the
higher Reality behind it. Thus we may say that the “abolition of
distance” effected by science and civilisation is, as it were, a
practical vindication of our metaphysical doctrine of the comparative
unreality of space.

Similarly with time, though the temporal series may, in a sense, be said
to be less of an unreality than the spatial. For it does not seem
possible to show that spatial appearance is an _inevitable_ form of
finite experience. We can at least conceive of a finite experience
composed entirely of successive arrangements of secondary qualities,
such as sounds or smells, and the accompanying feeling-tones, though we
have no positive ground for affirming the existence of such a type of
experience. But the temporal form seems inseparable from finite
intelligence. For the limitation of my existence to a certain portion of
time is clearly simply the abstract and external aspect of the fact that
my interests and purposes, so far as I can apprehend the meaning of my
own life, occupy just this special place in the logical development of
the larger whole of social life and purpose of which my own life is a
member. So the position of a particular purposive act in the temporal
series of acts which I call the history of my own life, is the outward
indication of the logical place filled by this particular act in the
connected scheme of interests which form my life on its inner side. But
it is an inevitable consequence of the want of complete internal harmony
we call finitude, that the aims and interests of the finite subject
cannot be in the same degree present to its apprehension all at once and
together. In being aware of its own internal purpose or meaning, it
must, because it is finite and therefore not ultimately a completely
harmonious systematic whole, be aware of that purpose as only partially
fulfilled. And in this sense of one’s own purposes as only partially
fulfilled, we have the foundation of the time-experience, with its
contrast between the “now” of fulfilment and the “no longer” and “not
yet” of dissatisfied aspiration.

For this reason, dissatisfaction, unfulfilled craving, and the
time-experience seem to be bound up together, and time to be merely the
abstract expression of the yearning of the finite individual for a
systematic realisation of its own purpose which lies for ever beyond its
reach as finite. If this is so, only the absolute and infinite
individual whose experience is throughout that of perfectly harmonious
systematic realisation of meaning, can be outside the time-process; to
it, “vanished and present are the same,” because its whole nature is
once for all perfectly expressed in the detail of existence. But the
finite, just because its very nature as finite is to aspire to a
perfection which is out of reach, must have its experience marked with
the distinction of _now_ from _by and by_, of desire from performance.
In this temporal character of all finite experience we may perhaps
afterwards discern the ultimate ground of morality, as we can already
discern in the unresting struggle of the finite to overcome its
finitude, practical evidence that time is not a form which adequately
expresses the nature of Reality, and must therefore be imperfect
appearance.[154]

Thus we seem finally to have reached the conclusion that time and space
are the imperfect phenomenal manifestation of the logical relations
between the purposes of finite individuals standing in social relations
to each other; the inner purposive life of each of these individuals
being itself in its turn, as we have previously seen, the imperfect
expression, from a special logical “point of view,” of the structure and
life of the ultimate infinite individual. For the infinite individual
itself the whole of the purposes and interests of the finite individuals
must form a single harmonious system. This system cannot itself be in
the spatial and temporal form; space and time must thus in some way
cease to exist, as space and time, for the absolute experience. They
must, in that experience, be taken up, rearranged, and transcended, so
as to lose their character of an endless chain of relations between
other relations.

Precisely _how_ this is effected, we, from our finite standpoint, cannot
presume to say. It is natural to draw illustrations from the “specious
present” of perception, in which we appear to have a succession that is
also simultaneous; or again, from the timeless and purely logical
character science seeks to ascribe to its “laws of nature.” But in the
“specious present” we seem obliged to attend to _one_ aspect, succession
or simultaneity, to the exclusion of the other; probably we never
succeed in equally fixing both aspects at once. It thus presents us
rather with the problem than with its solution. And again, after our
discussion of the meaning of law, we cannot affirm that Nature is, for
the absolute experience, a system of general laws. Hence it seems well
not to take these illustrations for more than they are actually worth as
indications of the merely phenomenal character of time. Metaphysics,
like the old scholastic theology, needs sometimes to be reminded that
God’s thoughts are not as ours, and His ways, in a very real sense when
Philosophy has done its best, still past finding out.[155]

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 4
(Space and Time), 18 (Temporal and Spatial Appearance); L. Couturat,
_L’Infini Mathématique_, pt. 2, bk. iv. chap. 4 (against the Kantian
antinomies); H. Poincaré, _La Science et L’Hypothèse_, pp. 68-109; H.
Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. ii. chaps. 1-3; W. Ostwald, _Vorlesungen über
Naturphilosophie_, lects. 5, 8; J. Royce, _The World and the
Individual_, Second Series, lect. 3; B. Russell, _Foundations of
Geometry: Is Position in Space and Time Absolute or Relative_ (_Mind_,
July 1901), _Principles of Mathematics_, pt. 6, vol. i.; H. Spencer,
_First Principles_, pt. 2, chap. 3.

-----

Footnote 141:

The student who desires to think out the problems for himself would
probably do well to take the discussions of Locke (_Essay_, bk. ii.
chaps. 13-15) and Hume (_Treatise of Human Nature_, bk. i. pt. 2)
rather than that of Kant as his starting-point, as they are less
vitiated by psychological superstitions. In recent metaphysical work
the chapters on the subject in Mr. Bradley’s _Appearance and Reality_
will probably be found most useful. Much may be learned from Mr.
Russell’s work, _Foundations of Geometry_, with which should, however,
be compared the largely discrepant results of his later article, “Is
Position in Space and Time Relative or Absolute?” (_Mind_, July 1901).

Footnote 142:

We are not called upon to enter into such specially psychological
questions as, _e.g._, whether both directions, past and future, can be
detected within the “specious present” of direct perception, or
whether the specious present only contains the elements “now” and “no
longer,” the “not yet” being a subsequent intellectual construction,
as is held, _e.g._, by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Shadworth Hodgson.

Footnote 143:

We may indeed go still further, and say that every unique moment or
experience has its own unique spatial and temporal system. The method
by which I weave the perceived space-time systems of different
experiences within my own mental life into a single conceptual system,
is in principle the same by which the spaces and times of myself and
other men are made into one system for the purpose of practical
intercourse.

Footnote 144:

For an account of the psychological processes involved in all this,
see, _e.g._, Stout, _Manual of Psychology_,^3 bk. iii. pt. 2, chaps.
3-5; bk. iv. chap. 6.

Footnote 145:

Thus Dedekind (_Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?_ p. xii.)
maintains that none of the constructions of Euclid involve the
continuity of space.

Footnote 146:

Of course, a physical _vacuum_ is not the same thing as _empty space_.
For the purposes of any special science a _vacuum_ means a space not
occupied by contents of the special kind in which that special science
is interested. Thus, in the ordinary parlance of Physics, a _vacuum_
means simply a space in which there is no _mass_. Whether it is
desirable, for the purposes of physical science, to assume the
existence of _vacuum_, is altogether a question for Physics itself,
and to decide it in the affirmative is not to maintain the existence
of that unmeaning abstraction, absolutely empty space. In any case, it
may be observed that the widespread notion that motion is only
possible in a physical _vacuum_ is a mistake, motion being perfectly
possible in a fluid _plenum_.

Footnote 147:

It must be carefully noted that _distance_ as thus defined is not
properly a _quantitative relation_, and involves no notion of
magnitude, but only of relative place in a series. It should also be
observed that in assuming the existence of such a unique relation
between every pair of points, it is tacitly taken for granted that the
number of dimensions of the spatial order is finite. In a space of an
infinite number of dimensions, such unique relation would be
impossible. (See Russell, _Foundations of Geometry_, p. 161 ff.) Our
justification for making this assumption, as also for taking time to
be of one dimension only, seems to be that it is indispensable for all
those practical purposes which depend on our ability to create a
science of Geometry, and that we have no positive ground for assuming
the opposite. Thus ultimately the assumption appears to be of the
nature of a postulate.

Footnote 148:

The ablest detailed account of the relativity of spatial position
readily accessible to the English reader, will be found in Mr.
Russell’s _Foundations of Geometry_, chaps. iiiA, iv. Mr. Russell has
since, in _Mind_ for July 1901, attempted to prove the opposite view,
that positions in space and time are _inherently_ distinct, but
without discussing his own previous arguments for relativity. Into the
purely mathematical part of Mr. Russell’s later contentions I am not
competent to enter. I may, however, suggest that the question of
Metaphysics cannot be decided merely by urging, as Mr. Russell does,
that fewer assumptions are required to construct a geometry on the
hypothesis of absolute than on that of relative position. The superior
convenience of an assumption for certain special purposes is no proof
of its ultimate intelligibility. And when Mr. Russell goes on to admit
that points in space are _indistinguishable for us_, he seems to me to
give up his case. For is not this to admit that, after all, the space
with which we deal in our geometrical science is relative from
beginning to end? How differences of quality of which we, by
hypothesis, can know nothing, can help or hinder our scientific
constructions, it is indeed hard to see.

Footnote 149:

This may be brought home even to those who, like myself, are not
mathematicians, by the perusal of such a work as Lobatchevsky’s
_Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Parallel-Linien_, where a consistent
geometry of triangles is constructed in entire independence of the
postulate of parallelism. Of course, in the end it must be a mere
question of nomenclature whether a form of serial order independent of
these quasi-empirical restrictions is to be called “space” or not.

Footnote 150:

It must be carefully remembered that the essential defect of the
indefinite regress is not its interminableness, but its monotony. We
ourselves held that Reality is an individual composed of lesser
individuals which _repeat_ the structure of the whole, and that the
number of these individuals need not be finite. But, in our view, the
higher the order of individuality the more self-explanatory was its
structure, whereas in the indefinite regress an incomprehensible
construction is endlessly repeated _in the same form_.

Footnote 151:

Normally, that is; for brevity’s sake I omit to note the possible case
of a coherent dream-life continued from night to night. In principle
there would be a difference between the case of the space and time of
_such_ a dream-life and those of our waking hours.

Footnote 152:

So the events of my dreams, though not occupying any place in the
temporal series of the events of waking life, are so far _logically_
connected with that series as both sets of events stand in relation to
certain identical elements of psychical temperament and disposition.
Another interesting case is that of so-called “dual personality.” The
experience of both the two alternating personalities can be arranged
in a single temporal series only because of the way in which both sets
are inwoven with the systematic interests of other men, whose
personality does not alternate, or alternates with a different rhythm.
If all mankind were subject to simultaneous alternations of
personality, the construction of a single time-series for all our
experiences would be impossible. In this discussion I have throughout
followed the full and thorough treatment of the problem by Mr.
Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 18.

Footnote 153:

Otherwise, conceptual space and time are, as we have seen, derivatives
of the number-series, and we have already learned that the
number-series leads to the problem of summing an endless series, and
is therefore not an adequate way of representing ultimate Reality.
(Bk. II. chap. 4, § 10). Another form of the same difficulty would be
that conceptual space and time are applications of the numerical
series,—but application to _what_? To a material which is already
spatial and temporal. All these puzzles are only different ways of
expressing the essential relativity of space and time. But see the
anti-Kantian view in, _e.g._, Couturat, _L’Infini Mathématique_, pt.
2.

Footnote 154:

Compare Prof. Royce’s remarks, _The World and the Individual_, Second
Series, lect. 3, “The Temporal and the Eternal,” p. 134. I should
certainly have had to acknowledge considerable obligation to Prof.
Royce’s discussion had not the present chapter been written before I
had an opportunity of studying it.

Footnote 155:

Against the plausible attempt to solve the problem by simply thinking
of the whole physical order as forming a “specious present” to the
Absolute Experience, we may urge that the “specious present” itself
regularly consists for us of a multiplicity of detail, which we
apprehend as simultaneous without insight into its inner unity as the
embodiment of coherent system. Hence the direct insight of the
Absolute Experience into its own internal meaning or structure cannot
be adequately thought of as mere simultaneous awareness of the detail
of existence. So long as a succession is merely apprehended as
simultaneous, its meaning is not yet grasped.

-----

CHAPTER V

SOME CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION

§ 1. The concept of _evolution_ an attempt to interpret natural
processes in terms of individual growth. § 2. Evolution means change
culminating in an end which is the result of the process and is
qualitatively new. The concept is thus teleological. § 3. Evolution,
being teleological, is essentially either progress or degeneration.
If it is more than illusion, there must be real _ends_ in the
physical order. And ends can only be real as subjective interests of
sentient beings which are actualised by the process of change. § 4.
Thus all evolution must take place within an _individual_ subject. §
5. Further, the subject of evolution must be a _finite_ individual.
All attempts to make “evolution” a property of the whole of Reality
lead to the infinite regress. § 6. The distinction between
progressive evolution and degeneration has an “objective” basis in
the metaphysical distinction between higher and lower degrees of
individuality. § 7. In the evolutionary process, old individuals
disappear and fresh ones originate. Hence evolution is incompatible
with the view that Reality consists of a plurality of ultimately
independent finite individuals.

§ 1. We saw, in the first chapter of the present Book, that evolution or
orderly development is a fundamental characteristic of the processes
which compose the physical order as apprehended by the various empirical
sciences. For the purposes of Mechanics and Mechanical Physics, indeed,
we have no need to look upon Nature as the scene of development; for
these sciences it is enough to conceive of it as a vast complex of
changes of configuration and transformations of energy, connected by
regular uniformities of sequence. As soon, however, as we come to regard
Nature from the standpoint of those sciences which explicitly recognise
differences of _quality_, as well as differences in position and
quantity, among the objects with which they deal, this narrowly
mechanistic conception of natural processes becomes inadequate. With the
notion of physical processes as productive of changes of quality we are
inevitably led to think of the physical order as a world in which the
qualitatively new is derived from, or developed out of, the previously
familiar by fixed lines of deviation and under determinate conditions.

Naturally enough, it is from the biological sciences, in which the study
of organic _growth_ plays so prominent a part, that the impulse to
conceive of physical change as development originally comes. As long ago
as the fourth century B.C., Aristotle had taken the concept of growth or
development as the foundation of the most influential scheme of
metaphysical construction yet produced in the whole history of
speculation. In Aristotle’s view, however, the process of development
was regarded as strictly confined within the limits of the individual
life. The individual organism, beginning its existence as an undeveloped
germ or potentiality, gradually unfolds itself in a series of successive
stages of growth, which culminates at the period of complete maturity.
But the individual germ itself is a product or secretion derived from a
pre-existing mature individual of the same type as that into which this
germ will ultimately grow. The number of distinct typical processes of
growth is thus strictly determined, and each such process implies the
previous existence of its completed result. In other words, the
boundaries between _species_ are fixed and ultimate; there can be no
beginning in time of the existence of a new species, and therefore no
origination of new species by development from other types. As Aristotle
epigrammatically puts it, “It takes a man to beget a man.”

A further point of weakness in the Aristotelian theory is the absence of
any definite account of the _machinery_ by which the process of growth
is effected. We learn, indeed, that the latent capacity of the organic
germ to develop according to a certain specific type is stimulated into
activity by influences contained in the environment, but the precise
nature of this process of stimulation was necessarily left in obscurity,
in consequence of the imperfect knowledge possessed by Aristotle of the
minute character of natural processes in general.

In the evolutionary theories of modern biology, it is precisely the
problems of the origination of new _species_, and of the special
character of the relations between the species and its environment by
which this process is conditioned, that have attracted almost exclusive
attention. And, with the steadily increasing success of evolutionary
hypotheses in dealing with biological problems, there has naturally
arisen a tendency to extend the application of the general concept of
evolution far beyond the sphere in which it first originated. We have
now not only more or less well-accredited hypotheses of the production
by evolution of our chemical elements, but even ambitious philosophical
constructions which treat the concept of evolution as the one and only
key to all the problems of existence. In the presence of these
far-reaching applications of evolutionary ideas, it becomes all the more
necessary to bear in mind, in our estimate of the worth of the evolution
concept, that its logical character remains unaltered by the extension
of its sphere of applicability; it is still, in spite of all minor
modifications, essentially an attempt to interpret natural processes in
general in terms of individual growth.

We are not, of course, in the present chapter in any way concerned with
the details of any one particular theory as to the special conditions
which determine the course of organic or other evolution. What those
conditions in any special case are, is a question, in the first
instance, for that particular branch of empirical science which deals
with the description of the particular aspect of the processes of the
physical order under investigation. And though it would be a proper
question for a complete Philosophy of Nature how the details of a
well-established scientific theory must be interpreted so as to
harmonise with the general metaphysical implications of the physical
order, it is for many reasons premature to raise such a question in the
present state of our actual knowledge of the details of evolutionary
processes. All that can be done here is to ask what in general are the
logical implications involved in thinking of a process as an evolution
at all, and how those implications are related to our general
interpretation of the physical order.

§ 2. Evolution obviously involves the two concepts, already criticised
at length, of change and the dependence of the order and direction of
change upon determinate conditions. But an evolutionary process is never
a mere orderly sequence of changes. For instance, the changes of
configuration and exchanges of energy which take place when work is done
in a material system, conceived as composed of moving masses without any
element of secondary quality, are not properly to be called a process of
evolution. They are not an evolution or development, because, so long as
we keep to the strictly kinetic view of natural processes as consisting
solely in the varying configuration of systems of mass-particles, the
end of the process is qualitatively undistinguishable from its
beginning; nothing qualitatively _new_ has emerged as its result. Or
rather, to speak with more accuracy, the process has really no _end_ and
no unity of its own. It is only by an entirely arbitrary limitation of
view, due to purely subjective interests of our own, that we isolate
just this collection of mass-particles from the larger aggregate of such
particles which form the physical order as regarded from the strictly
kinetic standpoint, and call it _one system_; and again, it is with
equal arbitrariness that we determine the point of time beyond which we
shall cease to follow the system’s changes of configuration. In the
indefinitely prolonged series of successive configurations there is no
stage which can properly be called final. Hence from the rigidly
mechanistic point of view of Kinetics and Kinematics there are no
evolutions or developments in the universe, there is only continuous
change.

Development or evolution, then, definitely implies the culmination of a
process of change in the establishment of a state of things which is
relatively _new_, and implies, further, that the relatively new state of
things may truly be regarded as the end or completion of this special
process of change. Thus the fundamental peculiarity of all evolutionary
ideas is that they are essentially _teleological_; the changes which are
evolutions are all changes thought of as throughout relative to an _end_
or _result_. Except in so far as a process of change is thus essentially
relative to the _result_ in which it culminates, there is no sense in
calling it a development. We may see this even by considering the way in
which the concepts of evolution and development are used in the various
departments of Physics. We sometimes speak of a chemical process as
marked by the “evolution” of heat, or again we say that, if the second
law of Thermo-dynamics is rigidly and universally true, the physical
universe must be in a process of evolution towards a stage in which none
of its energy will be available for work. But we can only attach a
meaning to such language so long as we allow ourselves to retain the
common-sense point of view according to which there are real qualitative
differences between what abstract Mechanics treats as equivalent forms
of “energy.”

We can speak of the evolution of heat, just because we, consciously or
unconsciously, think of heat as being really, what it is for our senses,
something qualitatively new and distinct from the other kinds of energy
which are converted into it by the chemical process. So we can
intelligibly talk of the gradual conversion of one form of energy into
another as an evolution only so long as we regard the various forms of
energy as qualitatively different, and are therefore entitled to look
upon the complete conversion of the one into another as the
qualitatively new result of a process which is therefore terminated by
its complete establishment. From the standpoint of the physical theories
which regard the distinction between the forms of energy as only
“subjective,” there would be no sense in regarding that particular stage
in the course of events at which one form of energy disappeared as the
_end_ or result of a process which terminates in it, and thus such terms
as evolution and development would lose their meaning. Only the
establishment of the qualitatively new can form a real _end_ or
_result_, and so afford a logical basis for the recognition of the
changes in the physical order as distinct processes of development.

§ 3. This essentially teleological character of development is
emphasised in the language of the biological sciences by the constant
use of the concepts of progress and degeneration. For biology an
evolution is essentially a process either in the progressive or in the
regressive direction. Every evolution is an advance to a “higher” or a
decline to a “lower” state of development. Now progress and regress are
only possible where the process of change is regarded as throughout
relative to the _end_ to be attained by the process. Exactly how we
conceive this end, which serves us as a standard for distinguishing
progress from degeneration, is a secondary question; the point of
fundamental importance is that, except in reference to such an end,
there can be no distinction at all between progressive and retrogressive
change. Thus, unless there are really ends in the physical order which
determine the processes of change that culminate in their actual
establishment, evolution cannot be real. If the ends, by the
establishment of which we estimate progress in development, are merely
arbitrary standards of our own to which nothing in external reality
corresponds, then the physical order must really be a mere succession of
changes which are in no true sense developments, and the whole concept
of nature as marked by development will be a mere human delusion. And,
on the contrary, if there is any truth in the great scientific
conceptions of evolution, there must be real ends in the physical order.

Now, there is only one intelligible way in which we can think of a
process of change as really relative to an _end_. The resultant state
which we call the end of the process, as being the final stage which
completes this special process, and enables us to mark off all that
succeeds it as belonging to a fresh process of development, must also be
its end in the sense of being the conscious attainment of an _interest_
or purpose underlying the whole process. It is only in so far as any
state of things is, for some sentient being, the realisation of a
subjective interest previously manifested in an earlier stage of
experience, that that state of things forms the real culmination of a
process which is distinguished from all other processes, and stamped
with an individuality of its own, by the fact that it does culminate in
precisely this result. The conceptions of _end_ or _result_ and of
subjective _interest_ are logically inseparable. Hence we seem forced to
infer that, since evolution is an unmeaning word, unless there are
genuine, and not merely arbitrarily assigned, ends underlying the
processes of physical nature, the concept of evolution as characteristic
of the physical order involves the metaphysical interpretation of that
order as consisting of the teleological acts of sentient beings, which
we had previously accepted on more general grounds. It would be useless
to attempt an escape from this conclusion by drawing a distinction
between two meanings of “end”—“a _last_ state” and “the achievement of a
purpose.” For the whole point of the preceding argument was that nothing
can be an “end” in the former sense without also being an end in the
latter. Unless processes have ends which are their subjective
fulfilment, it is only by an arbitrary convention of our own that we
assign to them ends which are their _last_ states. And if it is only an
arbitrary convention that physical processes have ends in this sense,
evolution itself is just such a convention and nothing more.[156]

§ 4. What is in principle the same argument may be put in another form,
and the equivalence of the two forms is itself very suggestive from the
metaphysical point of view. Evolution or development, like all change,
implies the presence throughout successive stages in a process of
something which is permanent and unchanging. But it implies something
more definite still. Whatever develops must therefore have a permanent
_individual_ character of its own of which the successive stages in the
development process are the gradual unfolding. Unless the earlier and
the later stages in a connected series of changes belong alike to the
gradual unfolding, under the influence of surroundings, of a single
individual nature, there is no meaning in speaking of them as belonging
to a process of development. Only the individual can develop, if we are
to attribute precise meaning to our words. We speak of the evolution of
a society or a species, but if our words are not to be empty we must
mean by such phrases one of two things. Either we must mean that the
species and the society which develop are themselves individuals of a
higher order, no less real than the members which compose them, or our
language must be merely a way of saying that the life of each member of
the social or biological group exhibits development.

When we reflect on what is really involved in our ordinary loose
expressions about the “inheritance” of this or the other physical or
social trait, we shall see that the former alternative is far less
removed from ordinary ways of thought than might at first seem to be the
case. If any kind of reality corresponds to our current metaphor of the
“inheritance” of qualities, the groups within which such “inheritance”
takes place must be something much more than mere aggregates of mutually
exclusive individuals. A group within which qualities can be thus
inherited must, as a whole, possess a marked individual nature of its
own. Now we have already seen that all individuality is in the end
teleological. A group of processes forms an individual life in the
degree to which it is the expression of a unique and coherent interest
or aim, and no further. Hence, once more, only what is truly individual
can develop or evolve. And we readily see that it is precisely in so far
as a set of processes form the expression of individual interest, that
the demarcation of the group as a connected whole from all previous and
subsequent processes possesses more than a conventional significance.
Hence only processes which are the expression of individual interest
possess “ends” or “last states,” and thus the two forms of our argument
are in principle identical. Once more, then, the significance of
evolutionary ideas, if they are to be more than a purely conventional
scheme devised for the furtherance of our own practical purposes, and as
an artificial aid to classification, is bound up with the doctrine that
the events of the physical order are really the expression of the
subjective interests of sentient subjects of experience.[157]

§ 5. To proceed to a further point of the utmost importance. Not only
does evolution imply the presence of _individuality_ in the subject of
the evolutionary process; it implies its possession of _finite_
individuality. An infinite individual cannot have development or
evolution ascribed to it without contradiction. Hence the Absolute, the
Universe, or whatever other name we prefer to give to the infinite
individual whole of existence, cannot develop, cannot progress, cannot
degenerate. This conclusion might be derived at once from reflecting
upon the single consideration that temporal succession is involved in
all evolution, whether progressive or retrogressive. For temporal
succession is, as we have seen, an inseparable consequence of finite
individuality. But it will be as well to reach our result in a different
way, by considering certain further implications of the concept of
evolution which are manifestly only present in the case of _finite_
individuality.

In every process of development or evolution there are involved a pair
of interrelated factors, the individual nature which develops, and the
environment which contains the conditions under which and the stimuli in
response to which it develops. The undeveloped germ is as yet a mere
possibility, something which _will_ yet exhibit qualities not as yet
possessed by it. In its undeveloped state, what it possesses is not the
qualities characteristic of its later stages, but only “tendencies” or
“dispositions” to manifest those qualities, provided that the
environment provides the suitable stimulus. Hence, if either of the two
interrelated factors of development, the individual or the environment,
is missing, there can be no evolution. Now, the infinite individual
whole of existence has no environment outside itself to supply
conditions of development and incentives to change. Or, what is the same
thing, since the “possible” means simply that which will follow _if_
certain conditions are realised, there is no region of unrealised
possibility outside the realised existence of the infinite whole. Hence
in the infinite whole there can be no development: it cannot
progressively adapt itself to _new_ conditions of existence; it must
once and for all be in its reality all that it is in “idea.” The
infinite whole therefore evolves neither forward nor backward.

This impossibility of ascribing development to the whole of Reality is
strikingly illustrated by a consideration of the _impasse_ into which we
are led when we try in practice to think of the whole universe as in
process of evolution. So long as you are still in the presence of the
fundamental distinction between the developing subject and its
environment, you are logically driven, if everything is to be taken as a
product of evolution, to supplement every evolutionary theory by a fresh
evolutionary problem. To account for this special evolution (_e.g._, the
evolution of the _vertebrata_) you have to assume an environment with
determinate qualities of its own, influencing the evolution in question
in a determinate way in consequence of these qualities. But if
everything has been evolved, you have again to ask by what process of
evolution this special environment came to be what it is. To solve this
problem you have once more to postulate a second “environment”
determining, by interaction, the course of the evolution of the former.
And thus you are thrown back upon the indefinite regress.

Unless, indeed, you are prepared boldly to assert that, as all
determinate character is the product of evolution, the universe as a
whole must have evolved out of nothing. (You would not escape this
dilemma by an appeal to the very ancient notion of a “cycle” or
“periodic rhythm” of evolution, in virtue of which the product of a
process of evolution serves in its turn as the environment for the
reiterated evolution of its own antecedent conditions, A thus passing by
evolution into B and B back again into A. For you would at least have to
accept this tendency to periodic rhythm itself as an ultimate property
of all existence, not itself resulting by evolution from something
else.) The dilemma thus created by the attempt to apply the concept of
evolution to the whole of Reality, is sufficient to show that evolution
itself is only thinkable as a characteristic of processes which fall
within the nature of a system which, as a whole, does not evolve.

We may restate the same contention in the following form:—All
development means advance towards an _end_. But only that which is as
yet in imperfect possession of its end can advance towards it. For that
which already is all that it has it in its nature to be there can be no
advance, and hence no progressive development. Neither can such a
complete individual degenerate. For even in degenerating, that which
degenerates is gradually realising some feature of its own nature which
was previously only an unrealised potentiality. Thus even degeneration
implies the realisation of an end or interest, and is itself a kind of
advance[.] As the biologists tell us, the atrophy of an organ, which we
call degeneration, is itself a step in the progressive adaptation of the
organisation to new conditions of life, and, as the moralists remind us,
in the ethical sphere a “fall” is, in its way, an upward step. Hence
what cannot rise higher in the scale of existence also cannot sink
lower.

§ 6. Evolution is thus an inseparable characteristic of the life of
finite individuals, and of finite individuals only. And this
consideration gives us the clue to the metaphysical interpretation of
the distinction, so significant for all evolutionary theory, between the
progressive and retrogressive directions of the evolution process. To a
large extent it is, of course, a matter of convention what we shall
regard as progress and what as degeneration. So long as _we_ are
specially interested in the attainment of any end or culminating result,
we call the line of development which leads up to that result
progressive, and the line which leads to its subsequent destruction
degeneration. And thus the same development may be viewed as progress or
as degeneration, according to the special character of the interests
with which we study it. Thus, for instance, the successive modifications
of the vertebrate structure which have resulted in the production of the
human skeleton are naturally thought of as progressive, because our
special interest in human intelligent life and character leads us to
regard the human type as superior to its predecessors in the line of
development. At the same time, many of these modifications consist in
the gradual loss of characteristics previously evolved, and are
therefore degenerative from the point of view of the anatomical student,
who is specially interested in the production of organs of increasing
complexity of structure, and therefore takes the complexity of those
structures as _his_ standard in distinguishing progress from
retrogression.

But the distinction is not a _purely_ conventional one. As we have seen,
degrees of individuality are also degrees of reality; what is more
completely individual is also a completer representative of the ultimate
structure of the infinite individual whole, and therefore more
completely real. Hence we may say that advance in individuality is
really, and not in a merely conventional sense, progress in development;
loss of individuality is real degeneration. Thus we get at least the
possibility of a true “objective” basis for distinction between the
directions of evolutionary progress. But we must remember that it is
only where we are able to know something of the actual interests of
finite experiencing beings that we have safe grounds for judging whether
those interests receive more adequate embodiment in consequence of the
changes of structure and habit produced by evolution or not. Hence,
while our insight into the inner lives of ourselves and our animal
congeners theoretically warrants us in pronouncing the various
developments in human social life to be genuinely progressive or
retrogressive, and again in regarding the series of organic types which
leads directly up to man as a true “ascent,” our ignorance of the
special character of the individual experiences of which the inorganic
physical order at large is the phenomenal manifestation, makes it
impossible for us to determine whether an “evolution” outside these
limits is really progressive or not. We have to treat “cosmic evolution”
in general, outside the special line of animal development which leads
up to man, as indifferently a “progress” or a “degeneration” according
to our own arbitrary point of view, not because it is not “objectively”
definitely the one or the other, but because _our_ insight is not
sufficient to discern which it is.

§ 7. One more point may be noted, which is of some importance in view of
certain metaphysical problems connected with the nature of finite
individuality. If evolution is more than an illusion, it seems necessary
to hold that it is a process in the course of which finite individuals
may disappear and new finite individuals originate. This point is
metaphysically significant, because it means that the fact of evolution
is irreconcilable with any of the philosophical theories of ancient and
modern times, which regard Reality as composed of a plurality of
ultimately independent finite individuals or “personalities.”[158] If
these philosophical theories are sound, the course of the world’s
history must be made up of the successive transformations of finite
individuals, who somehow remain unaffected and unaltered in their
character by the various external disguises they assume. The individuals
of such a philosophy would, in fact, be as little modified by these
changes as the actors on a stage by their changes of costume, or the
souls of the “transmigration” hypothesis by the bodies into which they
successively enter. And thus development would not be even a relatively
genuine feature of the life of finite individuals; it would be a mere
illusion, inevitable indeed in the present condition of our acquaintance
with the detailed contents of existence, but corresponding to no actual
fact of inner experience.

On the other hand, if evolution is not a pure illusion, these
metaphysical constructions cannot be valid. For the whole essence of the
modern doctrine of evolution is contained in the principle that radical
differences in kind result from the accumulation of successive
modifications of individual structure, and once established continue to
be perpetuated as differences in kind. Now, such differences in kind can
only be interpreted metaphysically as radical differences in the
determining aims and interests of the experiencing subjects constituting
the physical order, and we have already seen that it is precisely the
character of these dominant unique interests which forms the
individuality of the individual. Thus the metaphysical interpretation of
the evolution process seems inevitably to resolve it into a process of
the development of fresh and disappearance of old individual interests,
and thus into a process of the origination and disappearance of finite
individuals within the one infinite individual whole.

A conclusion of the same sort would be suggested by consideration of
those facts of our own individual development from which the wider
evolutionary theories have, in the last resort, borrowed their ideas and
their terminology. The mental growth of the individual human being is
essentially a process of the formation of interests in things. Both our
formal education, and our informal intellectual and moral training
effected by the influence of social tradition and mutual intercourse,
are processes consisting of an accumulation of minor modifications which
ultimately culminate in the establishment of more or less unique
personal interests in different aspects of existence. And inasmuch as
this process is never terminated, it is always possible for our
previously acquired interests to undergo such modification as renders
them obsolete, and substitutes novel interests in their places. So far
as this is effected, we rightly say that we are no longer our “old
selves.” A new “self” or centre of unique individual interests has then
developed within the former self.

Usually the process stops short of the point at which all sensible
continuity seems suspended, but that this point can be actually reached,
under exceptional conditions, is shown to superfluity by such facts as
those of “conversion,” to say nothing of the more pathological phenomena
of “multiple personality.” The same phenomena illustrate the fact that a
new individuality, once evolved, may stand in various relations to the
old individual interests it displaces. It may permanently replace them,
or, as in so many cases of “conversion,” may prove only temporary and
pass back again into the old individuality, or the two may alternate
periodically.[159] The one important point in which all these cases
agree is simply the general one of the production in the course of
development of a new individuality within the first individuality. It
may perhaps be suggested that we have in these features of individual
growth a hint as to the true nature of the process we call the
origination of new species by evolution.[160]

To recapitulate: evolution implies change determined by reference to an
end, and thus constituted into an individual process. Such “ends” have
no meaning, except in so far as the processes of change are viewed as
the progressive attainment of individual interests, and thus evolution
is only possible where there is finite individuality. This is the
philosophical justification for our previous assertion that evidence of
structural evolution, where it can be had, affords reasonable
presumption that what appears to us _one thing_ is really a true
individual of some degree, and not a mere arbitrary grouping together on
our part of states which possess no inner unity. Further, evolution is a
process in which new individuals arise and old ones disappear. Hence its
significance for Metaphysics as excluding all theories which make
Reality consist of a mere plurality of unchanging finite individuals. It
is significant also from another point of view. Implying, as it so
manifestly does, the presence of individual subjects of experience
throughout the physical order, the concept of Nature as a realm of
evolutionary processes is infinitely nearer to the full truth for
Metaphysics than the purely mechanistic view of it as a mere succession
of connected changes.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 27,
28 (pp. 497, 499, 508 of ed. i. for criticism of concept of Progress);
H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. ii. chap. 8 (“Forms of the Course of
Nature,” Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 109, 162); J. Royce, _The World and
the Individual_, Second Series, lect. 5; H. Sidgwick, _Philosophy: its
Scope and Relations_, lects. 6 and 7 (for some general consideration of
the bearing of evolution on Metaphysics); G. E. Underhill, “The Limits
of Evolution” (in _Personal Idealism_); J. Ward, _Naturalism and
Agnosticism_, vol. i. lects. 7-9 (criticism of Spencer’s evolutionary
philosophy), 10 (on _biological_ evolution).

-----

Footnote 156:

It might be objected that, _e.g._, death is the _end_ of life in the
sense of being its last stage, without being the attainment of the
interests which compose our inner life. But the illustration will not
bear examination. The processes of change within the organism, when
viewed simply _as_ connected changes, do not cease with death; in
fact, they have _no_ end or last state. To call a man’s death his end
only means that the purposes for which _we_ are interested in the
study of his behaviour get complete fulfilment when we have followed
him from the cradle to the grave. He is “done with” at death, because
_we_ have done with him. Only teleological processes can have a _last_
stage. Note as a consequence of the significance of the concept of
“ends” for evolution, that whereas the purely mechanistic
interpretation of the processes of Nature logically leads to the
thought of them as a continuous series, the series of successive
organic or social types is essentially discontinuous, a point well
brought out by Professor Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second
Series, lects. 5, 7.

Footnote 157:

I need hardly remind the reader of the vast difference between the
view inculcated above and the doctrine of “ends in nature” as it
figures in the old-fashioned “argument from design.” The old-fashioned
teleology assumed (1) that the “subjective interests” manifested in
the evolutionary process are fundamentally human. We, it held, can
recognise what these ends are, and further, they are for the most part
summed up in the “design” of furthering our human convenience. (2)
That these interests exist as the reflective designs of an
anthropomorphic Ruler of Nature. Our doctrine is consistent with
neither assumption. It follows from our whole interpretation of the
physical order, that we do not and cannot know what kind of subjective
interest of finite individuals is realised by any portion of it beyond
that constituted by our own bodies and those of our near congeners,
and therefore are absolutely without any right to fancy ourselves the
culminating end of all evolution. Again, a subjective interest need
not exist in the form of a definitely preconceived design; most of our
own interests exist as unreflective cravings and impulses. Whether any
part of the evolutionary process is due to deliberate reflective
design on the part of superhuman intelligences, Metaphysics, I take
it, has no means of deciding. This would be a question for solution by
the same empirical methods which we employ in detecting the presence
of design in the products of human art. In any case, reflective design
is bound up with the time-process, and cannot therefore be ascribed to
the infinite individual.

Footnote 158:

Compare, _e.g._, the first of the arguments for immortality in Plato’s
_Phædo_, p. 70 ff., and the remark in the _Republic_, with obvious
reference to this argument, that the “number of souls is always the
same” (611A). In Plato the doctrine is pretty certainly of Orphic
_provenance_. Compare also the cyclic alternation of death and life in
Heracleitus, the (Orphic) cycle of births of Empedocles, that of the
Stoics, and in the modern world, to take only one instance, the
“eternal recurrence” of Nietzsche.

Footnote 159:

The same phenomenon of the formation of a new individuality within the
limits of an already existing one, is illustrated by the familiar
facts of the moral conflict between the “higher” and “lower” self.

Footnote 160:

Compare Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second Series, p. 305
ff., where a view of this kind is worked out in some detail. Prof.
Royce’s second volume unfortunately came into my hands too late to
enable me to make all the use of it I could have wished; the same is
the case with Mr. Underhill’s essay on “The Limits of Evolution” in
_Personal Idealism_.

-----

CHAPTER VI
THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF DESCRIPTIVE
SCIENCE

§ 1. Scientific _description_ may be contrasted with philosophical or
teleological _interpretation_, but the contrast is not absolute. §
2. The primary end of all scientific description is
intercommunication with a view to active co-operation. Hence all
such description is necessarily restricted to objects capable of
being experienced in the same way by a plurality of individuals. §
3. A second end of scientific description is the _economising_ of
intellectual labour by the creation of _general_ rules for dealing
with typical situations in the environment. In the course of
evolution this object becomes partially independent of the former. §
4. From the interest in formulating _general_ rules arise the three
fundamental postulates of physical science, the postulates of
_Uniformity_, _Mechanical Law_, and _Causal Determination_. § 5. The
mechanical view of physical Nature determined by these three
postulates is systematically carried out only in the abstract
science of _Mechanics_; hence the logical completion of the
descriptive process would mean the reduction of all descriptive
science to Mechanics. That the chemical, biological, and
psychological sciences contain elements which cannot be reduced to
mechanical terms, is due to the fact that their descriptions are
inspired by æsthetic and historical as well as by primarily
“scientific” interests. § 6. The analysis of such leading concepts
of mechanical Physics as the Conservation of Mass and of Energy
shows them to have only _relative_ validity.

§ 1. In its general outlines our interpretation of the significance of
the physical order is now complete. We have seen reason to hold that in
that order we have the appearance to our human senses of a great system
or complex of systems composed of purposive sentient beings, whose
interests are for the most part so widely removed from our own as to
preclude all direct intercourse, but who are nevertheless historically
connected with ourselves by that unceasing process of the development of
new forms of individual interest which we know empirically as the
evolution of life and intelligence on our planet. As we have tried
throughout the four preceding chapters to show in detail, there is no
real inconsistency between this general interpretation of the meaning of
the physical order and the working assumptions of our various empirical
sciences. At the same time it is obvious that in executing the task of
the detailed description and calculation of the phenomenal course of
events, the empirical sciences, while not rejecting such a metaphysical
interpretation, ignore it; and the more conscientiously they exclude
from their programme all amateur excursions into extraneous metaphysical
speculation, the more thoroughly is the work of description and
mathematical formulation done. It seems advisable, therefore, to
conclude our brief sketch of the principles of Cosmology with a short
discussion of the nature of the limitations imposed on empirical
science, by the special character of the objects it sets before it, and
of the way in which the existence of these limitations is revealed by
analysis of the most general concepts of the empirical sciences
themselves.

It is important, in the first place, to be quite clear as to the sense
in which we speak of _description_ as the work of the empirical
sciences, and as to the meaning of the contrast between such description
and a philosophical _interpretation_ of existence. In this connection
there are two points which seem to call for special and repeated
emphasis. (1) The contrast between interpretation and description is not
an absolute one. _Complete_ description would of itself be something
more than mere description, and would pass into philosophical
interpretation. Thus a significant purposive movement is not adequately
described when, _e.g._, its direction, velocity, momentum, and duration
have been assigned. The complete description of such a movement would
require the recognition of its meaning for the being executing it as a
step in the realisation of a craving or a design, and would thus merge
in what we have called philosophical interpretation. So generally, if
all existence is ultimately experience and all experience essentially
teleological, such description as can be distinguished from
interpretation must always be incomplete from the logical standpoint,
though adequate to fulfil certain special purposes.

(2) The descriptions of science, again, must be carefully distinguished
from such descriptions as can be effected by the mere multiplication of
unanalysed sensible detail. Scientific description, it must be
remembered, is always description undertaken with a view to the
_calculation_ and prediction of the course of events. This implies that
it must be description in general terms, and, wherever possible, by the
aid of mathematical analysis. Natural processes are described by the
empirical sciences which deal with them, not in their concrete
individual detail, but only in so far as they exhibit certain uniform
aspects permitting of reduction to formulæ suitable for calculation.
Such description is frequently spoken of as _explanation_, and is
expressly contrasted by this difference in nomenclature with the mere
accumulation of sensible detail. We must not, however, allow the
difference in question to blind us to the essentially descriptive
character of all scientific hypotheses. It is sometimes urged that
scientific _explanation_ must differ in its logical character from
description, because the “substance,” “agencies,” and “media,” in terms
of which explanation is couched, are largely of a kind inaccessible to
sense-perception. It must be remembered, however, that hypotheses as to
such imperceptible objects are only valuable so far as they serve as
connecting-links by which we may calculate sensible events from sensible
data. Whatever intermediate links empirical science may find it useful
to assume, it invariably takes the sensible occurrences of the
phenomenal physical order as the starting-point, and again as the goal
of its inferences.[161] All its hypothetical constructions are thus
subservient to the main interest of the accurate description of the
course of sensible events. The only kind of “explanation” which can be
reasonably contrasted, in respect of its logical character, with
description is teleological interpretation, and even here the contrast,
as we have seen, is not final.

§ 2. We have to ask, then, what is the object at which scientific
descriptions aim? What purpose do they seek to fulfil, and how does the
essential character of this purpose determine the logical character of
the descriptive process? Now, it is at once evident that all description
has for its immediate object one or other of two practical ends, which
are so closely connected as to be ultimately coincident. Historically,
it is beyond a doubt that the original purpose of all description of
physical events was intercommunication with a view to social
co-operation. I have already referred to this function of description
with special reference to the use of causal descriptions in science, but
may conveniently deal with the same point rather more fully and in a
more general way here.

In a society of finite individuals with interrelated aims and objects,
each of the individuals can only attain satisfaction for his own
subjective interests by some degree of concerted action along with the
rest. And concerted action is only possible where the co-operating
individuals can reduce their various views of their common external
environment to common terms, equally intelligible to all, and similarly
indicate to each other their respective special contributions to the
common task. There must be a common understanding of the difficulty to
be met, and of the precise part each is to play in meeting it. Thus
intercommunication between individuals is an indispensable requisite of
all effective practical co-operation.

But again, intercommunication is only possible by means of description
in _general_ terms. Only in so far as there are identical elements in
the experiences of the various individuals can one communicate the
contents of his experience to another. Immediate feeling, precisely
because of its unique individual character, is essentially
incommunicable. Thus in communicating information about my own body to
another, I am of necessity forced to speak of my body in terms not of
the immediate experience I have of it in organic sensation, but of those
complexes of sense-presentations which he and I alike get through our
organs of special perception. And so the whole physical order can only
serve as a basis of co-operation between individuals so far as it is
describable in the last resort as a complex of sense-presentations
equally accessible to the observation of all the individuals. Any kind
of experience of nature which is uniquely peculiar to myself, and
therefore incapable of being got under assignable conditions by any
other individual endowed with the same organs of perception, is
necessarily incommunicable, and therefore useless as a basis for
concerted action. Hence science is restricted by its very purpose to
describe the physical order in such a way that its descriptions may be
available for the objects of practical art, to the description of it in
its phenomenal aspect as a mere complex of related presentations or
possibilities of presentation. It is no accident, but a logical
consequence of the conditions of intercommunication, that all scientific
description must start from and end with occurrences of the phenomenal
order which any individual may experience by conforming to the
prescribed conditions of perception. Thus we see that it is an
epistemological characteristic of the physical order as investigated by
science, that it consists exclusively of those objects which are, in
principle, perceptible by more than one individual. If there are objects
in their own nature incapable of being experienced by more than one
individual, such as, _e.g._, my own inner life, those objects cannot
belong to the physical order of science.[162]

§ 3. There is a second purpose of description which arises out of the
first as human experiences become more reflective. Description not only
enables me to communicate the particular situation of the moment to
others, and devise in concert with them means for coping with it; it
also enables me to formulate beforehand _general_ rules for my own
behaviour in recurrent situations of the same type. The need for the
possession of such general views originates, of course, while
description is still confined to its original function in assisting
social co-operation. From the practical point of view of those
industrial arts out of which our various physical sciences have arisen,
it is an economical advantage of the first magnitude to be able once and
for all to formulate a _general_ rule for dealing with the indefinitely
numerous occurrences of typical situations, instead of having to deal
with each occurrence separately as it arises.

The advantages of such general rules speedily make themselves felt in
the increased power and importance enjoyed by the section of society
which is in possession of them, a consideration which may help us to
understand why, in early stages of civilisation, such rules are commonly
jealously guarded as the hereditary secrets of close corporations.[163]
Thus it comes to be the special aim of scientific description to assist
the formulation of general rules for the practical manipulation of the
objects of the physical order. And, with the progress of reflection,
this originally secondary object of the descriptive process becomes to a
large extent independent of the primary object of intercommunication.
Even where I have no need or no desire for intercommunication and
co-operation with my fellows, it becomes my interest to seek generalised
descriptions of typical situations in the physical order as the basis of
practical rules for my own voluntary intervention in that order.

§ 4. The interest in the formulation of general rules for practical
interference with nature, again, necessarily dictates the form which our
scientific descriptions will take, and is thus the source of those
practical postulates of empirical science with which we have already
made some acquaintance. It compels us to assume, in the first place, as
an indispensable condition of success in our descriptions, that there
are situations in the physical order which may be treated with
sufficient accuracy for our practical purposes, as recurring
identically; in the second place, that, so long as _we_ abstain from
intentional intervention in the course of events, they succeed one
another in a fixed routine order, or, in other words, that there are no
departures in nature from established routine of such a kind as to
interfere with our calculations; in the third place, that every event in
the physical order is, within the limits requisite for our successful
devising of means to our ends, determined by antecedent events. It is
thus our interest in obtaining general rules for the production of
effects in the physical order by intentional interference with it which
is the source of the three fundamental postulates of empirical physical
science, the postulates of uniformity, of the omnipresence of routine or
mechanical “law,” and of the causal determination of subsequent by
antecedent events.

The dependence of physical science upon these three fundamental
postulates thus does not prove their ultimate truth, as we have already
shown at length in preceding chapters: it proves only that where they
cannot be treated as approximately true, within the limits in which
their falsity could be detected by sensible experiment, our special
interest in devising rules for the manipulation of events cannot be
gratified. Conversely, wherever that interest can be successfully
gratified, these postulates must be for all practical purposes
equivalent to the truth. Hence, if we remember that the ultimate object
of all physical science is the successful formulation of such practical
rules for action, we can see that it is a logical consequence of the
character of the interests which dominate our scientific descriptions,
that the physical sciences should adopt a rigidly mechanical view of the
physical order. Only, in proportion as any one branch of physical
science succeeds in carrying out in detail this conception of the
physical order as an interconnected mechanism of sequences rigidly
determined by laws of sequence, does it succeed in effecting the
purposes by which all physical science has been called into existence.
We may thus call the mechanical conception of the physical order the
most general postulate of physical science. Only, we must once more take
care to recollect that a fundamental postulate of physical science need
not in the least be an ultimate truth; such a postulate is in the end
nothing more than a way of stating the nature of the interest which
physical science subserves, and, as we have sufficiently seen, that
interest is not the purely logical one of consistent thinking, but the
practical one of successful interference with nature.

§ 5. It does not, of course, follow that all the sciences which deal in
any way with the events of the physical order can as a matter of fact
carry out this mechanical view of their objects with equal success. It
is only in the various branches of abstract Mechanics that we get
anything like complete systematic adherence to the postulates of the
mechanical theory of physical nature as previously enumerated. For the
physical, chemical, and still more for the biological sciences, it
remains an unrealised ideal—and one we have no right to think ever
completely realisable—that all the facts of electrical and chemical, and
again of physiological process should be ultimately capable of reduction
to routine uniformities upon which confident calculation and prediction
can be based.

Thus, even in Chemistry, limits are set to the successful adoption of
the purely mechanical point of view, by the fact that chemical
combination is regularly productive of _new qualities_ in the compound
which could not have been predicted from a knowledge of the properties
of its constituents, but have to be ascertained _a posteriori_ by actual
experiment. It is true, no doubt, that we seem to be increasingly able,
as our chemical knowledge advances, to say in general what properties
may be expected to result from the combination of given elements, but
there is no logical ground for supposing that we shall ever be able to
foretell _all_ the properties of an as yet unexamined compound, and in
any case such knowledge could only be of a general sort. However much we
might know, in advance of the results of the combination of certain
elements in certain proportions, it would still be impossible to predict
with absolute certainty the precise result of trying the combination in
a particular concrete case.

Still less realisable would be the ideal of the reduction of Biology to
applied Mechanics. It is not merely that the isolated physiological
process regularly exhibits _qualitative_ aspects of a chemical or
electrical kind, which we have no right to reduce to mere quantitative
changes. Beyond this, as the very terminology of our evolutionary
hypotheses is enough to show, it is impossible to state the facts of
biological evolution without introducing, under such names as “sexual
selection,” continual reference to a subjective factor, in the form of
the likes and dislikes, habits and cravings of sentient beings, and this
selective factor, being in its own nature incapable of direct
presentation in identical form to a plurality of experiences, is not
even a member of the physical order. With the case of Psychology we
shall be better able to deal in connection with the special discussions
of the following Book. (See especially Bk. IV. chap. 1.)

Considerations of this kind seem to necessitate the following general
view of the logical character of descriptive physical science. The only
science in which the postulates of description are rigidly carried out
to their logical consequences is the science of abstract Mechanics in
its various branches (Statics, Kinetics, etc.). Mechanics owes its power
to follow out these postulates to its abstract character. Precisely
because it regards only those aspects of the actual physical order which
are consistent with the fundamental postulate of describability by
general formulæ, Mechanics is constrained to be a purely abstract and
hypothetical science. For since every actual process involves the
appearance of the qualitatively novel, and since all concrete _quality_
is in its essence unique, no actual process can be merely mechanical.

Thus the only way of conceiving the physical order which is logically
consistent with the postulates of descriptive science in their rigidity,
is one which treats all natural changes as reducible to equations. And
it is only in abstract Mechanics that this view is systematically
carried out.[164] Consequently, it is only in so far as all physical
science can be reduced to abstract Mechanics that we can attain the
ultimate purpose of our scientific constructions, the calculation and
prediction of the course of occurrences by means of general formulæ.
This conclusion, derived in the first instance from reflection on the
logical nature of scientific description, is fully borne out by our
actual experience of the results of our scientific theories. Just
because we cannot ultimately reduce all chemical and biological
processes to mere quantitative changes in a material of uniform quality,
we are unable to predict with absolute confidence the precise result of
a concrete chemical experiment, and still more unable to foretell the
precise behaviour of a living organism.

Hence follow two very important results. (1) There is a real practical
justification for the attempt, as far as possible, to treat the chemical
and biological phenomena _as if_ they were simply more complicated
instances of the relations familiar to us in Mechanics. For though they
are not really purely mechanical, it is only in so far as we can treat
them without appreciable error as exactly measurable that they admit in
principle of calculation.

(2) At the same time, there is also ample justification for the use of
qualitative and teleological categories in Chemistry and Biology. For
the interests which chemical and biological knowledge subserve are not
limited by our need for practical rules for intervention in the course
of nature. Over and above this original _scientific_ interest, which can
only be gratified by a mechanical treatment of the subject, we have an
_æsthetic_ interest in the serial grouping of processes according to
their qualitative affinities, and an _historical_ interest in tracing
the successive modifications which have led to the establishment of a
relatively stable form of human social existence. In so far as the
chemical and biological sciences involve the recognition of qualitative
distinctions and the consequent use of categories which are
non-mechanical, it is these æsthetic and historical interests, and not
the primary scientific interest in the control of natural phenomena,
which are subserved by their elaboration.

Hence, while Chemistry and Biology, even apart from the possibility of
their conversion into branches of applied Mechanics, are essentially
descriptive sciences, the task fulfilled by them, so far as they use
qualitative and teleological categories, is one of æsthetic and
historical rather than of properly scientific description. And æsthetic
and historical description, having another object than that of purely
scientific description, are under no necessity to conform to the
postulates imposed on the latter by the special character of the
interests it aims at satisfying. Thus we can see how the right of
Chemistry and Biology to be regarded as something more than mere applied
Mechanics, can be reconciled with Kant’s profoundly true assertion that
any branch of knowledge contains just so much _science_ as it contains
of Mathematics. When we come, in connection with the special problems of
the following Book, to discuss the aims and methods of Psychology, we
shall find in that study a still more striking example of the way in
which the narrowly “scientific” interest may play a markedly subordinate
part in determining the procedure of a branch of knowledge which must,
because of its systematic character, be called a “science” in the wider
acceptation of the term.[165]

§ 6. Since it is only complete and all-embracing knowledge which can be
in the last resort a completely self-contained and self-explaining
system, we must expect to find that the concepts employed in the
mechanical interpretation of the physical order lead us into
contradiction the moment we try to treat them as a complete account of
the concrete nature of the whole of Reality. This is shown more
particularly in two ways. On the one hand, the application of the
categories of Mechanics to the whole of Reality leads inevitably to the
indefinite regress. On the other, in their legitimate application to a
lesser part of existence they are all demonstrably _relative_, that is,
they always appear as one aspect of a fact which has other aspects, and
without these other aspects would have no meaning. It is worth our while
to consider both these points in some detail.

For the successful application of the mechanical view to the physical
order, we need to treat that order as consisting of the changing
configurations of a whole of qualitatively homogeneous related parts.
Any departure from this point of view would involve the recognition of
differences which cannot be treated as merely quantitative, as mere
subjects for calculation and prediction, and would thus necessitate the
introduction of a non-mechanical factor into our interpretation of the
universe. The mechanical view, fully carried out, thus involves the
conception of the universe as a system extended and ordered in space and
time, and capable of spatial and temporal change, but manifesting a
quantitative identity throughout its changes. In the actual
constructions of physical science this quantitative identity is
represented principally by the principles of the Conservation of Mass
and the Conservation of Energy. Both these latter principles are thus,
in their general form, neither axioms of knowledge nor verifiable
empirical facts, but a part of the general mechanical postulate. There
is no ultimate logical principle in virtue of which we are constrained
to think of the particular quantities we denote as mass and energy as
incapable of increase or diminution, nor again have we any experimental
means of proving that those quantities are more than approximately
constant.[166] It is, however, a necessary condition of success in
calculating the course of events, that there should be _some_
quantitative identity which remains unaffected in the various processes
of physical change, and it is chiefly in the special forms of the
quantitative constancy of Mass and Energy that we seem at present able
to give definite expression to this _a priori_ postulate of mechanical
construction.

Now, with regard to spatial and temporal direction and position, we have
seen already both that they are always relative, position and direction
being only definable with respect to other positions and directions
arbitrarily selected to serve as standards of reference, and that, when
taken as ultimate realities, they involve the indefinite regress. It
only remains to show that the same is true of the other fundamental
concepts of the mechanical scheme, mass and energy. Taking the two
separately, we may deal first of all with the notion of _mass_. The mass
of a material system is often loosely spoken of as its “quantity of
matter,” but requires, for the purposes of logical analysis, a more
precise definition. Such a definition may be given in the following way.
In order to explain what is meant by the constancy of the mass of a
body, it is necessary to consider the mutual relations of at least three
different bodies, which we will call A, B, and C. It is found that, at a
given distance, in the presence of A, C receives an acceleration _m_,
and in the presence of B a second acceleration _n_; then the mass of A
is said to stand to that of B in the ratio _m_/_n_, which is the ratio
of the accelerations which they respectively produce on C, and this
ratio is constant, whatever body we choose for C. Hence, if we
arbitrarily take B as our unit for the measurement of mass, the mass of
A as determined by the foregoing experiment will be represented by the
_number m_. By the principle of the _Conservation_ of Mass is meant the
doctrine that the ratio _m_/_n_ as above determined does not alter with
the lapse of time.[167] That is, the ratio between the accelerations
produced by any pair of bodies or a third body is constant and
independent of this third body itself. This proposition is verifiable
approximately by direct experiment for a particular pair of bodies, but
when affirmed as universally true becomes a part of the general
mechanical postulate.

Now, it is obvious from the foregoing explanation of the meaning of mass
(1) that mass is a relative term. It is a name for a certain constant
ratio which requires no less than three distinct terms for its complete
definition. Hence there would be no meaning in ascribing mass to the
whole physical order or “universe.” The “universe” could only have a
mass as a whole if there were some body outside the universe, but
capable of interaction with it, so that we could compare the relative
accelerations, in the presence of this body, of the whole “physical
universe,” and of our arbitrarily selected unit of mass. But the
“universe,” by supposition, contains all physical existence, and there
is therefore no such accelerating body outside it. Hence we cannot say,
without an implicit contradiction, that the whole of existence possesses
the property of mass, nor _a fortiori_ that its mass is constant. It is
only subordinate parts of the universe to which the principle of the
Conservation of Mass can be intelligibly applied.

(2) It is also clear that the mass of a body is only one aspect of a
whole of existence which possesses other aspects, not regarded in our
mechanical constructions. The bodies which actually exhibit a constant
ratio in their accelerations have other properties over and above the
fact of this constant ratio. They have always, in actual fact,
_qualitative_ differences from one another and from other things, which
we disregard in our mechanical treatment of them because they make no
difference to this special property, in which for purposes of
calculation we are peculiarly interested. It is by the barest and most
palpable of abstractions that, in Mechanics, we treat bodies as if they
were masses and nothing more. Thus the facts taken into account by the
mechanical interpretation of nature are, so far as its reduction of
bodies to masses is concerned, a mere aspect of a fuller reality which
we treat as equivalent to the whole for no better reason than the
practical one that it suits a special object of our own that it should
be so equivalent, and that this object is empirically found to be
attained by regarding it as equivalent.

Precisely the same is the case with the complementary concept of Energy.
The kinetic energy, or capacity of a body for doing work against
resistance, is found experimentally to be measured by half the square of
its velocity multiplied by its mass. It is further found by experiment
that, so far as we can measure, the energy of a material system not
acted upon from without remains constant. That the constancy is absolute
is, of course, once more not a matter for direct empirical proof, but a
part of the postulate that the physical order shall be capable of a
mechanical interpretation. Now we can see at once, from what has been
previously said of the concept of Mass, that the physical order or
“universe” as a whole cannot be intelligibly said to possess kinetic
energy, whether constant or otherwise. What cannot be said to have mass
clearly cannot have a property only explicable in terms of mass. We
might indeed have inferred the same consequence directly from the
definition of energy as capacity for doing “work” in overcoming
resistance. The “universe,” having nothing outside itself, can have no
source of possible resistance to overcome, and therefore cannot be
thought of as doing “work.” Hence, once more, it is only the parts of
the physical order, considered as parts, to which energy can be
ascribed.

(3) Again, it is even more evident in the case of energy than in the
case of mass, that we are dealing with one aspect singled out by
abstraction from a whole possessed of other aspects not regarded in a
purely mechanical construction. For (_a_) the capacity for work of an
actual body does not always exist in the “kinetic” form of actual
motion. There are various forms of non-kinetic energy, such as, _e.g._,
the energy of “position” of a resting body, the heat of a body of higher
temperature than its surroundings, which Mechanics treats as equivalent
to “kinetic” energy, because they are theoretically capable of being
converted into it. And these forms of non-kinetic energy are
_qualitatively_ different both from energy of actual motion and from
each other. It is by a mere abstraction that we treat them as identical
because they are, for certain special purposes, equivalent. The
qualitative differences may make no difference with respect to a
particular purpose of our own, but they are none the less really there.

Again, the mechanical scheme itself is quite insufficient to explain why
or when these different forms of energy are replaced by one another. As
has been well said by Professor Ward, the doctrine of the Conservation
of Energy asserts no more than that a certain quantitative identity is
maintained in all exchanges of energy. But when or in what direction
these exchanges shall take place, the principle itself does not enable
us to say. Thus, to take a simple example: if I know the mass of a stone
lodged on a roof, the height of the roof from the ground, and the
acceleration produced by gravity at the spot in question, I can
determine the “potential energy” of the stone. But my data tell me
nothing as to whether this potential energy will remain for ever in its
potential form, or whether the stone will yet be dislodged and its
energy converted into kinetic shape, and if so, when. The principles of
the mechanical interpretation of nature are thus inadequate to describe
the concrete course of events in so simple a case as that of the fall of
a stone. _If_ the stone falls, then by the aid of the mechanical
postulate I can describe one aspect of the process, namely, the amount
of kinetic energy which will be evolved; and again, _if_ certain
previous conditions are fulfilled, _e.g._, _if_ the support gives way,
and _if_ the descent of the stone is not previously arrested, the
mechanical postulate enables me to infer that the stone _will_ fall and
will reach the ground with just this kinetic energy. But I can never
escape, so long as I keep within the mechanical scheme, from this
necessity of hypothetically assuming as given data which the mechanical
scheme itself cannot fully determine.

All these considerations show how the very nature of the mechanical
scheme itself justifies our previous conclusion, that it is in all its
details simply the expression of a postulate created by our practical
need that the course of nature shall admit of calculation with
sufficient exactitude for the devising of successful rules for
intervention in it, but logically incapable of being without
contradiction regarded as the real truth about any concrete natural
process. The internal evidence, derived from examination of the
fundamental concepts of scientific Mechanism, thus confirms the view we
have already adopted on different grounds, that the whole physical order
is merely the appearance of a more ultimate reality of a kind akin to
our own sentient and purposive life. At the same time, our examination
of mechanism may serve to throw some useful light on the often
misconceived antithesis between Reality and Appearance. We call the
physical order, as conceived by mechanical science, “appearance,” not
because we regard it as illusory or deceptive in itself, or because it
is not the manifestation of a true reality, but because it takes account
only of those particular aspects of Reality which are important and
significant for certain very special purposes. What appears to us as the
physical order is, indeed, true Reality, and is, in fact, an integral
part of the only Reality there is, but it appears to us in this special
form and under these special restrictions because _we_ have arbitrarily
excluded every other aspect of the concrete facts from our purview by
the choice of our initial postulates of descriptive science. By the
nature of the special questions we put to our world, in our physical
science, we determine in advance for ourselves the general character of
the answer we are to receive.

Rigidly scientific investigation, for instance, finds mechanical
determination everywhere in the world, and purposive spontaneity
nowhere, just because it has previously resolved that it will accept
“mechanical explanation” and nothing else as the answer to its
questions. So far as we bear in mind the presence of these self-imposed
logical limitations throughout our mechanical science, their existence
need lead to no illusion or deception. The success of our mechanical
postulates shows that, within the sphere of their logical applicability,
the course of the world does really conform to them, and thus the
results won by their application are genuine truth, so far as they go.
It is only when we forget the limits set to the logical applicability of
the mechanical postulates, by the special nature of the interests they
subserve, and proceed to treat them as logically indispensable
conditions of all existence and all knowledge, that the truths of
mechanical science are perverted into the illusions and falsehoods of a
mechanical philosophy.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 11
(Phenomenalism), 22 (Nature); H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. ii. chaps. 7,
8; E. Mach, _Science of Mechanics_, chap. 2, § 5, p. 216 ff.; K.
Pearson, Grammar of Science, chaps. 7, 8; H. Poincaré, _La Science et
L’Hypothêse_, parts 3 and 4, chaps. 6-10; J. B. Stalle, _Concepts and
Theories of Modern Physics_, chaps. 2-6, 10-12; J. Ward, _Naturalism and
Agnosticism_, vol. i. lects. 2-6.

-----

Footnote 161:

And, again, the intermediate links themselves, however imperceptible,
have always to be thought of as exhibiting properties identical in
kind with those of objects given in direct presentation. As Mill said,
a hypothesis which assumes at once an entirely unfamiliar agent and an
equally unfamiliar mode or law of operation, would be useless. Thus
the imperceptibles of scientific hypothesis belong essentially to the
physical order.

Footnote 162:

This is the characteristic selected by Prof. Münsterberg as the basis
of his own distinction between “physical” or “superindividual” and
“psychical” or “individual” objects. See _Grundzüge der Psychologie_,
i. 15-77.

Footnote 163:

Cf. Mach, _Science of Mechanics_, p. 4. Mach, however, erroneously as
I think, makes the intercommunication a _secondary_ consequence of the
rise of specialised industrial classes.

Footnote 164:

_I.e._, the _mechanical_ view of Nature, to be thoroughly
self-consistent, must be purely _mechanistic_.

Footnote 165:

To put the matter more succinctly, as regards the position of
Chemistry and Biology, we may say that while chemical and biological
_facts_ are never merely mechanical, chemical and biological
_science_, so far as they subserve the strictly scientific interest of
calculation and the formulation of general rules, must always be so.
The _facts_ only lend themselves to this special purpose in so far as
they admit of being, without sensible error, treated _as if_ they
conformed to the postulates of universal Mechanism. The special and
more difficult case of psychological facts I reserve for separate
discussion in the following Book (_infra_, Bk. IV. chap. 1).

I am glad to be able to refer the reader, for a view of the logical
worth of the mechanical postulates which appears in principle
identical with my own, to the interesting discussion of Mr. W. R. B.
Gibson in _Personal Idealism_, p. 144 ff.

Footnote 166:

Compare Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 23, note 2 to p. 331
(1st ed.); Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. ii. chap. 7, pp. 209, 210 (Eng.
trans., vol. ii. p. 89 ff.); Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol.
i. pp. 84-91 (Conservation of Mass), 170-181 (Conservation of Energy).

Footnote 167:

If we merely desired to fix the sense of the term _mass_ without
introducing the concept of _constant_ mass, we might of course
consider two bodies only, A and B. Then the ratio

mass of B acceleration of A in presence of B
————- = —————————————————
mass of A acceleration of B in presence of A.

See Mach, _Science of Mechanics_, p. 216 ff.; and Pearson, _Grammar of
Science_, p. 302 (2nd ed.), on which the above account is based.

-----

BOOK IV

RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY:
THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE

CHAPTER I

THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL
SCIENCE

§ 1. The various sciences which deal with the interpretation of human
life all avail themselves of the fundamental categories of
Psychology. Hence we must ask how the concepts of Psychology are
related to actual experience. § 2. Psychology is a body of abstract
descriptive formulæ, not a direct transcript of the individual
processes of real life. It presupposes the previous construction of
the physical order. § 3. The psychological conception of conscious
life as a succession of “mental states” or “images” is a
transformation of actual experience devised primarily to account for
the experience of other subjects, and subsequently extended to my
own. The transformation is effected by the hypothesis of
“introjection.” §§ 4, 5. The logical justification of the
psychological transformation of facts is twofold. The psychological
scheme serves partly to fill up the gaps in our theories of
physiological Mechanism, and also, in respect of the teleological
categories of Psychology, to describe the course of human conduct in
a form capable of ethical and historical appreciation. Psychology
may legitimately employ both mechanical and teleological categories.
§ 6. The objections sometimes brought against the possibility of
(_a_) psychological, (_b_) teleological description are untenable.

§ 1. The net result of our brief examination of some of the most
important cosmological concepts has been to confirm us in the
“idealistic” or “spiritualistic” interpretation of existence to which
our first two books in principle committed us. The reader who has
followed us so far with acquiescence will now be fully prepared to admit
that we shall at least be nearer the truth in conceiving the universe as
composed of sentient and purposive subjects of experience, akin in
principle to the members of human society, than as constituted, entirely
or in part, of mechanically interacting and interdependent elements. The
acceptance of an idealist interpretation of the universe, however, still
leaves us face to face with a number of problems of the gravest
philosophical import. We have still to ask how in particular we can most
truly conceive the systematic unity which is formed by the whole
multiplicity of apparently more or less independent subjects of
experience, what degree of permanence and individuality, so far as we
can judge, belongs to ourselves as members of that system, and what
light is thrown by our ethical, religious, and æsthetic aspirations and
ideals on the concrete character of the whole system and on our own
place in it. Again, before we can attack these momentous problems with
any reasonable hope of success, we shall need to know which among the
categories employed by the various sciences dealing with mental life are
of fundamental significance, and what is the logical relation of those
sciences to the concrete realities of immediate experience, and to the
constructions of physical science. Only on the basis of a rational
theory as to the purposes subserved by the various mental sciences, and
the possible limitations imposed by those purposes on the use of the
corresponding categories, can we decide how far the interpretation of
existence as a whole in terms of Psychology, Sociology, or Ethics, is
legitimate.

It is clear that the complete execution of the programme indicated in
the previous paragraph would involve a systematic philosophical
interpretation of the significance of human life for which some such
name as the _Metaphysics of Society_ or _Metaphysics of History_ would
be a more adequate designation than the traditional title of _Rational
Psychology_. I have, however, retained the ancient name for this
subdivision of our task, mainly on the ground that our own elementary
discussion will be primarily concerned with those most simple and
universal psychological concepts of which the various more concrete
social and historical sciences make the same constant use as chemistry
and the other physical sciences do of the mechanical concepts of mass,
energy, velocity, etc. Whatever view we adopt of the precise degree of
connection between Psychology on the one side and the various social and
historical sciences on the other, it is at least manifest that Ethics,
Sociology, History, and the rest all involve the constant use of such
psychological categories as those of _self_, _will_, _thought_,
_freedom_, and that thus any sound metaphysical interpretation of
history and society must begin with investigation into the logical
character of the science to which these concepts belong, just as a sound
Metaphysic of nature had to start by an examination of the postulates of
Mechanics. I suppose that there is no need to utter more than a passing
word by way of reminder to the reader, that such an investigation
presupposes the previous creation of a purely empirical science of
Psychology. The business of Metaphysics with Psychology is not to
dictate in advance how it _must_ construct its view of the world, but to
ascertain the logical character of the completed construction, and its
relation to the general system of human knowledge.

§ 2. _The Place of Psychology among the Sciences._—From the
metaphysician’s point of view, it is of the utmost importance to
recognise clearly and constantly that Psychology, like the other
sciences, deals throughout not with the actual experiences of real
subjects, but with “data” obtained by the artificial manipulation and
transformation of actual experience into a shape dictated by certain
special interests and purposes. This is a point upon which the idealist
metaphysician, in particular, is peculiarly liable to go wrong when left
to himself. Starting with the conviction that the key to the nature of
existence as a whole is to be found in our own direct experience of our
sentient and purposive life, he almost inevitably tends, unless he has
given particular attention to the methodology of psychological science,
to take it for granted that the concepts and hypotheses of the
psychologist afford a description of this experience in its concrete
directness, and may therefore be treated without misgiving as a fruitful
source of certain knowledge about the inmost structure of the absolute
or infinite individual itself. And even the reiterated demonstration
that one or another of the current categories of Psychology cannot be
predicated of the absolute whole of reality without flagrant
contradiction, frequently fails to produce conviction where it is not
accompanied by direct proof of the artificiality and remoteness from
concrete actuality of the psychologist’s data. Hence it would be worse
than useless to discuss such questions as, whether the infinite
individual can properly be thought of as a “self” or an “ethical
person,” or again as a “society of ethical persons,” or again whether
finite “selves” are “eternal” or only transitory constituents of the
world-system, without first arriving at some definite view as to the way
in which these psychological concepts are derived from the concrete
actualities of experience, the special interests which lead to their
formulation, and the restrictions imposed by those interests on the
sphere of their valid application.

That Psychology, like all descriptive science, deals throughout with
data which are not concrete experience-realities, but artificial
products of a process of abstraction and reconstruction, should be
sufficiently clear from the very consideration that, like the other
sciences, it is a body of _general_ descriptions of typical situations.
An actual process of knowing or acting, like every actual event, is
always individual, and because of its individuality defies adequate
description. It is only in so far as a situation admits of being
generalised by the selection of certain of its aspects or qualities as
representative of its whole reality, that it is capable of being
described at all. Even History and Biography, in which the teleological
interpretation of a series of events as internally united by the
singleness of the purpose underlying them takes the place of external
connection in accord with mechanical laws of sequence as the ideal of
explanation, are only possible on the condition that such transformation
of the concrete realities of life as is implied in such a degree of
abstraction and reconstruction can be carried out without detriment to
the special interests of the historian and the biographer. And
Psychology is unreal and abstract even as compared with history. It
provides us with general formulæ which are, or should be, valuable as
affording a means of describing certain universal features of the
processes of willing and knowing which it is desirable to study in
isolation, but it is of itself as incapable of adequately tracing the
actual course of a real process of willing or thinking, as Mechanics is
of following the actual course of a real individual process in
“external” nature. In this respect the concepts and formulæ of
scientific Psychology stand on precisely the same footing, as regards
their relation to the individual and actual, as do those of scientific
Physics. Their truth and validity means simply that by substituting them
for concrete actualities we can get answers to certain special questions
which we have an interest in solving, not that they are unaltered
transcripts of the actualities themselves.

This is perhaps most strikingly shown by observing that the very
existence of Psychology as a distinct branch of science presupposes that
artificial severance of the unity of direct experience into a physical
order and a non-physical realm external to that order, of which we have
already investigated the origin. Psychology has no subject-matter at all
until we have first, for the practical reasons already discussed,
constructed the physical order by the inclusion in it of all those
experience-contents which are equally accessible under specified
conditions to the observation of a plurality of subjects, and then gone
on to assign to the realm of “psychical” or “mental” existence whatever
experience-contents fall outside the system so defined. And this whole
separation of the physical and the psychical or mental, as we have
already seen, has no place in the direct experience of actual life. In
actual life, until we come to reconstruct it in thought for the purposes
of description and calculation, there are neither material bodies nor
“immaterial minds” or “consciousnesses” which are “in” them or “animate”
them; there are simply sentient and purposive beings and the environment
of things to which they have to adjust themselves in the execution of
their purposes. How and for what reasons this naïvely realistic view of
existence comes to give place to the dualistic conception of a physical
world and a plurality of non-physical beings in relation with it, we
have already seen in our study of the methodology of the physical
sciences. We have now to follow the development of the dualistic line of
thought somewhat further, before we can see precisely what is the
character of the logical reconstruction of actual experience presupposed
by the existence of a science of Psychology.

§ 3. As we have already learned, our recognition of the actuality of our
own and our fellow-men’s life of unique and incommunicable feeling
compelled us to admit the existence of much that, from its
incommunicable nature, falls outside the sphere of physical reality. We
have now to see how Psychology, in taking this non-physical existence as
its subject-matter, conceives of its mode of existence and its relation
to the subject-matter of the physical sciences. In recent years, much
light has been thrown upon the methodological problem in question by the
labours of Avenarius and his followers, from whom the substance of our
account will be largely drawn. What Avenarius has for the first time
made perfectly clear is, that the psychological interpretation of our
own experience is throughout based upon reading into that experience a
theory originally devised to meet a difficulty suggested by the
existence of our fellow-men.

We have already seen, in dealing with the subjectivist’s fallacy, what
this difficulty is. So long as I am concerned only with the analysis of
my own experience, there is nothing to suggest the distinction between a
physical and a psychical aspect of existence. All that I require, or
rather all that I should require had I any interest in analysing my own
experience independent of the need for intercommunication, is the
simpler and more primitive distinction between myself as one thing in
the world and the other things which form my environment. But the case
is altered when I come, after the creation of the concept of a physical
order, to analyse the experience of my fellow-men. My fellow-men, on the
one hand, belong to the physical order, and, as belonging to it, are
known to me as objects cognisable through my senses. On the other hand,
it is necessary for all the purposes of practical intercourse to credit
them with the same kind of sentience and feeling which I directly know
in myself. This sentience and feeling are, of course, inaccessible to
the perception of my own senses; I can see my fellow’s eye and can hear
his voice, but I cannot see that he sees or hear that he hears. My
fellow thus comes to be thought of as having a double existence; besides
that aspect of him in which he is simply one among other things
perceived, or in principle perceptible, by my senses, he has another
aspect, not directly perceptible but necessarily presupposed in all
social relation with him. On the side of his body he belongs entirely to
the physical order; but there is, associated with this bodily existence,
another side to him which I call his psychical aspect. Now, how must
this “psychical aspect” be supposed to be constituted when once it has
come to be thus artificially separated in thought from the physical side
of my fellow’s existence? It is here that the theory of “introjection,”
as worked out by Avenarius, comes to our aid.

When I perceive any object directly, without sophisticating myself by
devising psychological hypotheses about the process, what I am aware of
is, on the one side, the thing as a constituent of my environment, and,
on the other, a variety of movements or impulses to movement in myself,
marked by a peculiar tone of satisfied or dissatisfied feeling, and
determined by the relation in which the thing in question stands to my
various interests. But when I come to explain to myself what is meant by
my fellow-man’s assertion that he also perceives the same object, a
difficulty seems to arise which renders this simple analysis inadequate.
The perceived object, the sun for example, appears to belong to _my_
world of sensible things, for I too see the sun. Not so my fellow-man’s
perception of it; as I cannot “see him seeing the sun,” so to say, I
find it hard to understand how the sun, which is a thing in my sensible
world, can be an object for his perception, which is not in my sensible
world. Hence I draw the inference that while I see the _actual sun_, the
content of my fellow’s perception is an _image_ or _idea_ of the sun
(cf. p. 81).

By the extension of this process of inference I come to think of the
non-physical aspect of my fellow’s existence as consisting, as a whole,
of a vast complex of successive ideas or images, attended with their
characteristic tone of satisfied and dissatisfied feeling; as this
series of “mental states” or “ideas” has now to be represented as in
some way related to the sensible physical reality I call my fellow’s
body, I imagine it as going on “within” his skin somewhere, and thus
arrive at the conception of my fellow as a dualistic compound of a
physical factor, perceptible by my senses, his _body_, and a
non-physical factor, composed of a stream of “mental images,” and
imperceptible to sense, his _mind_. One further step remains to be taken
and the work of “introjection” is complete. That step is the artificial
re-interpretation of my own experience in terms of the distinction I
have been led to establish for the case of my fellow. I come to think of
my own conscious life in terms of the distinction between body and mind,
and to analyse what as originally experienced was the direct reaction of
a unitary self upon the things which formed its environment into a
succession of “mental states” or “images” going on “within” a body,
their relation to which will yet form a prominent scientific problem.

Now, it is only when this process of “introjection” has reached its
final issue, and the actual life of sentient purposive intercourse with
the other actual things of our environment has been replaced in thought
by the conception of a mental succession of “images” or “contents of
consciousness,” taken to “refer” to “things” which are themselves
“outside consciousness,” while the felt unity of experience has given
way to the radical sundering of human existence into a physical and a
psychical aspect, that we have reached the point of view from which
psychological science takes its departure. Only when the actualities of
experience have been artificially transformed into “mental states” or
“images” of actualities by the hypothesis of “introjection,” and thus
definitely constituted into a non-physical order, have we the materials
for the construction of a special science of the “psychical side” of our
nature. Psychology, in fact, presupposes “psychical states” as the
material of its studies, and “psychical states” are not data of
immediate experience, but symbols derived from and substituted for the
actual data of experience by an elaborately artificial method of
transformation. Hence we should be committing a grave fallacy in Logic
if we were to argue that since subjects of experience are the sole real
things, the hypotheses of Psychology must be the final metaphysical
truth about the world.

When we attempt to criticise the logical validity of the process of
“introjection,” and the scientific constructions of a Psychology built
up on an introjectionist foundation, we cannot fail to observe certain
apparent gross breaches of logic which affect it. In the first place,
the fundamental assumption that my fellow’s “mental life” is composed of
“images” of the actual things of my own experience, is clearly at
variance with the principle previously implied in the construction, for
purposes of co-operation, of the physical order as composed of things
_equally_ accessible to the perception of a plurality of individuals.
This discrepancy is once more done away with, when the process of
introjection has been completed, by the reduction of my own mental life
to a succession of images or states of consciousness, but only at the
cost of forgetting that the original motive to “introjection” was a
supposed disparity between my own and my fellow’s relation to the
physical things of my environment.

Hence it is not strange that Avenarius should apparently hold the whole
introjectionist transformation of the “naïvely realistic” standpoint to
be essentially fallacious, and should close his discussion of the
subject with the proposition that all attempts to vary the “natural view
of the world” lead to superfluities or contradictions.[168] It does not,
however, seem necessary to follow him in this unfavourable judgment.
Indeed, if we reflect that such a thorough-going rejection of all the
results of introjection must involve as a consequence the repudiation of
the whole science of Psychology, a science which may fairly be said to
be at present about as fully justified by its successful growth as most
of the physical sciences, we shall probably be inclined to hold that a
process so fruitful in results _must_ have its logical justification,
however artificial the assumptions upon which it rests.

§ 4. What, then, is the logical justification for that elaborate
transformation of experience which is necessary to bring it into the
form presupposed by psychological science? In principle the question is
not hard to answer. The “ideas,” “mental states,” and so forth, of
Psychology are, as we have seen, _symbols_ which we substitute for
certain concrete actualities, and, like all symbols,[169] they only
partially correspond to the material they symbolise. But, like other
symbols, they are admissible as substitutes for the things symbolised on
two conditions: (1) that the individual symbol corresponds to that which
it symbolises according to a definite and unambiguous scheme, and (2)
that the substitution of the symbol for the thing symbolised is required
in order to make the latter amenable to such manipulation as is
necessary for the solution of some particular class of problem. Now,
there can be no doubt that the first of these conditions is fulfilled by
the translation of our actual experience into the introjectionist
symbols of Psychology. For in the external or “physical” events which
correspond to a “mental state,” I possess an unambiguous means of
recognising the actual experience for which the mental state in question
stands in the symbolism of Psychology. If the various physical
“conditions” and forms of “expression” of the mental state are indicated
with sufficient fulness and accuracy, they enable me to identify the
corresponding actual experience when it occurs in my own life, or even
to produce it experimentally for the express purpose of interpreting the
Psychologist’s symbolism. The only question, then, that can reasonably
be raised as to the legitimacy of psychological symbolism, is the
question whether such a transformation of the actualities of immediate
experience is demanded for the attainment of some specific purpose or
interest.

It seems, I think, that the transformation is really required for more
purposes than one. In the first place, one obvious use of psychological
hypotheses is that, like the hypotheses of physical science, they assist
us to calculate the course of events, in so far as it is independent of
purposive interference of our own, and thus to form prudential rules for
our own guidance in so interfering. This seems to be the principal use
of those parts of Psychology which deal with the more mechanical aspects
of mental life, _e.g._, the laws of the formation of fixed habits and
associations by repetition, the gradual passing of voluntary into
involuntary attention, and so forth. We are interested in studying the
laws of habit and association, just as we are in formulating mechanical
laws of physical nature, because we require to guide ourselves by such
knowledge whenever we directly and intentionally interfere in the life
of our fellows for educational, punitive, or general social purposes.
Unless we can forecast the way in which our fellow will continue to act,
so far as his behaviour is not modified by fresh purposive initiative,
we shall be helpless to decide how we must intervene in his life to
produce a given desired effect. Similarly, the direct moulding of our
own future in a desired direction would be impossible apart from such
knowledge of what that future is likely to be without intentional
direction.

It may be said, of course, with justice, that, so far as Psychology
presents us with such routine uniformities of succession, it is a mere
supplementary device for making good the defects in our anatomical and
physiological knowledge. If our physiological science were only
sufficiently extensive and minute, we might reasonably expect to be able
to describe the whole course of human action, so far as it is amenable
to mechanical law, and exhibits routine uniformity in purely
physiological terms. Instead of talking about the “association” of
“ideas” or the production of a “habit” by repetition, we should then,
for instance, be able to describe in physiological terminology the
changes effected in a cerebral tract by the simultaneous excitement of
two nervous centres, and to write the complete history of the process by
which a permanent “conduction-path” arises from the reiteration of the
excitement. Such a definite substitution of physiological for
psychological hypotheses is pretty evidently the goal which the modern
“experimental Psychology” has set before itself, and which it is
constantly trying to persuade itself it has reached, in respect of some
parts at least of its subject.

Nor does there seem any reason to doubt that, since the physiological
counterpart of a routine uniformity of mental sequence must itself
clearly be a routine uniformity, all psychological laws of uniform
mechanical sequence might be ultimately replaced by their physiological
equivalents, if only our knowledge of the structure and functions of the
nervous system were sufficiently advanced. Hence Professor Münsterberg
is perfectly self-consistent in arguing from the premisses that the sole
function of psychological science is to provide us with mechanical
uniformities of sequence by the aid whereof to calculate the future
behaviour of our fellows, in so far as it is not modified by fresh
purposive initiative, to the conclusion that the whole of Psychology is
a temporary stop-gap by which we eke out our defective Physiology, but
which must sooner or later cease to be of use, and therefore cease to
exist as Physiology advances.[170]

It would, of course, remain true, even if we were to accept this view of
the case without reservation, that Psychology is, in the present state
of our knowledge, an indispensable adjunct to Physiology. For, while our
knowledge of the physiology of the nervous system is at present too
fragmentary and vague to be of much practical use in enabling us to
forecast even the simplest sequences in the behaviour of our fellows,
Psychology is, temporarily at least, in many respects in a more advanced
condition. Thus, if it were necessary, before we could infer the
probable effects of exposure to a particular stimulus on a man’s
behaviour, to frame a workable hypothesis as to the physiological
occurrences in the nervous system between the first reception of the
stimulus and the issuing of the ultimate bodily reaction, we should
still be waiting helplessly for the means of framing the simplest
general judgments as to the probable effects of our actions on our
social circle. This is because the nervous changes intervening between
the reception of the stimulus and the reaction can only be rendered
accessible to observation by devices which postulate for their invention
an extremely advanced condition of physical science in general and of
Physiology in particular. There is no direct method of translating the
actual processes which we experience into an unambiguous physiological
symbolism, or, _vice versâ_, of testing a physiological hypothesis by
retranslating it into facts of direct living experience. On the other
hand, when we have given the assumed conditions of the occurrence of the
stimulus, it is comparatively easy to observe what follows on them in
actual life, and to translate it into the introjectionist Psychology,
or, _vice versâ_, to test a theory couched in terms of that Psychology
by comparison with the actualities of experience.

For this reason psychological hypotheses are, in the present state of
knowledge, an indispensable mediating link between actual experience and
physiological theory, and if ever they should come to be finally
superseded by purely physiological descriptions of human conduct, we may
be sure that the triumphant physiological theories will themselves first
have been won by the process of establishing psychological formulæ and
then seeking their physiological analogues. This is illustrated in the
actual history of contemporary science by the extent to which the
cerebral physiologists are dependent for their conception of the
structure of the nervous system on the previous results of purely
psychological investigation. We might present the mutual relations of
concrete experience, Psychology and nervous Physiology, in an
epigrammatic form, by saying that the connecting link between the
subject of experience and the brain of Physiology is the “mind” or
“consciousness” of Psychology.

§ 5. It is, I think, questionable whether such a view as Professor
Münsterberg’s does full justice to the interests which prompt us to the
construction of the psychological symbolism. On his theory, Psychology,
it will be seen, is essentially a science of routine or mechanical
uniformities of sequence, just like the various branches of mechanical
Physics. According to him, teleology must be ruthlessly banished from
scientific Psychology. In other words, though all the actual processes
of direct experience are pervaded by teleological unity of interest or
purpose, yet in substituting our psychological symbols for the
actualities we must deprive them of every vestige of this teleological
character. Nor is this demand that Psychology shall translate experience
into a series of non-purposive routine sequences an arbitrary one on
Professor Münsterberg’s part. If the sole function of Psychology is to
facilitate calculation and prediction of the course of events, so far as
it is _not_ controlled by purposive interference, Psychology must, of
course, either follow rigidly mechanical lines in its descriptions, or
fail of its object. But I would suggest that over and above this
function of facilitating calculation and prediction at present fulfilled
by Psychology as _locum tenens_ for a perfected Physiology, Psychology
has another and an entirely distinct function, in which it would be
impossible for it to be replaced by Physiology or by any other branch of
study. This function is that of affording a set of symbols suitable for
the description, in abstract general terms, of the teleological
processes of real life, and thus providing Ethics and History and their
kindred studies with an appropriate terminology.

It is manifest enough that neither the ethical appreciation of human
conduct by comparison with an ideal standard, nor the historical
interpretation of it in the light of the actual ends and ideals which
pervade it and give it its individuality, would be possible unless we
could first of all describe the events with which Ethics and History are
conceived in teleological language. Apart from the presence throughout
those events of more or less conscious striving towards an ideal end,
there would be nothing in them for the moralist to applaud or blame, or
for the historian to interpret. Thus, if Ethics and History are to have
their subject-matter, there must be some science which describes the
processes of human life and conduct in terms of teleological relation to
an end. Now, to what science can we go for such descriptions? From our
previous examination of the postulates of physical science, it is clear
that the requisite material cannot be afforded by any branch of physical
science which remains rigidly consistent with its own postulates. The
nature of the interests in response to which the concept of the physical
order was constructed, as we saw, required that the physical order
should be thought of and described in terms of rigid mechanism. Hence no
science which describes the processes of human life in purely physical
terminology can indicate their purposive or teleological character in
its descriptions. The purposive character of human conduct, if
recognised at all in our descriptions, must find its recognition in that
science which describes the aspect of human experience that is in
principle excluded from the physical order. In other words, it is
Psychology to which we have to go for such a general abstract conception
of teleological unity as is necessary for the purposes of the more
concrete sciences of Ethics and History.

This function of Psychology is indeed quite familiar to the student of
the moral and historical sciences. In Ethics, as Professor Sidgwick has
observed, the whole vocabulary used to characterise human conduct, apart
from the specially ethical predicates of worth, is purely psychological.
All the material which Ethics pronounces “good” or “bad,” “right” or
“wrong”—“acts,” “feelings,” “tempers,” “desire,” etc.,—it has taken over
bodily from Psychology. And so, too, History would have nothing left to
appreciate if a record of merely physical movements were substituted for
accounts of events which imply at every turn the psychological
categories of “desire,” “purpose,” “intention,” “temptation,” and the
rest. Universally, we may say all the teleological categories of human
thought on examination prove to be either avowedly the property of
Psychology, or, as is the case with the concepts of biological
evolutionism, thinly disguised borrowings from it.

If this is so, we seem to be justified in drawing certain important
inferences. (1) It will follow that of the two distinct offices which
Psychology at present fulfils, one belongs to it, so to say, in its own
right and inalienably, while the other is exercised by it temporarily,
pending the majority of Cerebral Physiology. While, as we have seen,
those parts of psychological doctrine which are concerned with the more
mechanical aspects of conduct may ultimately be replaced by Physiology,
the parts which deal with the initiation of fresh purposive adjustments,
such as the psychology of attention and of feeling, are in principle
irreducible to Physiology, and must retain a permanent value so long as
mankind continues to be interested in the ethical and historical
appreciation of human life.[171]

(2) It will also follow that, at present and for long enough to come,
Psychology is bound, _pace_ Professor Münsterberg, to use both
mechanical and teleological hypotheses and categories. Such a mixture of
two different logical standpoints would no doubt be intolerable in a
science which owed its existence to the need of satisfying a single
interest of our nature. For the kind of interest which is met by
mechanical hypotheses is baffled by the introduction of teleological
modes of thought, and _vice versâ_. But, according to our view, the
interest to which Psychology owes its creation is not single but double.
We have an interest in the mechanical forecasting of human action, and
an interest in its ethical and historical interpretation, and
Psychology, as at present constituted, has to satisfy both these
conflicting interests at once. Hence the impossibility of confining it
either to purely mechanical or to purely teleological categories. If,
indeed, our Physiology had reached the point of ideal completeness, so
that every routine uniformity at present expressed in psychological
terminology as the establishment of an “association” or “habit” could be
translated into its physiological correlate, we should be able to
dispense altogether with psychological hypotheses as aids to the
calculation of the course of events, and to restore logical unity to
Psychology by confining it entirely to the task of providing Ethics and
History with the teleological categories they require for the
description of their subject-matter. But such a reform of method would
be most premature in the present condition of our physiological
knowledge.[172]

§ 6. There are two points of difficulty which our discussion has so far
failed to deal with, but must not leave entirely unnoticed. We have
allowed ourselves to assume (_a_) that description in psychological
terms, and (_b_) that description in teleological terms, are possible.
Both these assumptions have been questioned, and it is clear that if the
first is unsound there can be no science of Psychology at all, while, if
the second is unsound, Psychology cannot use teleological conceptions.
Hence it is absolutely necessary to attempt some justification of our
position on both questions.

As to (_a_), it has been argued that since only that which is accessible
on equal terms to the perception of a plurality of subjects can be
described by one subject to another, and since all objects so accessible
to the perception of a plurality of subjects were included in our
construction of the physical order, description can only be of physical
objects. A “mental state” must be in principle incapable of description,
because it can only be experienced by _one_ subject.

Now, if Psychology claimed to be the _direct_ description of immediate
experience, as it is experienced, this contention would certainly be
fatal to its very existence. But, as we have seen, Psychology makes no
such claim. Its data are not the actualities of immediate experience
themselves, but symbols derived from those actualities by a certain
process of transformation. And though what Psychology calls its “facts”
cannot, of course, like physical facts, be directly exhibited to the
sense-perception of a plurality of subjects, we have in the physical
conditions and concomitants of a “mental state” assignable marks by
which we may recognise when it occurs in our own life, the actual
experience of which the psychologist’s “mental state” is the symbol.
Thus, though I cannot directly produce for inspection a sample of what
in Psychology I call “the sensation of red,” I can indirectly, by
assigning the upper and lower limits of the wave-length corresponding to
the sensation, make every one understand what actual experience I am
thinking of when I use the term.

(_b_) The second difficulty need not detain us long. The view that _all_
description must be exclusively mechanical, rests upon the assumption
that no other kind of description will answer the purpose for the sake
of which we set out to describe things. Now, so far as description is
undertaken for the purpose of establishing practical rules for
intervention in the course of occurrences, this assumption is perfectly
justified. If we are to lay down general rules for meddling in the
course of events, we must of course assume that, apart from our
meddling, it goes on with routine regularity. And we have already seen
that for this very reason the mechanical interpretation of Nature is a
fundamental postulate of physical science, so long as it confines itself
strictly to the work of formulating “laws of Nature,” and does not
attempt the task of historical appreciation. But, as we have also seen,
the historical appreciation of a series of events as marked by the
progressive execution of an underlying plan or purpose, is only possible
when the events themselves have been described in essentially
teleological terms as processes relative to ends.[173] Hence we have no
right to contend that _all_ scientific descriptions shall be of the
mechanical type, unless we are also prepared to maintain that the _only_
purpose they subserve is that of the formulation of general rules for
practice.

If the historical appreciation of events is a legitimate human interest,
the description of events in terms of end and purpose must also be a
legitimate form of description. Now, in point of fact, even the
“physical sciences” themselves, when they come to deal with the facts of
organic life, largely desert the primary scientific ideal of the
formation of general laws for the historical ideal of the detection of
lines of individual development, and if our previous conclusions are
correct, it is much more for the latter than for the former purpose that
we are interested in the construction of a science of Psychology. What a
human being wants Psychology for, in the main, is not so much to help
him to forecast the behaviour of other men, as to assist him to
understand how the successive stages of his own individual development
and that of his “social environment” are knit into a unity by the
presence of all-pervading permanent interests and ends. The contention
that psychological description must, on grounds of logical method, be of
the mechanical type, seems therefore to repose on misconception as to
the uses of Psychology.

The preceding discussion may perhaps appear somewhat arid and wearisome,
but it was indispensable that our subsequent examination of the
metaphysical problems suggested by the recognition of the psychical
realm of existence should be based upon a definite view as to the
connection between psychological conceptions and the actualities of
experience, and such a view, in its turn, presupposes a positive theory
of the interests to which psychological construction ministers and the
logical procedure by which it is affected. The general result of our
investigation has gone to show negatively that Psychology is not a
direct transcript of real experience, but an intellectual reconstruction
involving systematic abstraction from and transformation of experience,
and positively that the reconstruction depends for its legitimacy upon
its serviceableness for the special purposes, partly of the practical
anticipation of events, but principally of their historical and ethical
appreciation. The significance of those conclusions will be more
apparent in the course of the two following chapters.

_Consult further_:—R. Avenarius, _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_; F. H.
Bradley, “A Defence of Phenomenalism in Psychology” (_Mind_, January
1900); H. Münsterberg, _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, vol. i. chap. 2 (The
Epistemological Basis of Psychology), 11 (Connection through the Body);
J. Ward, Art. “Psychology” in _Encyclopædia Britannica_, _ad init._
(“The Standpoint of Psychology”); _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii.
lect. 16.

-----

Footnote 168:

See Avenarius, _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_, p. 115 _ad fin._

Footnote 169:

Or rather, like all symbols which are not identical with the things
they represent. In the latter case, as when, _e.g._, for any purpose I
count the numbers of the natural number series themselves, beginning
with 1, there may appear to be _complete_ correspondence. But the
usefulness of the process depends on the fact that the 1 which I count
and the 1 by which I count it are at least _numerically_ distinct—how
much _more_ distinction this implies I do not stay to discuss here—and
hence, I take it, it is by an abuse of language that the process is
called “representation of a thing by itself.”

Footnote 170:

See _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, vol. i. chap. 11, pp. 415-436.

Footnote 171:

This is strikingly illustrated by the procedure of Professor
Münsterberg himself. He expels selective interest from his
psychological account of attention, in obedience to the principle that
teleological ideas must be kept out of a descriptive science, and
then, when confronted with the problem what it is that does decide
what presentations shall actually be attended to, makes the selection
a function of the sub-cortical motor-centres in the brain, thus
reintroducing into biology the teleological categories previously
declared inadmissible. See _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, vol. i. chap.
15, pp. 525-562. I may once more note, for the benefit of the reader
who is interested in methodology, that whereas the processes of the
mechanical sciences are essentially continuous, the teleological
processes of finite life as conceived by ethical and historical
science appear, as Professor Royce has insisted, to be of the nature
of _discontinuous_ series, _i.e._ to consist of terms _between_ which
intermediate links cannot be interpolated. Why I cannot accept what
appears to be Professor Royce’s view, that ultimate Reality itself is
a discontinuous series, will perhaps be clear from Chap. 3 and the
following chapter of the present Book. But see also the Supplementary
Note at the end of the present chapter.

Footnote 172:

Psychology is, of course, far from being the only branch of study
which, in its present state, employs categories of both types. Compare
the constant use made in biological evolutionary theories of the
teleological ideas of, _e.g._, the “_struggle_ for existence,” the
“survival of the _fittest_,” “sexual _selection_,” etc., ideas bodily
conveyed from Sociology and Psychology. As we have just seen, the
precisians who object to this mixture of higher and lower categories
in Psychology are in the awkward predicament of only being able to get
rid of it there by accentuating its presence in Physiology and
Biology. Where they go wrong is in exaggerating the amount of logical
unity attributable to any body of inquiries which happens, in virtue
of being pursued by the same men and with the same accessories, to be
called by a common name. It would require only a slight further
exaggeration to argue that since all branches of knowledge are alike
knowledge, they must be all either exclusively mechanical or
exclusively teleological. There is no reason in the nature of things
why “Psychology” should not at a particular period in the growth of
knowledge cover as wide a range of inquiries, with as much internal
variety of aim and method, as, say “Mathematics.”

Footnote 173:

And they cannot be so described without the introduction of
psychological ideas. Thus, _e.g._, in classifying a series of
implements dating from different periods in the history of
civilisation, so as to throw light on the evolution of some particular
type of tool or machine, we have to take as our _fundamentum
divisionis_ the adequacy with which the different varieties accomplish
the kind of _work_ they were _designed_ to perform, and are thus
committed at once to the use of the psychological concepts of purpose
and satisfaction.

-----

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER I.

ON THE DISCONTINUITY OF THE TELEOLOGICAL SERIES OF ETHICS AND HISTORY.

We have previously seen that every continuous series is indefinitely
divisible, and that consequently no two terms of such a series are
_immediately_ coadjacent. On the other hand, any series which consists
of terms which are immediately coadjacent, and between which
intermediate terms of the same series cannot be inserted, is not
indefinitely divisible, and _a fortiori_ not continuous. Applying this
to the case of a series of psychical processes, we can see that where
the sequence is of a mechanical routine type it is continuous, since it
can be indefinitely divided into smaller fragments, each exhibiting the
same law of sequence as the whole. (Strictly, it ought to be added that
the other condition of continuity is also fulfilled, since whatever
point of time thus divides the sequence falls within the series itself.)
But where you have new teleological adaptation there is a manifest
solution of this continuity. The new purpose emerges at a definite point
in the sequence: what has gone before up to this point belongs to the
working out of a different interest or purpose, what comes after to the
working out of the now freshly emerged interest. Each may form a
continuous process within itself, but the transition from the one to the
other is not continuous. There is where the old purposive series ends
and the new one begins, a genuine case of immediate coadjacency of terms
between which intermediate members cannot be interposed.

In another connection, it would, I think, be easy to show how this
consideration is of itself fatal to the reality of Time. My point here
is simply to maintain that the facts just referred to do not warrant the
inference that “ultimate Reality” or “the Absolute” is for itself a
discontinuous series. My objection to this view is that the “emergence
of new selective interest” is itself essentially a feature of the finite
experience which, because finite, appears in a temporal form. The
distinction between the “new” and the “habitual” has no meaning for a
completed and infinite experience, which embraces all existence in a
perfectly harmonious form. Or, to put it in another way, the serial form
of arrangement itself has no significance except for an experience which
has to advance progressively from one stage to another of partial
insight and comprehension. This seems as true of “logical” order or
ethical order of valuation according to moral worth as of merely
numerical order. In fact, we said in Book II. chap. 4, § 10, that the
serial arrangement is the simplest and most general expression of that
relational mode of apprehension which we decided to be at once
inevitable for finite knowledge and inadequate to express Reality. It is
on this ground that I feel obliged, as I understand the problem at
present, to hold that ultimate Reality is neither a continuous nor a
discontinuous series, for the reason that it is not for itself a series
at all.

CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF SOUL AND BODY

§ 1. The problem of psychophysical connection has to do with the
correlation of scientific abstractions, not of given facts of
experience. § 2. The “consciousness” of Psychology is thus not the
same thing as the finite individual subject of experience, and
Reality must not be said to consist of “minds” in the psychologist’s
sense. Again, we must not assume _a priori_ that there can be only
_one_ working hypothesis of psychophysical connection. § 3. The
possible hypotheses may be reduced to three, Epiphenomenalism,
Parallelism, and Interaction. § 4. _Epiphenomenalism_ is legitimate
as a methodological principle in Physiology; it is untenable as a
basis for Psychology because it implies the reduction of psychical
facts to mechanical law. § 5. _Parallelism._ The arguments for
Parallelism as necessarily valid to Psychophysics because of its
congruity with the postulates of mechanical Physics, are fallacious.
We cannot assume that Psychology must necessarily conform to these
postulates. § 6. As a working hypothesis Parallelism is available
for many purposes, but breaks down when we attempt to apply it to
the case of the initiation of fresh purposive reactions. A
teleological and a mechanical series cannot ultimately be
“parallel.” § 7. We are thus thrown back on the hypothesis of
_Interaction_ as the only one which affords a consistent scheme for
the correlation of Physiology and Psychology. We have, however, to
remember that what the hypothesis correlates is scientific symbols,
not actual facts. The actuality represented by both sets of symbols
is the same thing, though the psychological symbolism affords a
wider and more adequate representation of it than the physiological.

§ 1. Few questions have more constantly attracted the attention of
philosophers, especially perhaps of those philosophers who have lived
since the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Western
world, than that of the relation between the soul or mind and the body;
and perhaps no question has given rise to graver misconceptions for want
of a correct insight into the true logical character of the problem
under discussion. Both in the half-scientific speculations of ordinary
persons and in the more systematic theories of metaphysicians and
psychologists, the subject is constantly approached under the totally
erroneous preconception that the dualistic separation of human life into
a bodily and a mental part or aspect is a datum of immediate experience
which we can directly verify in ourselves, and that the task of
philosophy is by ingenious but unverifiable hypothesis to transcend this
chasm between given realities. From the standpoint of our previous
chapter we can easily see that such a view fundamentally misrepresents
the real philosophical problem.

So long as we are concerned with human existence as we directly find it
in our immediate experience, or assume it in our practical social
relations with our fellows, no question of the relation between body and
mind can arise, because neither term of the relation is as yet before
us. For my own immediate experience I am neither a body nor a soul, nor
yet a composite of the two, but simply an individual subject of
experiences in direct intercommunion with other individuals. Under the
influence of conscious or unconscious dualistic prepossessions, we often
speak as if it were a directly experienced fact that I can communicate
with my fellow-subjects only indirectly through the medium of an alien
“material” body, and we sometimes contrast this supposed restriction
with an imagined higher state of existence, in which “disembodied
spirits” may conceivably have direct intercourse with each other. But
the truth is, that this direct intercourse and influence of one
intelligent and purposive individual on another is no privilege reserved
for our enjoyment in “a better world than this”; it is, as we can see if
we will only forget our dualistic prepossessions, the very truth about
our actual life. In actual life, before we have contaminated our direct
enjoyment of it with psychological prejudices, we know nothing of the
interposition of an inert “material” organisation between ourselves and
the members of our social environment. The severance of the original
unity of experience into a physical and a psychical aspect is entirely a
product of our own abstraction-making intellect. “Body” and “soul” are
not given actualities of experience, but artificial mental constructions
of our own derived from the actual “facts” of life by the elaborate
processes which we have just been studying.

As we have seen in constructing our concept of a mechanical physical
order, we abstract certain elements of our direct experience from the
whole, and consider them under the name of our “bodies” as if they had a
separate existence; we then, by the aid of the hypothesis of
“introjection,” represent those elements of direct self-experience which
were omitted from the physical order as forming by themselves a second
distinct whole or system called the “soul.” When we have reached this
point, we are, of course, compelled to raise the question how these two
systems, the bodily and the mental, must be supposed to be connected.
But the important fact to remember is that the two systems are not facts
of experience, but products of abstraction. Our task in discussing their
relation is not to transcend a _given_ dualism, but to get rid of one
which we have manufactured for ourselves by the manipulation of
experience in the interests of certain special scientific problems.
Hence, as Münsterberg well puts it, we have not to _find the_ connection
which subsists, as an actual fact, between body and soul, but to _invent
a_ connection in keeping with the general scheme of our artificial
physical and psychological hypotheses.[174]

§ 2. As far as the interests of Metaphysics are concerned, this
recognition that the problem of soul and body has to do solely with
highly artificial products of scientific abstraction, and not with
anything which can be called a “given” actuality, is the one principle
of supreme importance which emerges from the discussion of the subject.
Two very significant inferences may at once be drawn from it. (1) We
clearly must not call the finite subjects of experience, of whom we saw
reason to hold that ultimate Reality is exclusively constituted, “minds”
or “souls” in the psychologist’s sense.[175] To call them so would
inevitably be to imply that exclusion from the physical order of
“bodies” apart from which the psychological concept of the “soul” or
“mind” has no significance. Or, in other words, it would identify them
not with what they are for their own direct experience, but with what
they become for one another’s theoretical reflection under the influence
of “introjection.” As we have seen, it is legitimate and necessary for
special scientific purposes to treat ourselves and other individuals _as
if_ we were such series of “mental states,” but it is never legitimate
to forget that, when we do this, we are substituting a highly unreal
symbolism for directly experienced facts.

One consequence of confusing the symbolism with the fact may be noted in
passing: when we have substituted the series of mental states for the
felt unity of actual conscious life, we go on to ask ourselves how the
fact and its symbol—the symbolic nature of which we have forgotten—are
related. And thus arise all the unanswerable, because fundamentally
unmeaning, questions as to the way in which the “self” _has_ or _owns_
the succession of “states.” Failing to see that the succession of states
is simply the unitary subject itself, as it appears from the point of
view of the “introjection” hypothesis, we then find ourselves confronted
by the alternatives of foisting upon our Psychology the useless and
unthinkable fiction of a changeless “substratum” of mental states—the
soul-substance of the pre-Kantian psychologists—or resolving real life
into a succession of discontinuous “mental images.” With the recognition
that Psychology never deals directly with experienced reality, but
always with the hypothetical products of an abstraction which is only
justified by its usefulness for the special purposes of the
psychologist, all these difficulties disappear.

(2) Another important consequence of our principle is that we cannot
dogmatically assert that there can be only _one_ legitimate theory of
the “connection between mind and body.” If “mind” and “body” were really
given as distinct but connected in direct experience, it might well be
that there could only be one account of their connection answering to
experienced fact. But since the separation is itself of our own
intellectual manufacture, as we are dealing throughout with artificial
creations of our own abstraction, any theory of their connection which
is desirable for the solution of a special problem or class of problems
will be legitimate _for that particular class of problems_. Thus the
physiologist may legitimately, if it answers his special purposes, adopt
a working hypothesis which the psychologist may find untenable, and
again different types of psychological problem may legitimately assume
different working hypotheses.[176] I shall aim at showing in the
immediately following paragraphs that there is one typical
psychophysical hypothesis which, on the whole, lends itself better than
its rivals to the general purposes of both Physiology and Psychology,
but we shall see, as we proceed, that the hypotheses we reject are also
legitimate for the solution of important special problems. In fact, our
chief interest, as students of Metaphysics, in the further discussion of
psychophysical connection will be to point out the fallaciousness of the
metaphysical arguments which are commonly used to establish some one
hypothesis as necessarily and exclusively true.

§ 3. Turning now to consider the chief types of hypothesis which have
been, or are at present, actually put forward by metaphysicians and
psychologists, we may perhaps group them under the five main heads of
(1) Pre-established Harmony, (2) Occasionalism, (3) Epiphenomenalism,
(4) Psychophysical Parallelism, (5) Interaction. For our purpose in the
present chapter the number of alternatives may be further reduced by the
omission of the first two. Neither the Pre-established Harmony of
Leibnitz nor the Occasionalism advocated by Geulincx and Malebranche,
and in a one-sided form by Berkeley, is likely to find much support from
the philosophy of the present day. Both doctrines are, moreover,—that of
Leibnitz avowedly and that of the Occasionalists by implication,—much
more than special psychophysical hypotheses. They are in principle
attempts to get rid of all transeunt causality, and have been discussed
in their general bearings in our chapter on the Causal Postulate, where
we satisfied ourselves that any science which recognises, as Psychology
has to do, the existence of finite things must also admit the principle
of transeunt causality, at any rate as a working hypothesis.

Each of the three remaining types of view has its supporters among
contemporary students of science and philosophy. The epiphenomenalist
theory is largely adopted by the workers in the physical sciences, and
though not much countenanced by psychologists and metaphysicians, has
the explicit support of Dr. Shadworth Hodgson, while some versions of
the parallelist doctrine, notably that of Münsterberg, approach it very
closely. The parallelist hypothesis is perhaps at present the most
popular among the psychological specialists, and is represented by
writers of such eminence as Wundt, Münsterberg, Ebbinghaus, Höffding and
Stout. Finally, Interaction has powerful champions in Bradley, Ward, and
James; to say nothing of its adoption by so sound a physiologist as Mr.
McDougall. Both the latter doctrines, again, have historical connections
with the great philosophical systems of the past, Parallelism with that
of Spinoza, and Interaction with those, to mention no other names, of
Descartes and Locke. In the philosophy of the ancient world the
psychophysical issue can hardly be said to appear in a well-defined
form, but we may perhaps state that Plato’s psychological doctrine is
decidedly one of Interaction, while the view of Aristotle, though too
complex to admit of very precise formulation, inclines rather towards
Parallelism.

§ 4. _Epiphenomenalism._ Of the three hypotheses which remain for
discussion, the theory of Epiphenomenalism has the least to recommend
it, and is open to the most serious objections. According to this view,
all causal connections are exclusively between physical states. Bodily
changes succeed one another in accord with uniform laws of sequence,
which it is the province of the physiologist to discover, and every
bodily change is completely determined by bodily antecedents. Certain
bodily conditions are further attended by corresponding “states of
consciousness,” but those states stand in no causal connection with
subsequent bodily states, nor yet with one another. They are thus
consequences or effects, but are never causes. The whole series of
physical changes, from birth to death, which makes up the history of the
human body, goes on precisely as it would if “consciousness” were
entirely absent. This is what is meant by the assertion that all mental
states are _epi_phenomena, superfluous accessories, which arise in the
course of the connected series of bodily changes, but are entirely
without any determining influence upon it. The doctrine may be
diagrammatically represented thus

_a_——α
|╭──╮
_b_——β
|╭──╮
_c_——γ,

where the italic letters symbolise physical and the Greek letters
psychical states, the vertical lines indicating the course of causal
sequence.

If a psychophysical hypothesis were ever directly applicable to the
actualities of experience, we might, of course, dismiss Epiphenomenalism
at once as inherently absurd. For nothing is more certain than that in
the actual life of direct experience our knowledge and our interests do
determine the course of our actions. That what we believe and desire
does make all the difference in the world to the way in which we behave,
is one of those elementary verities out of which no scientific
hypothesis can claim to reason us. Hence, when the defenders of the
theory attempt to draw practical moral and juristic consequences from
their doctrines, we are within our rights in simply declining to concern
ourselves with so absurd a travesty of the simplest facts of experience.
So long, however, as the hypothesis is put forward simply as a working
hypothesis for the correlation of our physiological and psychological
theories, the case is different. Its validity as a psychophysical theory
must be estimated solely by the degree in which it renders this
systematic correlation feasible, and is not necessarily impaired by the
manifest absurdities which result from mistaking the doctrine for a
description of actual life.

Now, if we look at the hypothesis from this point of view, we can at
once see that it is really legitimate for some purposes. For the purpose
of physiological science it is obviously to our interest that we should
be able to deduce the later from the earlier stages of a physiological
process. We have thus an interest in treating physiological changes, if
we can, as unconditioned by any but physiological antecedents. And every
actual success in establishing a uniformity or “law” of Cerebral
Physiology is proof that the assumption that, for the process in
question, the only determining conditions which count are physiological,
is equivalent to the truth. The physiologist, then, is clearly justified
in treating the psychical series as epiphenomenal, if he means no more
by this than that he intends to deal, as a physiologist, only with
processes which can be successfully resolved into uniform sequences on
the assumption that they involve only physiological terms. Though
whether any processes in the nervous system can be successfully treated
as purely physiological sequences, nothing but the physiologist’s actual
success in obtaining results from his initial postulate can decide.

If, however, the physiologist should go on, as he sometimes does, to
make the assertion that not only can some nervous processes be treated
_as if_ their psychical accompaniments made no difference, but that they
really are what they would be without those accompaniments, or even that
_all_ nervous process is what it would be without “consciousness,” he
commits a gross logical fallacy. It is a mere blunder in logic to argue
that because the presence of certain circumstances makes no difference
to the special result which follows on a given antecedent, the result
would equally follow in their absence. For it might be that in their
removal the very antecedents in which we are interested would disappear.
We are not at liberty to infer that, because the course of certain
physiological processes can be computed without taking their mental
correlates into account, they could occur apart from those correlates.

Even more serious are the consequences which follow when it is assumed
that _all_ mental processes without exception may be regarded as
epiphenomenal, _i.e._ that all human action, if only our Physiology were
sufficiently advanced, might be brought under laws of purely
physiological sequence. Such an assumption would lead at once to the
following dilemma: Either our Physiology must remain rigidly faithful to
the fundamental postulates of mechanical science, or not. If it is
faithful to them, its descriptions of human action must rigidly exclude
all reference to teleological determination by reference to conceived
and desired ends. _I.e._ we must treat human conduct as if it were
fatally determined apart from any possible influence of human choice and
intention, and thus stultify that whole work of historical and ethical
appreciation which we have already seen to be the principal _raison
d’être_ of Psychology as a science. We must revert, in fact, to a theory
of life which is identical with the extremest forms of Pagan or
Mohammedan fatalism in everything except the name it gives to its
_ineluctabile fatum._ Or, if we are not prepared to do this, we must
allow Physiology itself to use the psychological categories of desire,
selection, and choice, and thus covertly admit that human action, after
all, cannot be described without the introduction of factors not
included in the physical order. It is no doubt due to their realisation
of this dilemma that psychologists are all but universally agreed to
reject the epiphenomenalist hypothesis, while its popularity with
physiologists may be explained by observing that physiological
uniformities can manifestly only be successfully established for those
processes which can be treated _as if_ they were only physiologically
conditioned.

§ 5. _Parallelism._ The hypothesis of Parallelism attempts, while
preserving some of the characteristic features of the cruder view just
described, to avoid its unsatisfactory consequences. Agreeing with
Epiphenomenalism in the doctrine that physiological changes must be
treated as determined only by physiological antecedents, Parallelism
denies that the events of the psychical series are mere “secondary”
effects of their physiological correlates. According to it, the series
of physical and that of psychical events are strictly “parallel,” but
not causally connected. Each event in either series has its precise
counterpart in the other, but the physical events do not cause the
psychical events, nor _vice versâ_. The successive members of the
physical series form a connected causal sequence, independent of their
psychical concomitants, while these latter, it is generally
assumed,[177] form a similar chain of causally connected psychical
states. Thus every nervous change is determined solely by precedent
nervous changes, and the corresponding psychical change by the
corresponding antecedent psychical changes. In diagrammatic shape our
hypothesis now takes the form

╭──╮
_a_ α
| |
_b_ β
| |
_c_ γ

Usually it is further added that the ultimate metaphysical explanation
of this parallelism without mutual dependence must be found in the
(Spinozistic) doctrine of _Identity_, _i.e._ the doctrine that the
physical and psychical series are two different “sides” or “aspects” of
a single reality. Some supporters of Parallelism (_e.g._, Ebbinghaus)
conceive this single reality as a _tertium quid_, equally adequately
expressed by both the series, others (_e.g._, Stout) hold that its real
nature is more adequately revealed in the mental than in the physical
series.

The grounds commonly adduced in favour of the parallelistic view as the
most satisfactory psychophysical theory, are of two kinds. As a positive
argument it is urged that cerebral anatomy has already to some extent
confirmed the doctrine of correspondence between definite physical and
psychical processes by its successful “localisation” of specific sensory
and motor processes in various cortical “centres,” and may reasonably be
expected to accomplish further such “localisations” in the future.
Stress is also laid upon the formal analogy between the psychological
laws of retentiveness, association, and habit, and the physiological
theories of the formation of “conduction-paths” in the brain. These
positive contentions do not, however, take us far. The correspondences
upon which they rest, so far as they are ascertained experimentally and
are not mere deductions from the principle of Parallelism itself, would
be equally natural on a theory of Interaction, or of one-sided
dependence of either series on the other. The real strength of the case
for Parallelism rests upon certain negative assumptions which are widely
believed to exclude the hypothesis of causal dependence of either series
on the other. These negative assumptions appear to be in the main three.

(1) It is said that, while we can without difficulty conceive how the
later stages of a continuous physical or psychical process can be
connected by causal law with its earlier stages, we are entirely unable
to conceive how psychical events can arise from physical antecedents, or
_vice versâ_, because of the utter disparateness of the physical and the
psychical. The physical process, it is urged, is continuous, and so, on
the other side, is the psychical, but when we attempt to think of a
cerebral change conditioning a mental change, or _vice versâ_, there is
a complete solution of continuity which we cannot bridge by any causal
formula.

(2) The doctrine of Conservation of Energy is sometimes supposed to be
incompatible with the admission of psychical states among the
antecedents or consequents of physical states. It is said that if
psychical states can influence the course of nervous change, there will
be “work” done in the organism without the expenditure of energy, and if
the total effect of nervous change is not exclusively physical there
will be loss of energy without “work” being done by the organism, and in
either case the principle of Conservation will be contravened.

(3) Finally, it is maintained that it is a fundamental postulate of the
physical sciences, that every change of configuration in a material
system such as the living organism is assumed to be, is due to
exclusively physical antecedents, and that this postulate must therefore
be respected in Psychophysics. These are, so far as I can gather them
from the works of the psychologists who adopt the parallelist view, the
principal arguments by which their case is supported.

It is clear that if all—or any—of these contentions are valid, it must
follow that Parallelism is not only a legitimate but the only legitimate
hypothesis for the co-ordination of physical and psychical science. I
believe, however, that every one of them is fallacious, and that for the
following reasons:—

(1) The argument from the inconceivability of causal relation between
the physical and the psychical is perhaps the most effective of the
alleged grounds for denying interaction between the psychical and the
physical. Yet its force is not really so great as it might appear. It is
not denied that we can, in simple cases, assign the conditions under
which a mental state follows on a physical state (_e.g._, we can assign
the physical conditions of the emergence of a given sensation). But, it
is argued, we cannot show why those conditions (_e.g._, the stimulation
of the retina, and indirectly of the “optical centres” in the brain by
light of a given wave length) should be followed by this particular
sensation (_e.g._, green, and not some other colour). This means that we
cannot construct a mathematical equation connecting the character of the
sensation with that of the stimulus, as we can to connect the earlier
with the later stages of a purely physical process. This is, of course,
obvious enough. It is only by making complete abstraction from the
appearance of new _qualities_ in the course of a process, and by
treating it as a purely geometrical and quantitative transformation,
that we can render it amenable to our equations.

As we saw in our discussion of Causality, mathematical Physics only
succeeds in its constructions on the condition of excluding all
_qualitative_ change, as “subjective,” from its purview. But we also saw
there that the origination of the qualitatively new is an essential part
of the idea of Causality, and that in reducing all change in the
physical world to quantitative transformation, mathematical Physics
really does away with the causal concept. We are, in fact, in precisely
the same logical position if we speak of physiological changes as
_causing_ sensation, as when we speak of a quantitative change in the
proportions of a chemical compound as the _cause_ of alteration in its
qualities. The objection that the psychical effect cannot be connected
by an equation with its alleged cause, would hold equally in any case of
the production of the qualitatively new, _i.e._ in every case where we
use the category of causality at all. And for that very reason it has no
force when urged as an objection to psychophysical causality in
particular.[178]

(2) The argument from the Conservation of Energy may be more briefly
dismissed, as its fallacious character has been fully recognised by the
ablest recent exponents of the parallelistic view, such as Dr. Stout and
Professor Münsterberg. As Dr. Stout points out, the argument involves a
formal _petitio principii_. The principle of Conservation of Energy has
only been established for what are technically known as conservative
material systems, and no absolute proof has been given, or seems likely
to be given, that the human organism is such a conservative system.
Further, as has been urged by many critics, and notably by Professor
Ward, the principle of conservation, taken by itself, is simply a law of
exchanges. It asserts that the _quantity_ of the energy of a
conservative system remains constant under all the transformations
through which it passes, but, apart from the rest of the postulates of
mechanical science, it affords no means of deciding _what_
transformations of energy shall occur in the system, or _when_ they
shall occur. Hence there would be no breach with the special principle
of Conservation of Energy if we were to assume that psychical conditions
can determine the moment at which energy in the organism is transformed
_e.g._, from the kinetic to the potential state, without affecting its
quantity.

(3) It is, however, true that it is inconsistent with the postulates of
mechanical Physics, taken as a whole, to admit the determination of
physical sequences by non-physical conditions. To admit such
determination would be to stultify the whole procedure of the mechanical
sciences. For, as we have seen in our Third Book, the primary object of
mechanical science is to reduce the course of events to rigid laws of
uniform sequence, and thus to facilitate the formulation of practical
rules for our own interference with it. It is therefore a legitimate
postulate of mechanical science that—for its special object—desire and
will shall be excluded from our conception of the conditions which
determine events, and the whole course of nature treated _as if_
conditioned only by physical antecedents. If there is any department of
experienced reality which cannot be successfully dealt with according to
these postulates, then the formulation of rigid laws of uniform sequence
is, in principle, impossible for that department, and it must be
excluded from the “world” which mechanical science investigates.

But the fact that mechanical science can only attain its end by treating
all physical events as independent of non-physical conditions, does not
afford the slightest presumption that they must be treated in the same
way for all purposes and by every branch of inquiry. Whether Psychology,
in particular, is under the logical necessity of conforming to the
mechanical postulates, will depend upon our view as to whether the
object subserved by Psychology is the same as that of the mechanical
sciences, or different. If our purpose in psychological investigation is
not identical with the purposes of mechanical science, there is no sense
in demanding that we shall hamper our procedure as psychologists by
adherence to postulates based upon the special nature of the interests
to which mechanical science has to minister.

Now, we have already contended that the aims of Psychology only
partially and temporarily coincide with those of the mechanical
sciences. If we were right in holding that the principal object of
Psychology is to provide a general terminology of which History and
Ethics can avail themselves in their appreciations of life, it follows
at once that Psychology imperatively needs the recognition of that very
teleological aspect of human action which is excluded on principle, and
rightly so for the special purpose of mechanical Physics, by the
fundamental mechanical postulates. Thus the argument that the
parallelistic hypothesis must be the most suitable for the psychologist,
because it conforms to the mechanical postulates of sciences which deal
with experience from a different standpoint and in a different interest,
loses all its cogency.[179]

Now that we have, as I trust, sufficiently disposed of the _a priori_
arguments for the parallelistic view, we are in a position to estimate
it, as a psychological hypothesis, purely on its merits as evinced by
its actual success. But first we must point out once more that the whole
question is not one as to actualities, but purely as to the most
satisfactory way of bringing two sets of abstractions, originally
devised for divergent purposes, into touch with one another; and
further, that _if_ the hypothesis were put forward as a final
metaphysical truth about the constitution of the real world, it would be
manifestly self-contradictory.

In the first place, Parallelism, taken for anything more than a
convenient working hypothesis, would involve a flagrant breach of logic.
It is obvious that, as Mr. Bradley has urged, you cannot infer from the
premisses that one total state, containing both a physical and a
psychical element, causes another complex state of the same kind, the
conclusion that the physical aspect of the first, by itself, has caused
the physical, and the psychical the psychical aspect of the second. To
get this conclusion you need a “negative instance,” in which either the
physical or the psychical state is found apart from its correlate, but
followed by the same consequent as before, and Parallelism itself denies
the possibility of such an instance. From the premisses that _a_ α is
always followed by _b_ β, it attempts to infer, without any “dissection
of nature,” that _a_ by itself was the necessary and sufficient
condition of _b_, and α of β. And this is, of course, logically
fallacious. Dr. Ward expresses the same point differently when he urges
that unvarying and precise concomitance _without_ causal connection is a
logical absurdity.

That the supporters of the hypothesis themselves are conscious of the
difficulty, is shown by their unanimous assertion that the psychical and
physical series are ultimately manifestations of one and the same
reality. What they do not explain is how, if this is so, the two series
can be phenomenally so utterly disparate as to exclude mutual influence
on one another. The difficulty becomes insuperable when we reflect that
on the parallelistic view the physical series must be rigidly
mechanical, as otherwise we shall have a breach with those mechanical
postulates which are supposed to require the exclusion of psychical
states from the determining conditions of physical occurrences. Thus, if
teleology is to be recognised anywhere in our scientific constructions,
it must be in our conception of the psychical series. And on the whole
the supporters of Parallelism admit this in practice by the free use of
teleological categories in their Psychology. But it ought by now to be
clear to us that the nature of the identical reality cannot be expressed
with equal adequacy in a teleological series, and in one which is, by
the principles of its construction, purely mechanical. Here, again, most
of the parallelists are really in agreement with us, for they usually in
the end call themselves “Idealists,” and assert that the “mental” series
is a more faithful representation of Reality than the physical. But if
the two series are not on the same level in respect of their nearness to
Reality, it is hard to see how there can be exact correspondence between
them. This is a point to which we shall immediately have to return.[180]

§ 6. When we ask, however, whether Parallelism, apart from these
questions of ultimate philosophy, is legitimate _as a working hypothesis
in Psychology_, the answer must be that, in certain departments of
psychological investigation, it certainly is so. In practice, the
doctrine of the parallel but independent series amounts, for the most
part, to little more than a methodological device for the division of
labour between the physiologist and the psychologist, the physiologist
restricting himself to the formulation of such uniformities as can be
established between nervous processes, considered as if independent of
external influence, and the psychologist doing the same for their
psychical accompaniments. As a principle of methodical procedure,
therefore, in those parts of Psychology which deal with the more passive
and, as we may say, routine-like aspects of mental life, Parallelism is
a useful and therefore a legitimate working hypothesis.

The question by which its claim to be the _best_ hypothesis must be
decided is, to my mind, that of its applicability to the case of the
fresh initiation of new purposive adaptations to changes in the
organism’s environment.[181] For it is just in dealing with these cases
that Psychology, if it is to fulfil the purpose we have ascribed to it,
must most obviously discard mechanical for teleological categories.
Hence it is here, if anywhere, that a difficulty of principle must make
itself felt when we attempt to treat the psychical and the physical
series as exactly parallel and corresponding. It seems to follow
necessarily from the conception of physical science as based upon the
mechanical postulate, that a teleological and a mechanical series cannot
possibly run “parallel” in all their details in the fashion presupposed
by the hypothesis under consideration.

If Psychology is to be of any use in supplying Ethics and History with
the subject-matter of their appreciations, it is manifest that it must
make the assumption that desire and choice are operative in determining
the course of human action, and thus must—at certain points at
least—explicitly employ the categories of teleology. These categories,
again, cannot possibly be translated into the rigidly non-teleological
symbolism of a physical science, based upon the mechanical postulates,
as every science of “general laws” must be. It follows that “exact
parallelism _without_ mutual interference” cannot, consistently with the
purpose which Psychology subserves, be employed, even as a working
hypothesis throughout the whole field of psychological investigation
itself. When the attempt to extend its employment to the whole sphere of
psychical processes is seriously made, it leads inevitably to the crude
fatalism of the doctrine that there is no such thing as choice or action
(free or otherwise) in the universe. In actual practice, the supporters
of Parallelism, who reject this doctrine when it is explicitly avowed
under the name of Epiphenomenalism, only succeed in doing so because
they do not really insist on carrying out the parallelistic hypothesis
in their Psychology. They commonly make their hypothesis prominent,
while they are dealing with the comparatively passive and routine-like
aspects of mental life, association, habituation, etc., but allow
themselves to lose sight of it as soon as they come to treat of such
explicitly teleological concepts as attention and choice. Their
procedure is also rendered easier for them by the liberal use which
evolutionary biologists, even while professing with their lips fidelity
to the mechanical postulates, allow themselves to make of teleological
categories which are really purely psychological.

It would be an easy task, if space permitted, to show in detail how the
fundamentally different principles underlying the construction of the
mechanical and the teleological series involve the presence, in the
individual members of each series, of characters to which nothing
corresponds in those of the other. Thus we might ask, with Dr. Ward,
what corresponds in the psychical scheme to the composition of the units
of the physiological scheme out of their various chemical components,
and of these, again, out of more elementary physical “prime atoms”?[182]
or, from the opposite side, we might ask, what is the cerebral
equivalent, in terms of a rigidly mechanical Physiology, of the
psychological character of “meaning” or “significance”? But the
multiplication of these problems becomes superfluous if the reader has
once grasped our principle, that exact correspondence is only possible
between series which are either both mechanical or both—and both in the
same degree—teleological. Between a genuinely teleological and an
honestly mechanical series such correspondence is logically impossible,
because of the fundamental difference between their types of
construction.

§ 7. For the reasons just produced, it is, I think, necessary to hold
that the oldest and simplest hypothesis of the connection between body
and mind, that of _Interaction_, is after all the most satisfactory.
According to this view, the two series cannot be thought of as
presenting an exact correspondence, and must be thought of as causally
influencing each other at different points, precisely as any two sets of
physical events do. If we adopt it we shall recognise in sensation a
psychical state which has physical processes among its immediate
antecedents, and in motor reaction similarly a physical process with
psychical antecedents. It is scarcely to be denied that this conception
of body and mind, as two things which stand in causal relation, is the
hypothesis which most naturally presents itself, when once we have
artificially broken up the unity of immediate experience into a physical
and a psychical side, and so created the problem of psychophysical
connection. So natural is it, that even psychologists who accept one of
the other hypotheses are to be found constantly speaking of voluntary
movement in terms which, if they mean anything, imply causal
determination of bodily by mental process, while no psychologist of any
school has ever succeeded in expressing the relation of sensation to
stimulus in any other phraseology than that of Interaction. Probably the
hypothesis would never have been exposed to hostile criticism at all,
but for the metaphysical objections, already dismissed by us as
fallacious, founded upon the notion that the mechanical postulates with
which Interaction conflicts are ascertained truths about the actual
structure of the reality with which we are in touch in immediate
experience.

It is clear that, from the nature of the problem to be solved, we cannot
be called upon to _prove_ the actual occurrence of psychophysical
interaction. As a working hypothesis for the interrelation of two sets
of scientific abstractions, the theory is in principle incapable of
direct establishment by the “appeal to facts.” All that is requisite for
its justification is to show that it is (_a_) not in principle at
variance with any fundamental axiom of scientific procedure, and (_b_)
enables us to co-ordinate our scientific results in the manner most
suitable for the uses to which we propose to put them. Both these
conditions are fulfilled by the hypothesis of Interaction, if our
foregoing arguments are sound. We have seen the fallacious nature of the
objections brought against it on _a priori_ grounds of logical method,
and have also seen that it is positively demanded if we are at once to
be faithful to the mechanical postulates upon which physical science
depends for its successes, and to recognise in our psychological
constructions that teleological character of human action which is
all-essential for History and Ethics. In substance this is the whole
case for the Interaction hypothesis, and no further accession of
strength would result from its elaboration in detail.

It may be added that it is one great recommendation of the hypothesis of
Interaction, that it is quite consistent with the full recognition of
the relative usefulness of the alternative theories, though they, as we
have seen, are unable to do justice to those aspects of fact which can
only be expressed in terms of Interaction. Thus the hypothesis of
Interaction can readily afford to admit that, for certain purposes and
up to a certain point, it is possible to treat physical or psychical
processes _as if_ they were determined solely by physical or psychical
conditions respectively, and even to treat some physical processes _as
if_ the presence of their psychical concomitants made no difference at
all to their occurrence. The reason of this is, that whereas a
mechanical hypothesis can give no intelligible account of a purposive
process at all, a teleological hypothesis can quite easily account for
the apparently mechanical character of some of the processes which fall
under it. As we have seen (Book III. chap. 3, § 6), a purposive
reaction, once established, approximates to mechanical uniformity in the
regularity with which it continues to be repeated, while the conditions
are unchanged, and the end of the reaction is therefore still secured by
its repetition.

Thus we can readily see that, even if we contented ourselves with the
attempt to translate into the language of psychological science the
processes which make up the life of an individual subject, many of them
would appear to be going on with routine uniformity. And when we
deliberately set ourselves to obtain uniformities by taking an average
result, derived from comparison of a multitude of subjects, our results
are, of course, always mechanical in appearance, because the element of
individual purpose and initiative has been excluded by ourselves from
our data in the very process of taking the average. Hence we can
understand how, on the hypothesis of Interaction itself, all those
mental processes which consist in the repetition of an already
established type of reaction should come to appear mechanical, and thus
to suggest that mechanical conception of psychical processes which is
common to the epiphenomenalist and the parallelist view. Interaction,
and Interaction alone, is thus a hypothesis capable of being applied to
the _whole_ field of psychological investigation.

I will conclude this chapter with some considerations on the bearing of
our result upon the special problems of Metaphysics. We have explicitly
defended Interaction as being no statement of actual experienced fact,
but a working hypothesis for the convenient correlation of two
scientific constructions, neither of which directly corresponds to the
actualities of experience. This means, of course, that Interaction
cannot possibly be the final truth for Metaphysics. It cannot ultimately
be the “fact” that “mind” and “body” are things which react upon each
other, because, as we have seen, neither “mind” nor “body” is an actual
datum of experience; for direct experience and its social relations, the
duality subsequently created by the construction of a physical order
simply has no existence. Nor can it be maintained that this duality,
though not directly given as a datum, is a concept which has to be
assumed in order to make experience consistent with itself, and is
therefore the truth. For the concept of Interaction manifestly reposes
upon the logically prior conception of the physical as a rigidly
mechanical system. It is because we have first constructed the notion of
the “body” on rigidly mechanical lines that we have subsequently to
devise the concept of “mind” or “soul” as a means of recognising and
symbolising in our science the non-mechanical character of actual human
life. And since we have already seen that the mechanical, as such,
cannot be real, this whole scheme of a mechanical and a non-mechanical
system in causal relation with one another can only be an imperfect
substitute for the Reality it is intended to symbolise. In fact, we
might have drawn the same conclusion from the very fact that the
psychophysical hypothesis we have adopted is couched in terms of
Transeunt Causality, since we have already satisfied ourselves that all
forms of the causal postulate are more or less defective appearance.

The proposition that the psychophysical theory of the “connection” of
“body” and “mind” is an artificial transformation, due to the needs of
empirical science, of the actual teleological unity of human experience,
is sometimes expressed by the statement that mind and body are really
one and the same thing. In its insistence upon the absence of the
psychophysical duality from actual experience, this saying is correct
enough, but it perhaps fails to express the truth with sufficient
precision. For, as it stands, the saying conveys no hint of the very
different levels on which the two concepts stand in respect to the
degree of truth with which they reproduce the purposive teleological
character of real human experience. It would perhaps be nearer the mark
to say that, while the physiologist’s object, the “body,” and the
psychologist’s object, the “mind,” are alike conceptual symbols,
substituted, from special causes, for the single subject of actual life,
and may both be therefore said to “mean” or “stand for” the same thing,
their actual content is different. For what in the language of
physiology I call my “body” includes only those processes of actual life
which approximate to the mechanical ideal sufficiently closely to be
capable of being successfully treated as merely mechanical, and
therefore brought under a scheme of general “laws” of nature. Whereas
what, as a psychologist, I call my “mind” or “soul,” though it includes
processes of an approximately mechanical type, includes them only as
subordinate to the initiation of fresh individual reactions against
environment which can only be adequately expressed by teleological
categories. Thus, though “mind” and “body” in a sense mean the same
actual thing, the one stands for a fuller and clearer view of its true
nature than the other. In Dr. Stout’s terminology their _intent_ may be
the same, but their content is different.[183]

_Consult further_:—R. Avenarius, _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_; B.
Bosanquet, _Psychology of the Moral Self_, lect. 10; F. H. Bradley,
_Appearance and Reality_, chap. 23; Shadworth Hodgson, _Metaphysic of
Experience_, vol. ii. pp. 276-403; William James, _Principles of
Psychology_, vol. i. chaps. 5 and 6; H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. iii.
chaps. 1 and 5 (Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 163-198, 283-517); H.
Münsterberg, _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, i. chaps. 11. (pp. 402-436),
15 (pp. 525-562); G. F. Stout, _Manual of Psychology_,^3 Introduction,
chap. 3; James Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. lects. 11
and 12 (art. “Psychology” in Supplement to _Encyclopædia Britannica_, p.
66 ff.).

-----

Footnote 174:

Compare the following striking passage from Avenarius, _Menschliche
Weltbegriff_, p. 75: “Let an individual _M_ denote a definite whole of
‘perceived things’ (trunk, arms and hands, legs and feet, speech,
movements, etc.) and of ‘presented thoughts’ as _I_, ... then when _M_
says ‘_I_ have a brain,’ this means that a brain belongs as part to
the whole of perceived things and presented thoughts denoted as _I_.
And when _M_ says ‘_I_ have thoughts,’ this means that the thoughts
themselves belong as a part to the whole of perceived things and
presented thoughts denoted as _I_. But though thorough analysis of the
denotation of _I_ thus leads to the result that we _have_ a brain and
thought, it never leads to the result that the _brain has_ the
thoughts. The thought is, no doubt, a thought of ‘my Ego,’ but not a
thought of ‘my brain’ any more than my brain is the brain of ‘my
thought.’ _I.e._ the brain is no habitation, seat, generator,
instrument or organ, no support or substratum of _thought_. Thought is
no indweller or commander, no other half or side, and also no product,
indeed not even a physiological function or so much as a state of the
_brain_.”

Footnote 175:

As elsewhere in this work, I am using the terms “mind” and “soul” as
virtually interchangeable names for the object studied by the
psychologist. So far as there is any definite distinction of meaning
between the terms as currently used by English writers, “soul” seems
to carry with it more of the implication of substantiality and
relative independence than “mind.” It might not be amiss to adopt the
term “soul” as a name for the finite subject of experience as he is
for himself in actual social life, and to confine the name “mind” to
the construction which symbolises this subject for psychological
purposes. But the popular antithesis between soul and body is perhaps
too strongly rooted to admit of this suggestion. In earlier passages,
_e.g._, Book II. chap. 2, § 6, I have used the term “spirit” in the
sense here suggested for “soul.”

Footnote 176:

So, in dealing with astronomical problems, we are free to adopt either
the Copernican or the Ptolemaic scheme, whichever happens to be the
more _convenient_ for our special purpose. The superior _truth_ of the
Copernican system seems to mean no more than that the range of its
utility is the wider of the two. I may observe that I do not here
employ the term “utility” in the narrowly practical sense of those
philosophers who, _e.g._, condemn all speculation about the “Absolute”
on the ground of inutility. Whatever satisfies _any_ human aspiration
is for me, so far, “useful.” It follows that there is, for me, no such
thing as the “useless knowledge” which “Pragmatism” denounces. Thus,
if a man’s peace of mind depends upon speculation about the
“Absolute”—on the habits of angels, or any other topic you like (and
this is a matter in which every man must in the end decide for
himself)—Pragmatism would appear to be false to its own principle in
forbidding him to speculate.

Footnote 177:

The assumption is not always made, however. Professor Münsterberg, who
classes himself as a supporter of Parallelism, holds on metaphysical
grounds that all causal connection must be between physical states.
Hence he denies that psychical states can be causally connected with
one another, except indirectly through the causal relations of their
physical correlates. His doctrine is thus hardly to be distinguished
from Epiphenomenalism, except in terminology, though he avoids the
consequence of practical Fatalism by his insistence upon the purely
artificial nature of both the physical and the psychical series. (His
reason for refusing to admit causal relation between psychical states
is that causal connection can only be established between universals,
whereas every psychical state is _unique_. Does not this argument
imply a confusion between the actual experience and its psychological
symbol?)

Footnote 178:

Most supporters of Parallelism, it may be noted, stultify their own
case, so far as it rests on this special contention, by admitting the
causal determination of psychical states by one another, though, as
psychical states are essentially qualitative, the reduction of
causation to quantitative identity is particularly inadmissible here.
Professor Münsterberg is quite consistent, therefore, in denying
psychical causality and reducing Parallelism to Epiphenomenalism.

Footnote 179:

The reader who has followed the argument of our Third Book will not
need to be reminded that the world of purely mechanical processes is
simply an ideal construction based on postulates which we make for
their practical convenience, and in no sense a direct transcript of
the world of actual experience.

Footnote 180:

The “neutral Monism” to which the doctrine of rigid Parallelism
logically leads, when put forward as more than a working hypothesis,
will, one may hope, in England at least, fail to survive the exposure
of its illogicalities in the second volume of Professor Ward’s
_Naturalism and Agnosticism_.

Footnote 181:

This case includes, as will be apparent on a little reflection, not
only the initiation of new motor reactions upon a sensation or
percept, but also that of sensation itself as a qualitatively novel
reaction upon physiological stimulation, and thus includes both the
processes in which supporters of Interaction have always recognised
the causal interconnection of the physical and the psychical.

Footnote 182:

It is with great pleasure that I note the coincidence of my own view
on the impossibility of reconciling Parallelism with the recognition
of the psychological importance of “meaning” with that of Mr. Gibson
(essay on “The Problem of Freedom,” in _Personal Idealism_, p. 150
ff.). Professor Münsterberg’s declaration, that the consciousness
investigated by Psychology “knows nothing by its knowledge and wills
nothing by its will,” seems to me a confession of the bankruptcy of
Parallelism as a basal psychological hypothesis. Still more so his
elaborate and brilliant demonstration that the “brain” with which my
“mind” may be regarded as “parallel” is not the brain as studied and
charted by the anatomist, _i.e._ not the brain as a physical object at
all. See _Psychologie_, i. 415-428.

Footnote 183:

See his essay on “Error” in _Personal Idealism_.

-----

CHAPTER III

THE PLACE OF THE “SELF” IN REALITY

§ 1. The “self” is (1) a teleological concept, (2) implies a contrasted
not-self (where this contrast is absent from an experience there is
no genuine sense of self); (3) but the limits which divide self and
not-self are not fixed but fluctuating. The not-self is not a merely
external limit, but consists of discordant elements within the
individual, which are extruded from it by a mental construction. (4)
The self is a product of development, and has its being in the
time-series. (5) The self is never given complete in a moment of
actual experience, but is an ideal construction; probably selfhood
implies some degree of _intellectual_ development. § 2. The Absolute
or Infinite Individual, being free from all internal discord, can
have no not-self, and therefore cannot properly be called a self. §
3. Still less can it be a person. § 4. In a _society_ of selves we
have a more genuinely self-determined individual than in the single
self. Hence it would be nearer the truth to think of the Absolute as
a Society, though no finite whole adequately expresses the
Absolute’s full nature. We must remember, however, (_a_) that
probably the individuals in the Absolute are not all in _direct_
relation, and (_b_) that in thinking of it as a Society we are not
denying its real individuality. § 5. The self is not in its own
nature imperishable; as to the particular problem of its continuance
after death, no decision can be arrived at on grounds of
Metaphysics. Neither the negative presumption drawn from our
inability to understand the conditions of continuance, nor the lack
of empirical evidence, is conclusive; on the other hand, there is
not sufficient metaphysical reason for taking immortality as
certain.

§ 1. We have already, in Book II. chap. 1, § 5, incidentally raised the
question whether the whole spiritual system which we found ground to
regard as the reality of the universe, can properly be spoken of as a
“self.” We decided that to apply such a predicate to it was at least
misleading, and might prepare the way for serious intellectual
sophistication. Our discussion of the general character of psychological
conceptions has now made it possible for us to return to the problem
with reasonable hopes of being able to treat it more fully, and to
arrive at some definite conclusion as to the amount of truth embodied by
the notion of “self.”

First of all, then, let us attempt to fix the general meaning of the
concept, and to single out some of its more prominent characteristics.
It would clearly require much more space than we can spare to enumerate
all the senses in which the notion of “self” has been used in
Psychology, and the work, when done, would not be entirely germane to
our metaphysical purpose. What I propose to attempt here will be simply
to consider certain aspects of the concept of “self” which are
manifestly indispensable for the purpose of ethical and historical
appreciation, and to ask what their value is for the metaphysical
interpretation of existence.

(1) It is manifest, to begin with, that “self” is a teleological
concept. The self whose quality is revealed in Biography and History,
and judged in Ethics, has for its exclusive material our emotional
interests and purposive attitudes towards the various constituents of
our surroundings; of these, and of nothing else, our self is made. And
the self, again, is one and individual, just in so far as these
interests and purposes can be thought of as forming the expression, in
the detail of succession, of a central coherent interest or purpose.
Where this central interest appears not to exist at all, we have no
logical right to speak of a succession of purposive acts as the
expression of a single self. Thus, though it may be necessary for some
of the practical purposes of police administration to take bodily
identity as evidence of identity of self, we all recognise that what a
man does in a state of mental alienation complete enough to abolish
continuity of purpose, is not material for his biographer except in so
far as the knowledge of it may modify his interests and purposes on his
return to sanity. And even in cases where we may acquiesce in the
necessity for assuming responsibility before the law for “deeds done in
the body,” conscience acquits us of moral guilt if we honestly feel we
can say, “I was not myself when it was done.”[184] The teleological
character of the unity we ascribe to the self is further illustrated by
the puzzles suggested by the “alternate” and “multiple” personalities
occasionally brought to light in the study of hypnotism and of mental
pathology. Finally, in the fairly numerous cases of “conversion,” where
a man, as we say, becomes a “new being” or parts with his “old self,” we
only recognise him as identical with his past self in so far as we
succeed in thinking of his “new life” as being the expression of aims
and interests which were, at least implicitly and as “tendencies,”
already present, though concealed, in the “old.”

(2) The self implies, and has no existence apart from, a not-self, and
it is only in the contrast with the not-self that it is aware of itself
as a self. This seems to me clear, as a matter of principle, though the
consequences of the principle are in much current speculation partly
misconceived, partly neglected. The most important among them, for our
purposes, are the following. The feeling of self is certainly not an
inseparable concomitant of all our experience. For it only arises—and
here nothing but direct experimentation can be appealed to as
evidence—as a contrast-effect in connection with our awareness of a
not-self, whether as imposing restraints upon the expression of the
self, or as undergoing modification by the self. Hence experiences from
which this contrast is absent seem to exhibit no trace of genuine
“self-consciousness.”[185] Feeling, where you can get it in its simple
form, seems to be universally allowed to be an instance in point. Much
of our perception appears to me, though I know the view is not widely
current among psychologists, to be in the same position. _E.g._,
normally when I am looking at an object, say for instance, a
white-washed wall, I do not find that I am in any real sense “conscious
of self.” The content of my awareness seems, to me at least, to be just
the wall in a setting of a mass of unanalysed feeling, organic and
other, which you may, if you please, from your standpoint as an external
observer, call my perceiving self, but of which I am only aware _as_ the
setting of the perceived wall.

It is only when attention to the content of the perception becomes
difficult (as, _e.g._, through fatigue of the organs of sense, or
conflict with some incompatible purpose) that I am normally aware of the
perceived object as a not-self opposed to and restricting my self. The
same is, I think, true of much of our life of conscious purposive
action. I do not find that in my intellectual pursuit of a chosen study,
or again in my social relations to the other members of my community, I
have explicit awareness of the “facts” of science, or the interests and
purposes of others as a not-self with which my own interests are
contrasted as those of the self, except in so far as I either find these
facts and interests in actual collision with some aim of my own, or
experience the removal of such a collision. In ordinary social life, for
instance, I have a strong feeling of self as opposed to not-self when
the plans of some member of my immediate circle clash with my own, and
again when I succeed in winning such a recalcitrant over to my own side;
my self in the one case feels repression, in the other expansion. But I
do not think it can be said that the self-feeling arises in actual life
where there is temporarily no consciousness of opposition or its
removal. For instance, while we are harmoniously working with other men
for a previously concerted end, the consciousness of self and its
contrasted not-self scarcely appears to enter into our experience.[186]
This is, I presume, why practical worldly wisdom has always regarded
“self-consciousness” as a source of weakness and moral failure. While we
are steadily engaged in the progressive execution of a purpose, we “lose
ourselves” in the work; it is only upon a check that we become
“self-conscious.”

(3) The next point to be noted is that there is no definite line of
demarcation between self and not-self. In particular, we must not fall
into the error of supposing that the whole _content_ of the relation
between self and not-self is _social_,—the self on its side consisting
of me, and the not-self of other men. It is true, no doubt, that the
_origin_ of the distinction is mainly social, since it is in the main
through experience of what it is to have my execution of a desired act
repressed by others, and again to have the stumbling-blocks which have
previously restricted my action removed by their co-operation, that I
come to be definitely aware of what I want, and of the fact that it is I
who want it. But it would be hard to show that the distinction between
the self and the not-self could not originate at all except in a social
medium, and it is clear that the range of its applicability, when
originated, is not limited to the social relation. There seems, on the
one hand, to be no feature in our experience whatever which is entirely
excluded from entering into the constitution of what is felt as the
self. My social intimates, my professional colleagues, my regular
occupations, even my clothes or articles of furniture, to which I have
grown accustomed, may be so essential to the continuity of my
characteristic interests in life that their removal would make my
character unrecognisable, or possibly even lead to insanity or death.
And as thus indispensable to the teleological unity or my existence, all
these “external” objects seem to be capable of passing into and becoming
part of the self.

We see an extreme instance of this in the case of the savage
transplanted into civilised surroundings, who fails in body and mind and
finally dies, without recognisable disease, simply from the
disappearance of the interests connected with his old surroundings; or
that of the clinging affectionate persons who, in the same way, fade
away upon the loss of a beloved relative or friend. In a minor degree we
see the same thing in those changes of character which common speech
happily describe by such phrases as “he has never been himself since—his
wife died, since he lost that money,” and so forth. In principle there
seems to be no factor of what we should currently call the self’s
environment which may not in this way come to be part of the content of
the self.[187]

On the other side, it seems difficult to say whether there is anything
which ordinarily forms part of the “self” which may not, under special
conditions, become a part of what we recognise as the “not-self.” Thus
our bodily feelings and sensations, our thoughts and desires, and in
particular our virtuous and vicious habits, are usually reckoned as
definitely belonging to our self. Yet in so far as we can think of any
desire or habit as an element which is discordant with the rest of our
self, and ought not to be there,—and the whole business of moral
progress depends on our being able to take up this attitude,—we, so far,
relegate that element to the not-self. To will the habit or desire to be
otherwise is already, in principle, to expel it from the teleological
unity which makes up our inner life. So again with our thoughts: in so
far as we can suspend our assent to a judgment, and balance reasons for
or against accepting it into the general system of our beliefs, the
judgment clearly belongs to the external not-self.

Yet it is at least conceivable that there may be intellectual as well as
moral habits so deeply engrained in our constitution that we cannot thus
set them over-against the self for judgment and sentence. We must not
deny that there are cases in which we could not will or think
differently, or even mentally entertain the possibility of thinking or
willing differently, without the destruction of our life’s continuity of
purpose. Again, our bodily sensations seem to belong in a very special
way to our self. Yet in so far as we can acquire the power of
voluntarily observing them, or again of withdrawing attention from them,
they are in principle reduced to the position of elements in the
not-self.

Even pleasure and pain do not seem to belong inalienably to the self’s
side of the contrast. _E.g._, to adapt a Platonic illustration, if I
feel pleasure in contemplating the vulgar or obscene, and at the same
time feel disgusted with myself for being so pleased, the pleasure seems
in the act of condemnation to be recognised as no part of my “true”
self, but an alien element obtruded on the self against its nature.
Pain, by reason of that urgency and insistency which give it its
biological importance, is much harder to banish from the self; but
experience, I think, will convince any one who cares to make the
experiment, that bodily pains, when not too intense (_e.g._, a
moderately severe toothache), can, by directing attention to their
sensational quality, be sometimes made to appear as definitely foreign
to the experiencing self. And the history of asceticism, ancient and
modern, as well as the practice of “mind-curers,” suggests that this
process of extrusion can be carried further than we commonly suspect.

Organic or “common” sensations of general bodily condition probably form
the element in experience which most obstinately resists all attempts to
sever it from the whole self and treat it as a foreign object, though in
some cases we certainly seem able to extrude the organic sensation from
the felt self by analysis of its quality and “localisation.” Still, it
must be admitted that if there are any elements in experience which are
absolutely incapable of transference to the not-self, they are probably
in the main masses of unanalysed and unanalysable organic
sensation.[188]

All these considerations make two points very clear. (_a_) The self in
which we are interested in Ethics and History is not anything with
definitely fixed boundaries. The line dividing it from its complement,
the not-self, is one which we cannot draw according to any precise
logical rule; and again, what is at one time on one side of the boundary
is at another on the other. If there is any part of our experience at
all which must be regarded as always and essentially belonging to the
self’s side of the dividing line, it will in all probability be merely
masses of bodily feeling which are manifestly _not_ the whole of what
Ethics and History contemplate when they appraise the worth of a
self.[189]

Further, a conclusion follows as to the nature of the opposition of self
to not-self. The not-self, as the readiness with which most of the
contents of experience can pass from one side of the antithesis to the
other shows, is in a sense included in at the very time that it is
excluded from the self. The various factors of which the not-self can,
at different times, be composed, our fellows, the physical world,
thoughts, habits, feelings, all agree in possessing one common
characteristic; when referred to the self, they are all elements of
discord within the whole of present experience, and it is on account of
this discordancy that we treat them as foreign to our real nature, and
therefore as belonging to the not-self. We may thus say with accuracy
that what is ascribed to the not-self is so ascribed because previously
found to be discrepant, and therefore excluded from the self; in other
words, the not-self is not an external limit which we somehow _find_ in
experience side by side with the self, but is _constructed_ out of
experience-data by the extrusion of those data which, if admitted into
the self, would destroy its harmony. Thus we finite beings are
confronted by a not-self ultimately because in our very finitude, as we
have seen in earlier chapters, we contain in ourselves a principle of
strife and disharmony. The not-self is no merely external environment,
but an inevitable consequence of the imperfection of internal structure
which belongs to all finitude.

(4) The self is essentially a thing of development, and as such has its
being in the time-process. This is a point upon which it seems for many
reasons necessary to insist. Its truth seems manifest from our previous
consideration of the nature of the experiences upon which the concept of
the self is based. As we have seen, it is primarily to our experience of
internal disharmony and the collision of purpose that we owe our
distinction between self and not-self. And such experience seems only
possible to beings who can oppose an ideal of what ought to be, however
dimly that ideal may be apprehended, to what is. A being who either was
already all that it was its nature to become, or was incapable of in
some way apprehending the fact that it was not so, would thus not have
in its experience any material for the distinction between the self and
the foreign and hostile elements in experience. And, as we have already
seen in our Third Book, time is the expression in abstract form of the
fundamental nature of an experience which has as yet attained only the
partial fulfilment of its purpose and aspirations, and is therefore
internally subject to that want of perfect harmony in which we have now
sought the origin of the distinction between self and not-self. Hence we
may, I think, take it as certain, at least for us who accept this
account of the origin of the self concept, that selves are necessarily
in time and as such are necessarily products of development.

This conclusion seems in accord with positive facts which are too well
established to permit of question. It is probable that there is not a
single element in what I call my present self which is not demonstrably
the product of my past development, physical and mental. Nor does it
appear reasonable to contend that though the material of my existing
self is a result of development, its form of selfhood is underived. It
is not merely that my present self is not as my past self, but we cannot
avoid the admission that my mental life is the result of a process of
development by which it is continuously connected with that of the
embryo and even the spermatozoon. And thus it seems to have its
beginnings in experiences which are probably so little removed from
simple feeling as to afford no opportunity for the sense of self as
contrasted with not-self. Or if we maintain that the contrast cannot be
altogether absent from even the crudest forms of experience, we still
have to reckon with the fact that, one stage further back in my personal
history, I had no existence even as an animalcule. An embryonic self is
at least not positively inconceivable, but where was Levi’s selfhood
while he was yet in the loins of his father? If we will consider what we
mean when we say we have all had parents, it will, I think, be confessed
that our self must be admitted to have been actually originated in the
course of development, impossible as we find it to imagine the stage of
such a process.[190]

(5) Finally, we must deal briefly with one more point of some
importance. The self, as we can now see, is never identical with
anything that could be found completely existing at any one moment in my
mental life. For one thing, it is thought of as having a temporal
continuity which goes far beyond anything that can be immediately
experienced at any given moment. It stretches out both into the past and
the future beyond the narrow limits of the “sensible present.” Again,
this temporal continuity is only an abstract expression of the inner
sameness and continuity of aims and interests we ascribe to the self. My
experiences are, as we have seen, thought of as being the life of one
self ultimately because I look on them as the harmonious expression of a
consistent attitude of interest in the world. And any elements in
experience which will not coalesce in such a harmony are, by one device
or another, extruded from the true self and declared to be alien
intruders from elsewhere. Now, in real life we never find this complete
and absolute harmony of the contents of experience; there are always, if
we look for them, elements in our actual experience which are
discordant, and conflict with the system of interests which, on the
whole, dominates it. Hence self, in the last resort, is seen to be an
_ideal_ which actual experience only imperfectly realises,—the ideal of
a system of purposes and interests absolutely in harmony with itself.
And there must be, at least, grave doubt as to the logical
self-consistency of this ideal, doubts which we must shortly face.

For the present the point to which I want to call attention is this.
Must we say that any degree of felt continuity of existence is enough to
constitute rudimentary selfhood, or ought we to hold that there is no
true self where there is not at least as much _intellectual_ development
as is implied in the power to _remember_ the past and _anticipate_ the
future, as one’s own? In other words, are we to make selfhood as wide in
its range as sentient life, or to limit it to life sufficiently rational
to involve some distinct and explicit _recognition_ of the contrast
between self and not-self? This is perhaps, in the main, a question as
to terminology; for my own part, I confess I find the second alternative
the more satisfactory. I do not see that such a degree of teleological
continuity as is implied in the mere feeling of pain, for instance,
deserves to be recognised as genuine selfhood; and there is, I think, in
the unrestricted use of the term self, selfhood, as applied to merely
feeling consciousness, a danger of ambiguity. When we have once applied
the terms in such a case, we are inevitably tempted to over-interpret
the facts of such simple mental life in order to bring them into fuller
accord with what we know of selfhood in our own life.[191] At the same
time, it is clear that we have no right dogmatically to deny the
presence of the intellectual processes involved in the recognition of
self where our methods of observation fail to detect them.

§ 2. We may now approach the problem of the degree of reality which
belongs to the self. We have to ask, how far is the conception of self
applicable to the individual experiences which in our Second Book we
identified as the contents of the system of real existence? Is the
infinite individual experience properly to be called a self? Again, is
every finite experience a self? And how must we take finite selves, if
they are real, to be related to each other? Lastly, perhaps, we might be
called on in this connection to face the question how far an individual
finite self is more than a _temporary_ feature in the system of
existence. Our conclusions on all these points were no doubt in
principle decided by the discussions of our Second Book, but it is
desirable to make some of them more explicit than was possible there.

First, then, I think it is clear that the infinite experience or
“Absolute” cannot properly be called a self. This is immediately
apparent if our view as to the essential implications of self-feeling be
accepted. We have urged that self is only apprehended as such in
contrast to a simultaneously apprehended not-self. And the not-self, we
have seen, is composed of all the discordant elements of experience, so
far as their discord has not been overcome. It was for this reason that
we held the self to be indissolubly bound up with that experience of the
world as a process in time, with a “no longer” and “not yet,” which is
the universal characteristic of finitude. It must follow that an
experience which contains no discordant elements, in their character as
unresolved discords, is not characterised by the contrast-effect which
is the foundation of selfhood. An experience which contains the whole of
Reality as a perfectly harmonious whole can apprehend nothing as outside
or opposed to itself, and for that very reason cannot be qualified by
what we know as the sense of self.

To put the same thing in another way, “self” as we have seen, is
essentially an ideal, and an ideal which is apprehended as contrasted
with the present actuality. Hence only beings who are aware of
themselves as in process of becoming more fully harmonious in their life
of feeling and purpose than they at present are, can be aware of
themselves as selves. Self and imperfection are inseparable, and any
being which knows nothing of the opposition between the ideal and the
actual, the _ought_ and the _is_, must also know nothing of the feeling
of self. Or in yet a third form of words, only creatures whose life is
in time—and therefore only finite creatures—can be selves, since the
time-experience is an integral constituent of selfhood.

One objection which might be brought against this inference is
sufficiently ingenious to deserve special examination. It may be urged
that though the experience of imperfection and thwarted purpose are
conditions without which we in particular could not come to the
apprehension of self, they do not remain as ingredients in the
experience of selfhood when once it has been developed. Hence, it might
be said, the “Absolute” may conceivably have the experience without
having to acquire it through these conditions. In general principle, no
doubt this line of argument is sound enough. It is perfectly true that
the special conditions through which we come to have experience of a
certain quality cannot, without investigation, be taken as everywhere
indispensable for that experience. _E.g._, even if it were proved that
the pessimists are right in saying that _we_ never experience pleasure
except as a contrast with previous pain, it would still not follow that
the pleasure, as felt, _is_ the mere rebound from the pain, and has no
further positive quality of its own, and it would then still be an open
question whether other beings might not experience the pleasure without
the antecedent pain. But the principle does not seem applicable to the
case now under consideration, since it is our contention that the
contrast of the discordant factor with the rest of the experience to
which it belongs is not simply an antecedent condition, but is in fact
the central core of the actual apprehension of self. It is not simply
that we do not, if our previous analysis has been correct, have the
feeling of self except in cases where such a contrast is present, but
that the feeling of self _is_ the feeling of the contrast. Hence our
result seems untouched by the undoubtedly sound general principle to
which we have referred.

That our conclusion is so frequently opposed by philosophers who adopt a
generally idealistic position, is, I believe, to be accounted for by the
prevalence of the belief that experience, as such, is essentially
characterised by consciousness of self. To experience at all, it is
commonly thought, is to be aware of one’s _self_ as in relation to an
environment of the not-self. Hence to deny that the absolute Reality is
a self is often thought to be equivalent to denying that it is an
experience at all and this, from the idealistic point of view, would
mean to deny that it is real. But if our previous analysis was sound, it
is not even true of human experience as such that it is everywhere
conditioned by the felt contrast of self with not-self. From the point
of view of that analysis, the contrast only exists where there is felt
discord between experience as a whole and some of its constituents. The
conception of our experience as essentially marked by a sense of self,
must therefore rest upon our intellectual reconstruction effected by the
transparent fiction of ascribing to every experience features which
analysis detects only in special cases and under special conditions.
Hence it is quite possible for us to unite the affirmation that all real
existence ultimately forms a single experience-system, with the denial
that that system is qualified by the contrast-effect we know as the
sense of self. How, indeed, should that outside which there is nothing
to afford the contrast, so distinguish itself from a purely imaginary
other?[192]

§ 3. If the Absolute is not a self, _a fortiori_ it is manifest that it
cannot be a “Person.” Exactly how much is intended when the
“personality” of the Absolute, or indeed of anything else, is affirmed,
it would not be easy to determine. A “self” does not seem to be
necessarily a “person,” since those philosophers who hold that there is
no reality but that of selves, while admitting that the lower animals
are selves, do not usually call them persons. But it is hard to say how
much more is included in personality than in selfhood. If we bear in
mind that personality is, in its origin, a _legal_ conception, and that
it is usually ascribed only to human beings, or to such superhuman
intelligences as are held capable of associating on terms of mutual
obligation with human beings, we may perhaps suggest the following
definition. A person is a being capable of being the subject of the
specific obligations attaching to a specific position in human society.
And it becomes manifest that, if this is so, personality is, as Mr.
Bradley has said, finite or meaningless.

For a society of persons is essentially one of ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι, social
peers, with purposes mutually complementary though not identical, and
standing in need of each other’s aid for the realisation of those
purposes. Only those beings are personal for me whose aims and purposes
are included along with mine in some wider and more harmonious system,
and to whom I therefore am bound by ties of reciprocal obligation. But
it is clear that, to ask whether the wider system which is thus the
foundation of our mutual rights and duties as persons, is itself a
person, would be ridiculous. Thus, _e.g._, there would be no sense in
asking whether “human society”—the foundation of our moral
personality—is itself a person. You might, in fact, as reasonably ask
whether it can be sued for trespass or assessed under schedule D for
Income Tax.

Still more manifestly is this true of the Absolute which includes within
it all the (conceivably infinitely numerous) groups of mutually
recognising persons, and all those other forms of experience which we
cannot properly call personal. Between the whole system and its
component elements there can be no such relation of mutual
supplementation and completion as is the essence of genuine personality.
If the system, as a whole, may be said to supplement and correct our
defects and shortcomings, we cannot be said, in any way, to supplement
it; the Absolute and I are emphatically not, in any true sense, ἴσοι καὶ
ὅμοιοι, and the relation between us cannot therefore be thought of as
personal. All this is so obvious, that, as I take it, the personality of
the Absolute or whole of existence would find no defenders but for the
gratuitous assumption that whatever is an individual experience or
spiritual unity must be personal. This, as far as I can see, is to
assume that such an individual _must_ have an external environment of
other experience-subjects of the same degree of harmonious and
comprehensive individuality. And for this assumption I can, speaking for
myself, see no ground whatever.[193]

§ 4. If we cannot, then, properly say that the Absolute, or the
Universe,—or whatever may be our chosen name for the infinite individual
which is the whole of existence,—is a self or person, can we say that
the finite individuals which compose it are one and all selves, and that
the Absolute is therefore a society of selves? Our answer to this
question must depend, I think, upon two considerations,—(_a_) the amount
of continuity we regard as essential to a self, and (_b_) the kind of
unity we attribute to a society.

(_a_) If we regard _any_ and every degree of felt teleological
continuity as sufficient to constitute a self, it is clear that we shall
be compelled to say that selves, and selves only, are the material of
which reality is composed. For we have already agreed that Reality is
exclusively composed of psychical fact, and that all psychical facts are
satisfactions of some form of subjective interest or craving, and
consequently that every psychical fact comprised in the whole system of
existence must form part of the experience of a finite individual
subject. Hence, if every such subject, whatever its degree of
individuality, is to be called a self, there will be no facts which are
not included somewhere in the life of one or more selves. On the other
hand, if we prefer, as I have done myself, to regard some degree of
intellectual development, sufficient for the _recognition_ of certain
permanent interests as those of the self, as essential to selfhood, we
shall probably conclude that the self is an individual of a relatively
high type, and that there are consequently experiences of so imperfect a
degree of teleological continuity as not to merit the title of selves.

And this conclusion seems borne out by all the empirically ascertained
facts of, _e.g._, the life of the lower animals, of human infants, and
again of adults of abnormally defective intellectual and moral
development. Few persons, unless committed to the defence of a theory
through thick and thin, would be prepared to call a worm a self, and
most of us would probably feel some hesitation about a new-born baby or
a congenital idiot. Again, finite societies are clearly components of
Reality, yet, as we have seen, it is probably an error to speak of a
society as a self, though every true society is clearly an individual
with a community and continuity of purpose which enable us rightly to
regard it as a unity capable of development, and to appreciate its
ethical worth. Hence it is, perhaps, less likely to lead to
misunderstandings if we say simply that the constituents of reality are
finite individual experiences, than if we say that they are selves. The
self, as we have seen, is a psychological category which only
imperfectly represents the facts of experience it is employed to
correlate.

(_b_) Again, if we speak of the Absolute as a society of finite
individuals, we ought at least to be careful in guarding ourselves
against misunderstanding. Such an expression has certainly some manifest
advantages. It brings out both the spiritual character of the system of
existence and the fact that, though it contains a plurality of finite
selves and contains them without discord, it is not properly thought of
as a self, but as a community of many selves.

At the same time, such language is open to misconstructions, some of
which it may be well to enumerate. We must not, for instance, assume
that all the individuals in the Absolute are necessarily in _direct_
social interrelation. For social relation, properly speaking, is only
possible between beings who are ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι at least in the sense of
having interests of a sufficiently identical kind to permit of
intercommunication and concerted cooperation for the realisation of a
common interest. And our own experience teaches us that the range of
existence with which we ourselves stand in this kind of relation is
limited. Even within the bounds of the human race the social relations
of each of us with the majority of our fellows are of an indirect kind,
and though with the advance of civilisation the range of those relations
is constantly being enlarged, it still remains to be seen whether a
“cosmopolitan” society is a realisable ideal or not. With the non-human
animal world our social relations, in consequence of the greater
divergence of subjective interest, are only of a rudimentary kind, and
with what appears to us as inanimate nature, as we have already seen,
direct social relation seems to be all but absolutely precluded.

Among the non-human animals, again, we certainly find traces of
relations of a rudimentarily social kind, but once more only within
relatively narrow limits; the different species and groups seem in the
main to be indifferent to one another. And we have no means of
disproving the possibility that there may be in the universe an
indefinite plurality of social groups, of an organisation equal or
superior to that of our human communities, but of a type so alien to our
own that no direct communication, not even of the elementary kind which
would suffice to establish their existence, is possible. We must be
prepared to entertain the possibility, then, that the individuals
composing the Absolute fall into a number of groups, each consisting of
members which have direct social relations of some kind with each other,
but not with the members of other groups.

And also, of course, we must remember that there may very well be
varieties of degree of structural complexity in the social groups
themselves. In some the amount of intelligent recognition on the part of
the individuals of their own and their fellows’ common scheme of
interests and purposes is probably less articulate, in others, again, it
may be more articulate than is the case in those groups of co-operating
human beings which form the only societies of which we know anything by
direct experience.

On the other hand, we must, if we speak of the Absolute as a society, be
careful to avoid the implication, which may readily arise from a false
conception of human societies, that the unity of the Absolute is a mere
conceptual fiction or “point of view” of our own, from which to regard
what is really a mere plurality of separate units. In spite of the now
fairly complete abandonment in words of the old atomistic theories,
which treated society as if it were a mere collective name for a
multitude of really independent “individuals,” it may be doubted whether
we always realise what the rejection of this view implies. We still tend
too much to treat the selves which compose a society, at least in our
Metaphysics, as if they were given to us in direct experience as
_merely_ exclusive of one another, rather than as complementary to one
another. In other words, of the two typical forms of experience from
which the concept of self appears to be derived, the experience of
conflict between our subjective interests and our environment, and that
of the removal of the discord, we too often pay attention in our
Metaphysics to the former to the neglect of the latter. But in actual
life it is oftener the latter that is prominent in our relations with
our fellow-men. _We_—the category of co-operation—is at least as
fundamental in all human thought and language as _I_ and _thou_, the
categories of mutual exclusion. That you and I are mutually
complementary factors in a wider whole of common interests, is at least
as early a discovery of mankind as that our private interests and
standpoints collide.

If we speak of existence as a society, then we must be careful to
remember that the individual unity of a society is just as real a fact
of experience as the individual unity of the members which compose it,
and that, when we call the Absolute a society rather than a self, we do
not do so with any intention of casting doubt upon its complete
spiritual unity as an individual experience. With these restrictions, it
would, I think, be fair to say that if the Absolute cannot be called a
society without qualification, at any rate human society affords the
best analogy by which we can attempt to represent its systematic unity
in a concrete conceptual form. To put it otherwise, a genuine human
society is an individual of a higher type of structure than any one of
the selves which compose it, and therefore more adequately represents
the structure of the one ultimately complete system of the Absolute.

We see this more particularly in the superior independence of Society as
compared with one of its own members. It is true, of course, that no
human society could exist apart from an external environment, but it
does not appear to be as necessary to the existence of society as to
that of a single self, that it should be sensible of the contrast
between itself and its rivals. As we have already sufficiently seen, it
is in the main from the experience of contrast with other human selves
that I come by the sense of my own selfhood. Though the contents of my
concept of self are not purely social, it does at least seem clear that
I could neither acquire it, nor retain it long, except for the presence
of other like selves which form the complement to it. But though history
teaches how closely similar is the part played by war and other
relations between different societies in developing the sense of a
common national heritage and purpose, yet a society, once started on its
course of development, does appear to be able to a large extent to
flourish without the constant stimulus afforded by rivalry or
co-operation with other societies. One man on a desert land, if left
long enough to himself, would probably become insane or brutish; there
seems no sufficient reason to hold that a single civilised community,
devoid of relations with others, could not, if its internal organisation
were sufficiently rich, flourish in a purely “natural” environment. On
the strength of this higher self-sufficiency, itself a consequence of
superior internal wealth and harmony, a true society may reasonably be
held to be a finite individual of a higher type than a single human
self.

The general result of this discussion, then, seems to be, that neither
in the self nor in society—at any rate in the only forms of it we know
to exist—do we find the complete harmony of structure and independence
of external conditions which are characteristic of ultimate reality.
Both the self and society must therefore be pronounced to be finite
appearance, but of the two, society exhibits the fuller and higher
individuality, and is therefore the more truly real. We found it quite
impossible to regard the universe as a single self; but, with certain
important qualifications, we said that it might be thought of as a
society without very serious error.[194] It will, of course, follow from
what has been said, that we cannot frame any finally adequate conception
of the way in which all the finite individual experiences form the unity
of the infinite experiences. That they must form such a perfect unity we
have seen in our Second Book; that the unity of a society is, perhaps,
the nearest analogy by which we can represent it, has been shown in the
present paragraph. That we have no higher categories which can
adequately indicate the precise way in which all existence ultimately
forms an even more perfect unity, is an inevitable consequence of the
fact of our own finitude. We cannot frame the categories, because we, as
finite beings, have not the corresponding experience. To this extent, at
least, it seems to me that any sound philosophy must end with a modest
confession of ignorance.

“There is in God, men say,
A deep but dazzling darkness,”

is a truth which the metaphysician’s natural desire to know as much as
possible of the final truth, should not lead him to forget.

§ 5. This is probably the place to make some reference to the question
whether the self is a permanent or only a temporary form in which
Reality appears. In popular thought this question commonly appears as
that of the immortality (sometimes, too, of the pre-existence) of the
soul. The real issue is, however, a wider one, and the problem of
immortality only one of its subsidiary aspects. I propose to say
something briefly on the general question, and also on the special one,
though in this latter case rather with a view to indicating the line
along which discussion ought to proceed, than with the aim of suggesting
a result.

It would not, I think, be possible to deny the temporary character of
the self after the investigations of the earlier part of this chapter. A
self, we said, is one and the same only in virtue of teleological
continuity of interest and purpose. But exactly how much variation is
enough to destroy this continuity, and how much again may exist without
abolishing it, we found it impossible to determine by any general
principle. Yet the facts of individual development seemed to make it
clear that new selves—_i.e._ new unique forms of interest in the
world—come into being in the time-process, and that old ones disappear.

And again, both from mental Pathology and from normal Psychology, we
found it easy to cite examples of the formation and disappearance,
within the life-history of a single man, of selves which it seemed
impossible to regard as connected by any felt continuity of interest
with the rest of life. In the case of multiple personality, and
alternating personality, we seemed to find evidence that a plurality of
such selves might alternate regularly, or even co-exist in connection
with the same body. The less striking, but more familiar, cases of the
passing selves of our dreams, and of temporary periods in waking life
where our interest and characters are modified, but not in a permanent
way by exceptional excitements, belong in principle to the same
category. In short, unless you are to be content with a beggarly modicum
of continuity of purpose too meagre to be more than an empty name, you
seem forced to conclude that the origination and again the disappearance
of selves in the course of psychical events is a fact of constant
occurrence. No doubt, the higher the internal organisation of our
interests and purposes, the more fixed and the less liable to serious
modification in the flux of circumstance our self becomes; but a self
absolutely fixed and unalterable was, as we saw, an unrealised and, on
the strength of our metaphysical certainty that only the absolute whole
is entirely self-determined, we may add, an unrealisable ideal. We seem
driven, then, to conclude that the permanent identity of the self is a
matter of degree, and that we are not entitled to assert that the self
corresponding to a single organism need be either single or persistent.
It is possible for me, even in the period between birth and death, to
lose my old self and acquire a new one, and even to have more selves
than one, and those of different degrees of individual structure, at the
same time. Nor can we assign any certain criterion by which to decide in
all cases whether the self has been one and identical through a series
of psychical events. Beyond the general assertion that the more
completely occupied our various interests and purposes are, the more
permanent is our selfhood, we are unable to go.[195]

These considerations have an important bearing on the vexed question of
a future life. If they are justified, we clearly cannot have any
positive demonstration from the nature of the self of its
indestructibility, and it would therefore be in vain to demand that
philosophy shall prove the permanence of all selves. On the other hand,
if the permanence of a self is ultimately a function of its inner unity
of aim and purpose, there is no _a priori_ ground for holding that the
physical event of death _must_ necessarily destroy this unity, and so
that the self _must_ be perishable at death. For Metaphysics, the
problem thus seems to resolve itself into a balancing of probabilities,
and, as an illustration of the kind of consideration which has to be
taken into account, it may be worth while to inquire what probable
arguments may fairly be allowed to count on either side.

On the negative side, if we dismiss, as we fairly may, the unproved
assertions of dogmatic Materialism, we have to take account of the
possibility that a body may, for all we know, be a necessary condition
for the existence of an individual experience continuous in interest and
purpose with that of our present life, and also of the alleged absence
of any positive empirical evidence for existence after death. These
considerations, however, scarcely seem decisive. As to the first, I do
not see how it can be shown that a body is indispensable, at least in
the sense of the term “body” required by the argument. It is no doubt
true that in the experience of any individual there must be the two
aspects of fresh teleological initiative and of already systematised
habitual and quasi-mechanical repetition of useful reactions already
established, and further, that intercourse between different individuals
is only possible through the medium of such a system of established
habits. As we have already seen, what we call our body is simply a name
for such a set of habitual reactions through which intercommunication
between members of human societies is rendered possible. Hence, if we
generalise the term “body” to stand for any system of habitual reactions
discharging this function of serving as a medium of communication
between individuals forming a society, we may fairly say that a body is
indispensable to the existence of a self. But it seems impossible to
show that the possibility of such a medium of communication is removed
by the dissolution of the particular system of reactions which
constitutes our _present_ medium of intercourse. The dissolution of the
present body _might_ mean no more than the individual acquisition of
changed types of habitual reaction, types which no longer serve the
purpose of communication with the members of _our_ society, but yet may
be an initial condition of communication with other groups of
intelligent beings.

As to the absence of empirical evidence, it is, of course, notorious
that some persons at least claim to possess such evidence of the
continued existence of the departed. Until the alleged facts have been
made the subject of serious and unbiassed collection and examination, it
is, I think, premature to pronounce an opinion as to their evidential
value. I will therefore make only one observation with respect to some
of the alleged evidence from “necromancy.” It is manifest that the only
kind of continuance which could fairly be called a survival of the self,
and certainly the only kind in which we need feel any interest, would be
the persistence after death of our characteristic interests and
purposes. Unless the “soul” continued to live for aims and interests
teleologically continuous with those of its earthly life, there would be
no genuine extension of our selfhood beyond the grave. Hence any kind of
evidence for continued existence which is not at the same time evidence
for continuity of interests and purposes, is really worthless when
offered as testimony to “immortality.” The reader will be able to apply
this reflection for himself if he knows anything of the “phenomena” of
the vulgar Spiritualism.[196]

When we turn to the positive side of the question, it seems necessary to
remark that though the negative considerations we have just referred to
are not of themselves enough to disprove “immortality,” provided there
is any strong ground for taking it as a fact, they would be quite
sufficient to decide against it, unless there is positive reason for
accepting it. That we have no direct evidence of such a state of things,
and cannot see precisely _how_ in detail it could come about, would not
be good logical ground for denying its existence if it were demanded by
sound philosophical principles. On the other hand, if there were no
reasons for believing in it, and good, though not conclusive, probable
reasons against it, we should be bound to come provisionally to a
negative conclusion.

Have we then any positive grounds at all to set against the negative
considerations just discussed? Pending the result of inquiries which
have recently been set on foot, it is hard to speak with absolute
confidence; still, the study of literature does, I think, warrant us in
provisionally saying that there seems to be a strong and widely diffused
feeling, at least in the Western world, that life without any hope of
continuance after death would be an unsatisfactory thing. This feeling
expresses itself in many forms, but I think they can all be traced to
one root. Normally, as we know, the extinction of a particular
teleological interest is effected by its realisation; our purposes die
out, and our self so far suffers change, when their result has been
achieved. (And incidentally this may help us to see once more that
dissatisfaction and imperfection are of the essence of the finite self.
The finite self lives on the division of idea from reality, of intent
from execution. If the two could become identical, the self would have
lost the atmosphere from which it draws its life-breath.) Hence, if
death, in our experience, always took the form of the dissolution of a
self which had already seen its purposes fulfilled and its aims
achieved, there would probably be no incentive to desire or believe in
future continuance. But it is a familiar fact that death is constantly
coming as a violent and irrational interrupter of unrealised plans and
inchoate work. The self seems to disappear not because it has played its
part and finished its work, but as the victim of external accident. I
think that analysis would show, under the various special forms which
the desire for immortality takes, such as the yearning to renew
interrupted friendships or the longing to continue unfinished work, as
their common principle, the feeling of resentment against this apparent
defeat of intelligent purpose by brute external accident.[197]

Now, what is the logical value of this feeling as a basis for argument?
We may fairly say, on the one hand, that it rests on a sound principle.
For it embodies the conviction, of which all Philosophy is the
elaboration, that the real world is a harmonious system in which
irrational accident plays no part, and that, if we could only see the
whole truth, we should realise that there is no final and irremediable
defeat for any of our aspirations, but all are somehow made good. On the
other side, we must remember that the argument from the desire for
continuance to its reality also goes on to assert not only that our
aspirations are somehow fulfilled and our unfinished work somehow
perfected, but that this fulfilment takes place in the particular way
which we, with our present lights, would wish. And in maintaining this,
the argument goes beyond the conclusion which philosophical first
principles warrant.

For it might be that, if our insight into the scheme of the world were
less defective, we should cease to desire this special form of
fulfilment, just as in growing into manhood we cease to desire the kind
of life which appeared to us as children the ideal of happiness. The
man’s life-work may be the realisation of the child’s dreams, but it
does not realise them in the form imagined by childhood. And conceivably
it might be so with our desire for a future life. Further, of course,
the logical value of the argument from feeling must to some extent
depend upon the universality and persistence of the feeling itself. We
must not mistake for a fundamental aspiration of humanity what may be
largely the effect of special traditions and training. Hence we cannot
truly estimate the worth of the inference from feeling until we know
both how far the feeling itself is really permanent in our own society,
and how far, again, it exists in societies with different beliefs and
traditions. In itself the sentiment, _e.g._, of Christian civilisation,
cannot be taken as evidence of the universal feeling of mankind, in the
face of the apparently opposite feelings, _e.g._, of Brahmins and
Buddhists.

I should conclude, then, that the question of a future life must remain
an open one for Metaphysics. We seem unable to give any valid
metaphysical arguments for a future life, but then, on the other hand,
the negative presumptions seem to be equally devoid of cogency.
Philosophy, in this matter, to use the fine phrase of Dr. McTaggart,
“gives us hope,”[198] and I cannot, for my own part, see that it can do
more. Possibly, as Browning suggests in _La Saisiaz_, it is not
desirable, in the interests of practical life, that it should do more.
And here I must leave the question with the reader, only throwing out
one tentative suggestion for his approval or rejection as he pleases.
Since we have seen that the permanence of the self depends upon its
degree of internal harmony of structure, it is at least conceivable that
its continuance as a self, beyond the limits of earthly life, may depend
on the same condition. Conceivably the self may survive death, as it
survives lesser changes in the course of physical events, _if_ its unity
and harmony of purpose are strong enough, and not otherwise. If so, a
future existence would not be a heritage into which we are safe to step
when the time comes, but a conquest to be won by the strenuous devotion
of life to the acquisition of a rich, and at the same time orderly and
harmonious, moral selfhood. And thus the belief in a future life, in so
far as it acts in any given case as a spur to such strenuous living,
might be itself a factor in bringing about its own fulfilment. It is
impossible to affirm with certainty that this is so, but, again, we
cannot deny that it may be the case. And here, as I say, I must be
content to leave the problem.[199]

_Consult further_:—B. Bosanquet, _Psychology of the Moral Self_, lect.
5; F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 9 (The Meanings of
Self), 10 (The Reality of Self), 26 (The Absolute and its
Appearances,—especially the end of the chapter, pp. 499-511 of 1st ed.),
27 (Ultimate Doubts); L. T. Hobhouse, _Theory of Knowledge_, part 3,
chap. 5; S. Hodgson, _Metaphysic of Experience_, bk. iv. chap. 4; Hume,
_Treatise of Human Nature_, bk. i part 4, §§ 5, 6; W. James, _Principles
of Psychology_, vol. i. chap. 10; H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. iii chaps.
1 (especially § 245), 5; _Microcosmus_, bk. iii. c. 5; J. M. E.
McTaggart, _Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_, chap. 2 (for a detailed
hostile examination of Dr. McTaggart’s argument, which I would not be
understood to endorse except on special points, see G. E. Moore in
_Proceedings of Aristotelian Society_, N.S. vol. ii. pp. 188-211); J.
Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second Series, lects. 6, 7.

-----

Footnote 184:

“Bodily identity” itself, of course, might give rise to difficult
problems if we had space to go into them. Here I can merely suggest
certain points for the reader’s reflection. (1) All identity appears
in the end to be teleological and therefore psychical. I believe this
to be the _same_ human body which I have seen before, because I
believe that the interests expressed in its actions will be
continuous, experience having taught me that a certain amount of
physical resemblance is a rough-and-ready criterion of psychical
continuity. (2) As to the ethical problem of responsibility referred
to in the text, it is obviously entirely one of less and more. Our
moral verdicts upon our own acts and those of others are in practice
habitually influenced by the conviction that there are degrees of
moral responsibility within what the immediate necessities of
administration compel us to treat as absolute. We do not, _e.g._,
think a man free from all moral blame for what he does when drunk, or
undeserving of all credit for what he performs when “taken out of
himself,” _i.e._ out of the rut of his habitual interests by
excitement, but we certainly do, when not under the influence of a
theory, regard him as deserving of _less_ blame or credit, as the case
may be, for his behaviour than if he had performed the acts when he
was “more himself.” On all these topics see Mr. Bradley’s article in
_Mind_ for July 1902.

Footnote 185:

So “self-consciousness,” in the bad sense, always arises from a sense
of an incongruity between the self and some contrasted object or
environment.

Footnote 186:

Though, of course, it does appear in the process of framing and
initiating the scheme of concerted action; the other self is here
contrasted with my own, precisely because the removal of the collision
between my purpose and my environment is felt as coming from without.

Footnote 187:

It might be said that it is not these features of the environment
themselves, but my “ideas” of them, which thus belong to the self.
This sounds plausible at first, but only because we are habitually
accustomed to the “introjectionist” substitution of psychological
symbols for the actualities of life. On the question of fact, see
Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 8, p. 88 ff. (1st ed.).

Footnote 188:

A colleague of my own tells me that in his case movements of the eyes
appear to be inseparable from the consciousness of self, and are
incapable of being extruded into the not-self in the sense above
described. I do not doubt that there are, in each of us, bodily
feelings of this kind which refuse to be relegated to the not-self and
that it would be well worth while to institute systematic inquiries
over as wide an area as possible about their precise character in
individual cases. It appears to me, however, as I have stated above,
that in ordinary perception these bodily feelings often are
apprehended simply as qualifying the perceived content without any
opposition of self and not-self. At any rate, the problem is one of
those fundamental questions in the theory of cognition which are too
readily passed over in current Psychology.

Footnote 189:

Of course, you can frame the concept of a “self” from which even these
bodily feelings have been extruded, and which is thus a mere
“cognitive subject” without concrete psychical quality. But as such a
mere logical subject is certainly not the self of which we are aware
in any concrete experience, and still more emphatically not the self
in which the historical and ethical sciences are interested, I have
not thought it necessary to deal with it in the text.

Footnote 190:

That we cannot imagine it does not appear to be any ground for denying
its actuality. It is never a valid argument against a conclusion
required to bring our knowledge into harmony with itself, that we do
not happen to possess the means of envisaging it in sensuous imagery.

Footnote 191:

I venture to think that some of the rather gratuitous hypotheses as to
the rational selfhood of animal species _quà_ species put forward by
Professor Royce in the second volume of _The World and the
Individual_, are illustrations of this tendency to unnecessary
over-interpretation.

Footnote 192:

Is it necessary to refer in particular to the suggestion that for the
Absolute the contrast-effect in question may be between itself and its
component manifestations or appearances? This would only be possible
if the finite appearances were contained in the whole in some way
which allowed them to remain at discord with one another, _i.e._ in
some way incompatible with the systematic character which is the
fundamental quality of the Absolute. I am glad to find myself in
accord, on the general principle at least, with Dr. McTaggart. See the
Third Essay in his recent _Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_.

Footnote 193:

It would be fruitless to object that “societies” can, in fact, have a
legal corporate personality, and so can—to revert to the illustration
used above—be sued and taxed. What can be thus dealt with is always a
mere _association_ of definite individual human beings, who may or may
not form a genuine spiritual unity. _E.g._, you might proceed against
the Commissioners of Income Tax, but this does not prove that the
Commissioners of Income Tax are a genuine society. On the other hand,
the Liberal-Unionist Party probably possesses enough community of
purpose to enable it to be regarded as a true society, but has no
legal personality, and consequently no legal rights or obligations,
_as a party_. Similarly, the corporation known as the Simeon Trustees
has a legal personality with corresponding rights and duties, and it
also stands in close relation with the evangelical party in the
Established Church. And this party is no doubt a true ethical society.
But the corporation is not the evangelical party, and the latter, in
the sense in which it is a true society, is not a legal person.

I may just observe that the question whether the Absolute is a self or
a person must not be confounded with the question of the “personality
of God.” We must not assume off-hand that “God” and the Absolute are
identical. Only special examination of the phenomena of the religious
life can decide for us whether “God” is necessarily the whole of
Reality. If He is not, it would clearly be possible to unite a belief
in “God’s” personality with a denial of the personality of the
Absolute, as is done, _e.g._, by Mr. Rashdall in his essay in
_Personal Idealism_. For some further remarks on the problem, see
below, Chapter V.

Footnote 194:

I suppose that any doctrine which denies the ultimate reality of the
finite self must expect to be confronted by the appeal to the alleged
revelation of immediate experience. _Cogito, ergo sum_, is often taken
as an immediately certain truth in the sense that the existence of
myself is something of which I am directly aware in every moment of
consciousness. This is, however, an entire perversion of the facts.
Undoubtedly the fact of there being experience is one which can be
verified by the very experiment of trying to deny it. Denial itself is
a felt experience. But it is (_a_) probably not true that we cannot
have experience at all without an accompanying perception of self, and
(_b_) certainly not true that the mere feeling of self as in contrast
with a not-self, when we do get it, is what is meant by the self of
Ethics and History. The self of these sciences always embraces more
than can be given in any single moment of experience, it is an ideal
construction by which we connect moments of experience according to a
general scheme. The value of that scheme for any science can only be
tested by the success with which it does its work, and its truth is
certainly not established by the mere consideration that the facts it
aims at connecting are actual. Metaphysics would be the easiest of
sciences if you could thus take it for granted that any construction
which is based upon some aspect of experienced fact must be valid.

Footnote 195:

This is why Plato seems justified in laying stress upon the dreams of
the wise man as evidence of his superiority (_Republic_, bk. ix. p.
571). His ideal wise man is one whose inner life is so completely
unified that there is genuine continuity of purpose between his waking
and sleeping state. Plato might perhaps have replied to Locke’s query,
that _Socrates_ waking and _Socrates_ asleep _are_ the same person,
and their identity is testimony to the exceptional wisdom and virtue
of Socrates.

If it be thought that at least the _simultaneous_ co-existence within
one of two selves is inconceivable, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the _self_ always includes more than is at any moment given
as actual matter of psychical fact. At any moment the self must be
taken to consist for the most part of unrealised _tendencies_, and in
so far as such ultimately incompatible tendencies are part of my whole
nature, at the same time it seems reasonable to say that I have
simultaneously more than one self. Ultimately, no doubt, this line of
thought would lead to the conclusion that “my whole nature” itself is
only relatively a whole.

Footnote 196:

Compare the valuable essay by Mr. Bradley on the “Evidence of
Spiritualism” in _Fortnightly Review_ for December 1885.

Footnote 197:

Death, however, though the most striking, is not the only illustration
of this apparently irrational interference of accident with
intelligent purpose. Mental and bodily disablement, or even adverse
external fortune, may have the same effect upon the self. This must be
taken into account in any attempt to deal with the general problem.

Footnote 198:

Dr. McTaggart’s phrase is more exactly adequate to describe my view
than his own, according to which “immortality” is capable of
philosophical proof. (See the second chapter of his _Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology_.) I have already explained why I cannot accept
this position. I believe Dr. McTaggart’s satisfaction with it must be
partly due to failure to raise the question _what it is_ that he
declares to be a “fundamental differentiation” of the Absolute.

Footnote 199:

I ought perhaps to say a word—more I do not think necessary—upon the
doctrine that immortality is a fundamental “moral postulate.” If this
statement means no more than that it would be inconsistent with the
rationality of the universe that our work as moral agents should be
simply wasted, and that therefore it must somehow have its
accomplishment whether we see it in our human society or not, I should
certainly agree with the general proposition. But I cannot see that we
know enough of the structure of the universe to assert that this
accomplishment is only possible in the special form of immortality. To
revert to the illustration of the text, (1) our judgment that the
world must be a worthless place without immortality _might_ be on a
level with the child’s notion that “grown-up” life, to be worth
having, must be a life of continual play and no work. (2) If it is
meant, however, that it is not “worth while” to be virtuous unless you
can look forward to remuneration—what Hegel, according to Heine,
called a _Trinkgeld_—hereafter for not having lived like a beast, the
proposition appears to me a piece of immoral nonsense which it would
be waste of time to discuss.

-----

CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL FREEDOM

§ 1. The metaphysical problem of free will has been historically created
by extra ethical difficulties, especially by theological
considerations in the early Christian era, and by the influence of
mechanical scientific conceptions in the modern world. § 2-3. The
analysis of our moral experience shows that true “freedom” means
teleological determination. Hence to be “free” and to “will” are
ultimately the same thing. Freedom or “self-determination” is
genuine but limited, and is capable of variations of degree. § 4.
_Determinism_ and _Indeterminism_ both arise from the false
assumption that the mechanical postulate of _causal_ determination
by antecedents is an ultimate fact. The question then arises whether
mental events are an exception to the supposed principle. § 5.
_Determinism._ The determinist arguments stated. § 6. They rest
partly upon the false assumption that mechanical determination is
the one and only principle of rational connection between facts. §
7. Partly upon fallacious theories of the actual procedure of the
mental sciences. Fallacious nature of the argument that complete
knowledge of character and circumstances would enable us to predict
human conduct. The assumed data are such as, from their own nature,
could not be known _before the event_. § 8. _Indeterminism._ The
psychical facts to which the indeterminist appeals do not warrant
his conclusion, which is, moreover, metaphysically absurd, as
involving the denial of rational connection. § 9. Both doctrines
agree in the initial error of confounding teleological unity with
causal determination.

§ 1. The problem of the meaning and reality of moral freedom is
popularly supposed to be one of the principal issues, if not _the_
principal issue, of Metaphysics as applied to the facts of human life.
Kant, as the reader will no doubt know, included freedom with
immortality and the existence of God in his list of unprovable but
indispensable “postulates” of Ethics, and the conviction is still
widespread among students of moral philosophy that ethical science
cannot begin its work without some preliminary metaphysical
justification of freedom, as a postulate at least, if not as a proved
truth. For my own part, I own I cannot rate the practical importance of
the metaphysical inquiry into human freedom so high, and am rather of
Professor Sidgwick’s opinion as to its superfluousness in strictly
ethical investigations.[200] At the same time, it is impossible to pass
over the subject without discussion, if only for the excellent
illustrations it affords of the mischief which results from the forcing
of false metaphysical theories upon Ethics, and for the confirmation it
yields of our view as to the postulatory character of the
mechanico-causal scheme of the natural sciences. In discussing freedom
from this point of view as a metaphysical issue, I would have it clearly
understood that there are two important inquiries into which I do not
intend to enter, except perhaps incidentally.

One is the _psychological_ question as to the precise elements into
which a voluntary act may be analysed for the purpose of psychological
description; the other the ethical and juridical problem as to the
limits of moral responsibility. For our present purpose both these
questions may be left on one side. We need neither ask how a voluntary
act is performed—in other words, by what set of symbols it is best
represented in Psychology—nor where in a complicated case the conditions
requisite for accountability, and therefore for freedom of action, may
be pronounced wanting. Our task is the simpler one of deciding, in the
first place, what we mean by the freedom which we all regard as morally
desirable, and next, what general view as to the nature of existence is
implied in the assertion or denial of its actuality.

That the examination of the _metaphysical_ implications of freedom is
not an indispensable preliminary to ethical study, is fortunately
sufficiently established by the actual history of the moral sciences.
The greatest achievements of Ethics, up to the present time, are
undoubtedly contained in the systems of the great Greek moralists,
Plato and Aristotle. It would not be too much to say that subsequent
ethical speculation has accomplished, in the department of Ethics
proper as distinguished from metaphysical reflection upon the
ontological problems suggested by ethical results, little more than
the development in detail of general principles already recognised and
formulated by these great observers and critics of human life. Yet the
metaphysical problem of freedom, as is well known, is entirely absent
from the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. With Plato, as the reader
of the _Gorgias_ and the eighth and ninth books of the _Republic_ will
be aware, freedom means just what it does to the ordinary plain man,
the power to “do what one wills,” and the only speculative interest
taken by the philosopher in the subject is that of showing that the
chief practical obstacle to the attainment of freedom arises from
infirmity and inconsistency in the will itself; that, in fact, the
unfree man is just the criminal or “tyrant” who wills the
incompatible, and, in a less degree, the “democratic” creature of
moods and impulses, who, in popular phrase, “doesn’t know what he
wants” of life.

Similarly, Aristotle, with less of spiritual insight but more attention
to matters of practical detail, discusses the ἑχούσιον, in the third
book of his _Ethics_, purely from the standpoint of an ideally perfect
jurisprudence. With him the problem is to know for what acts an ideally
perfect system of law could hold a man non-responsible, and his answer
may be said to be that a man is not responsible in case of (1) physical
compulsion, in the strict sense, where his limits are actually set in
motion by some external agent or cause; and (2) of ignorance of the
material circumstances. In both these cases there is no responsibility,
because there has been no real act, the outward movements of the man’s
limbs not corresponding to any purpose of his own. An act which does
translate into physical movement a purpose of the agent, Aristotle, like
practical morality and jurisprudence, recognises as _ipso facto_ free,
without raising any metaphysical question as to the ontological
implications of the recognition.

Historically, it appears that the metaphysical problem has been created
for us by purely non-ethical considerations. “Freedom of indifference”
was maintained in the ancient world by the Epicureans, but not on
ethical grounds. As readers of the second book of Lucretius know, they
denied the validity of the postulate of rigidly mechanical causality
simply to extricate themselves from the position into which their
arbitrary physical hypotheses had led them. If mechanical causality were
recognised as absolute in the physical world, and if, again, as Epicurus
held, the physical world was composed of atoms all falling with constant
velocities in the same direction, the system of things, as we know it,
could never have arisen. Hence, rather than give up their initial
hypothesis about the atoms, the Epicureans credited the individual atom
with a power of occasional uncaused and arbitrary deviation from its
path, as a means of bringing atoms into collision and combination. Thus
with them “freedom of indifference” was the result of _physical_
difficulties.

In the Christian Church the doctrine seems to have owed its wide—though
not universal—acceptance to equally non-ethical difficulties of a
_theological_ kind. If God “foreknew from all eternity” the
transgression of Adam and all its consequences, how could it be
compatible with His justice to punish Adam and all his posterity for
faults foreseen by Adam’s Creator?[201] The difficulty of reconciling
the divine omniscience with the divine justice was supposed to be
avoided—in truth, it was only evaded[202]—by assuming that man was
created with a “free will of indifference,” so that obedience would have
been just as easy as transgression if man had chosen to obey. In our own
time the problem has assumed a rather different complexion, owing to the
enormous developments of mechanical physical science, which began with
Galileo and Descartes. Rigid causal determination being assumed as a
first principle of physical science, the question arose whether the
assumption should not also be extended to the psychical sphere. If so
extended, it seemed to strike at the roots of moral responsibility, by
making all human acts the inevitable “consequences of circumstances over
which we have no control”; if not admitted, the rejection of the
principle of rigid causal determination has often been thought to amount
to the denial that there is any principle of rational connection in the
psychical sphere. Hence, while persons specially interested in the facts
of the moral life have frequently inclined to the more or less radical
denial of rational connection between the events of the psychical
series, others, whose special interests have lain in the direction of
the unification of knowledge, have still more commonly thought it
necessary to hold that human action is determined by antecedents in the
same sense and to the same degree as the occurrences of the purely
physical order.

It will be our object to show that these rival doctrines of
Indeterminism and Determinism, or Necessitarianism, are alike
irrational, alike incompatible with what in practice we understand as
moral freedom of action, and alike based upon the false assumption that
rigid mechanical determination is itself an actual fact, and not a mere
postulate of the special physical sciences, valid only so far as it is
useful. But before we enter upon our task, it is necessary to begin with
a statement as to the real meaning of ethical freedom itself. Until we
know what we mean by the kind of freedom we, as moral beings, desire and
think we ought to have, it will be useless to ask whether we are or are
not free.

§ 2. “Free” and “freedom” are manifestly what are called by the
logicians “privative” terms; they denote the absence of certain
restrictions. To be “free,” in whatever special sense you may use the
word, means to be free _from_ something. What, then, are the typical
limitations which, in practice, we resent as making us unfree? They seem
to be, in the main, the following:—(1) We are not free when our limbs
are actually set in motion by an external physical agency, human or
non-human. And the reason why we are then unfree is that the resulting
movements of our bodies do not express a purpose of our own. They either
express the purpose of some other being who moves our limbs as seems
good to him, or, as in the case where we are set in motion by the
“forces” of the inanimate world, express no purpose at all that is
recognisable to us as such. And in either case _we_ have expressed no
purpose of our own by our movements; they do not truly belong to _us_ at
all, and there is therefore no freedom. It is not necessary that the
result of the movement should be one which, if it had been suggested, we
should have declined to entertain as a purpose of our own. We _might_
perhaps, if left to ourselves, have done just what another man or the
system of physical forces has done for us. Still, so long as the deed,
whatever it was, was done for us and not by us, so long as it
corresponded to no actual purpose of ours, it was not a free act.

(2) Again, we are not truly free when we act in ignorance (not due to
previous free action of our own)[203] of the special circumstances. Here
there is, as there was not in the former case, a genuine act. We
actually purpose to do something, but what we purpose to do is not the
deed which results from our movements. _E.g._, if I shoot a comrade by
mistake for one of the enemy, it is true that _I_ purpose to shoot, and
so far the shooting is an act, and a free act, of my own. But I did not
purpose to shoot my comrade, and so the result, in its concreteness, is
not the expression of my purpose, and I consequently regard myself as
not fully free in doing it, and therefore not morally accountable for
it. So far our analysis coincides with that of Aristotle, previously
referred to.

(3) Again, I am not acting freely where the circumstances are not such
as to admit of the formation of purpose at all. For this reason, merely
automatic action—if there is such a thing—is not genuine action, and
therefore not free.[204] Impulsive action without reflection, again,
comes under this category. It is, of course, accompanied by feelings of
satisfaction, and if impeded gives rise to craving, and so cannot be
called simply non-purposive. But in genuinely impulsive reaction, where
the possibility of reflection is excluded, there can be little clear
awareness of the concrete character of the purpose that is being put
into execution, and hence such action is not truly free. And in
practical life, though we are certainly held morally responsible for
impulsive action, in so far as it is thought we might have modified it
by previous habitual practice of reflection or by avoiding a situation
which we had reason to think would deprive us of the power to reflect,
we are never held as fully accountable for the deed of impulse as for
the reflectively thought out and deliberately adopted purpose.[205]

Further, we feel ourselves unfree when we fail to execute our purposes,
either from sheer inability to attend to a consistent scheme of action,
or because we attend equally to purposes which are internally
incompatible. This is why the “democratic” man, whose interests are an
incoherent medley without logical unity, and the “tyrannical man,” or,
as we should now say, the “criminal type,” whose passions are constantly
at war with one another and with his judgment, are regarded by Plato as
the typically unfree beings. To be really free, in the last resort, we
must have purposes which are coherent and abiding. And it is thus no
paradox to say that unfreedom in the end means, in the main, not knowing
your own mind, while to be free is to know what you mean.

§ 3. We may now draw some important consequences from this review of the
facts upon which every valid interpretation of freedom has to be based.
(1) Freedom, as Locke said in that famous chapter “On Power” which is
still the classic discussion of the whole subject as far as English
philosophy is concerned, “belongs to the man, not to the will.” The
proper question to ask is, “Am I free?” not “Is my will free?” or “Have
I a free will?” For “freedom” and “will,” as the facts enumerated above
show, are but the negative and the positive name for the same property,
the property of acting so as to put what we first possessed as our
private purpose into execution in the world of sensible fact. I “will”
when my outward deed is thus the expression of my purpose; in the same
case, and in no other, I am “free.” Thus to “will” and to be “free” are
one and the same thing; a will which was not free would be a will which
was not the translation into sensible fact of any one’s purpose, and
thus no will at all. Thus the question, “Are we free?” might be also put
in the equivalent form, “Can we ever will anything?” and to the
question, as thus put, experience gives a ready answer. For we certainly
do conceive purposes, and we certainly, in some of our movements, do
translate those purposes in act. And therefore we may say that freedom
is undoubtedly, in the only sense in which it is desired, a fact of
immediate experience.[206]

(2) If we retain the expression “freedom to _will_” by the side of the
phrase “freedom to _act_,” it can only be in a very special sense. It is
clear that not only may my outward deed be a translation into fact of my
present purpose, but my present purpose itself, as a psychical event,
may also be a translation into fact of a former purpose. This is largely
the case with all results of deliberate self-training and discipline,
and to a less degree with all acquired habits. Thus, _e.g._, the
movements by which I write these lines are the expression of my
preconceived purpose to write the present paragraph, but that purpose
itself, as an event in my history, is similarly the expression of a
former purpose to compose a work on Metaphysics. Thus there is a real
sense in which we can agree with Leibnitz in criticising Locke’s dictum
that we are free to act, but not free to will. For the mental conception
of a purpose is itself an act, and in so far as it translates into
existing thoughts and feelings a previous purpose it may be said itself
to be “freely willed.”[207]

(3) Freedom, in actual experience, is always limited, and, moreover,
admits of the most various degrees. As to the first point, it follows
immediately from our consideration of the circumstances which make us
unfree. If to be fully free means that your outward deed is the full
expression of an inward consistent purpose, then we can see at once that
complete freedom is, for all finite beings, an infinitely distant
_ideal_. For it means (_a_) that I am not hampered in the execution of
my purpose by vacillation of interest or conflict of incompatible
interests within myself; (_b_) nor by the establishment of “habitual”
reactions so nearly mechanical as to repeat themselves out of season
unless checked by special reflection; (_c_) nor by the limits set to my
power to “act or to forbear” in the physical world by the action of my
fellows and of “brute” nature.[208] Hence only an experience which is
absolutely devoid of internal conflict and external, partly discrepant
environment, in other words, only the experience which is the infinite
whole, can be in all its detail entirely and absolutely free. From the
possibilities of internal lack of unity of purpose and external
collision with rival purpose which are inseparable from our position as
finite beings, it must follow that we are never more than partially or
relatively free.

And that the degree to which we are free varies with the nature of our
purposes and their relation to the environment, is also manifest. There
is an indefinite plurality of such degrees, ranging up from the total or
all but total absence of freedom in the case of directly constrained
motion up to the case of cordial co-operation with the other members of
a relatively self-supporting social group in the conscious and
systematic execution of an elaborate and coherent scheme of action. To
indicate the principal distinctions among such grades of freedom which
are of practical importance for law and morality is the task of
systematic Ethics, and need not be attempted by us here. We may add that
our investigation has made it apparent that true moral freedom, of
whatever degree, is no inalienable heritage into which men step by the
“accident of birth,” but—in the main and as an actual possession—a prize
which has to be won by the double discipline of self-knowledge and
self-mastery, and of social comradeship, and may be, and is, forfeited
by the neglect of the arts by which it was first gained. No doubt one
man’s inherited disposition may make the practice of self-control, or
again of social fellowship, easier to him than to another, and to this
extent we may say that we are born with a greater or lesser “capacity
for freedom,” but of its actual possession we have all to say, “with a
great price purchased I this freedom.”

(4) Finally, our examination of the facts of morality enables us to
_define_ true freedom. We are free, as we have seen, just so far as our
experience is the embodiment of coherent and permanent interest or
purpose, and freedom is, like “will,” simply an abstract expression for
the teleological unity which, in varying degrees, is an essential
feature of all experience. Hence we can at once see that freedom does
not mean “absence of rational connection” or “absence of determination,”
but does mean, as so many recent philosophers have told us, for us
finite beings, _self_-determination. I am most free when acting for the
realisation of a coherent rational purpose, not because my conduct is
“undetermined”; in other words, because there is “no telling” what I
shall do next, but because it is, at such times, most fully determined
teleologically by the character of my inner purposes or interests,—in
other words, by the constitution of my _self_. The more abiding and
logically coherent my various purposes in action, the freer I am,
because it is my _whole_ self or system of rationally connected
interests, and not the insistence of others, or some passing whim or
impulse which I may forthwith disown as no part of my “true self,” which
is getting expression in my outward deeds. And if it were possible for a
finite being to become absolutely free, as we have seen that it is not,
such a being would, in the very moment of its entire deliverance, become
also absolutely determined from within; its whole life, as manifested to
the outsider in the series of its deeds, would become the perfect and
systematic expression of a single scheme of coherent purposes.

§ 4. We see, then, that such a genuine but limited freedom as is really
implied in the existence of morality is not only compatible with, but
actually demanded by, the principles of a sound Metaphysics. From the
side of morality we meet with the demand that human beings shall be, in
part at least, creatures whose outward acts shall be the genuine
expression of individual purpose; from the side of Metaphysics we have
already learned that just this teleological unity, genuine though
imperfect, is the essential nature of every finite experience. We are
now to see how a problem in itself quite simple leads to insoluble
difficulties and to the rival absurdities of Indeterminism and
Determinism when it is perverted by an initial metaphysical blunder. The
initial mistake of both the rival theories consists simply in taking
rigid mechanical determination of events by their antecedents in accord
with the principle of Causality as an actual fact, the divergence
between them only concerning the extent of the sphere of existence for
which such determination prevails. According to the indeterminist, the
action of conscious beings forms a solitary exception to a principle of
determination which is absolutely valid for all purely physical
processes. According to the determinist, there are no exceptions to the
principle, and our confessed inability to predict the course of an
individual life or a period of history from general laws in the same way
in which we predict an eclipse or a display of leonids, is due merely to
the greater complexity of the necessary data, and the temporary
imperfections of our mathematical methods.

It should be noted that there is no substantial disagreement between the
more sober representatives of the two views as to the actual facts of
life. The indeterminist usually admits that in practice, when you know
enough of a man’s character and of the influences brought to bear upon
him, you can tell with some confidence how he will conduct himself, and
that social intercourse, education, and penal legislation would be
impossible if you could not. Similarly, the determinist admits that it
would be very rash to treat your predictions of human behaviour in
practice with absolute confidence, and that the unexpected does
frequently happen in human life. The dispute is solely about the
philosophical interpretation of facts as to which there is virtually
universal agreement. According to the determinist interpretation, _if_
you were put in possession of the knowledge of a man’s “character” and
of his “circumstances” (and it is assumed that it is theoretically
possible to have this knowledge), and had sufficient skill to grapple
with the mathematical problems involved, you could calculate his whole
behaviour in advance, from the cradle to the grave, with infallible
precision. According to the indeterminist, you could not do so, and your
failure would arise not from any theoretical impossibility of obtaining
the supposed data, but from their insufficiency. Our behaviour, he
alleges, is not exclusively determined by the interaction of “character”
and circumstances; even with the complete knowledge of both these
elements, human action is incalculable, because of our possession of a
“free will of indifference” or power to act indifferently according to
or in violation of our “character.” You can never say beforehand what a
man will do, because of this capacity for acting, under any conditions,
with equal facility in either of two alternative ways.

I propose to show briefly that the determinist is right in saying that
conduct is completely determined by “character”—if the term be
understood widely enough—and circumstances, but wrong in holding that
this makes infallible prediction possible; on the other hand, that the
indeterminist is right in denying the possibility of such prediction,
but wrong in the reason he gives for his denial. Infallible prediction
is impossible, not because of the existence of “free will of
indifference,” but because the assumed data of the prediction are such
that you could not possibly have them until _after the event_. Finally,
it will be pointed out that the two errors both arise from the same
false metaphysical theory that the causal principle is a statement of
real fact.[209]

§ 5. _Determinism._ To begin with the view of the determinist. Human
conduct, he says, must be, like other processes, unequivocally
determined by antecedents, and these antecedents must consist of (_a_)
character and (_b_) external circumstance. For (1) to deny the causal
determination of our acts by antecedents is to deny the presence of
rational connection in the psychical sphere, and thus to pronounce not
only Psychology, but all the sciences which take psychical events as
their material and attempt to discover rational connections between
them, in principle impossible. Thus the very existence of Psychology,
Ethics, and History proves the applicability of the principle of causal
determinism to “mental states.”

(2) This is still more evident if we reflect that all science consists
in the formulation of “laws” or “uniformities,” and that the formulation
of “laws” rests upon the principle that “same result follows under same
conditions”—_i.e._ upon the principle of causal determination.

(3) Further, if psychical events are not so determined, then Psychology
and the mental sciences generally are inconsistent with the general
principles of the mechanical physical sciences.

(4) And, as a matter of fact, we do all assume that psychical events are
causally determined by their antecedents. In Psychology we assume that
our choices are determined by the strength of the _motives_ between
which we choose. Hence, if you know what are the “motives” present to a
man’s choice, and the relative strength of each, the determinist thinks
the prediction of his conduct is reduced to the purely mathematical
problem of the solution of an equation or set of equations. That our
present mathematical resources will not avail for the unequivocal
solution of such equations is, on this view, a mere temporary defect
incidental to the present condition of mathematical science. In
principle the equations must be soluble, or “there is no science of
human action.”

(5) And in practical life we do all assume that it is possible to
predict with considerable confidence the effect of typical conditions
upon the aggregate of mankind, and also, when you have the requisite
data, the effect of a definite set of conditions upon an individual man.
Thus we count upon the deterrent effects of punishment, the persuasive
influence of advertisement, etc.; and again, in proportion as we really
know our friends, we believe ourselves able to answer for their conduct
in situations which have not as yet arisen. Why, then, should we suppose
it theoretically impossible, if adequate data were furnished, to
calculate the whole career of a man or a society in advance, as the
astronomer calculates the path of a planet from its elements? These are,
I think, the chief of the stock arguments by which Determinism has been
defended. (With the purely theological argument from the absoluteness of
the divine foreknowledge I have already dealt in passing, and do not
propose to refer to it again.)

§ 6. It is not difficult to see that the logical value of all these
arguments is nothing at all. They fall of themselves into two groups,
one based upon the general view that all rational connection, or at
least all such rational connection as is significant for our knowledge,
is mechanical causal sequence, the other upon an appeal to the supposed
actual practice of the mental sciences. We may deal with the first group
(arguments 1 to 3) first. It is certainly not true that causal
determination by antecedents is the only form of rational connection.
For there is manifestly another type of connection, which we have
already seen to be fundamental for the mental sciences, namely,
teleological coherence. And we have learned in our preceding books that
no truly teleological or purposive series can really be mechanically
determined by uniform causal laws of sequence, though it is often
convenient for special purposes, as in the physical sciences, to treat
such a series _as if_ it were mechanically determined. Whether this type
of procedure will be valid in the mental sciences, depends upon the
further question whether our interest in the study of mental processes
is of the kind which would be satisfied by the formulation of a number
of abstract uniformities or laws of sequence, and the neglect of all
those features of real mental life of which such laws take no account.

In the physical sciences, as we saw, this mechanical scheme was valid
only because we have an interest—that of devising general rules for
dealing with typical physical situations—which is met by neglecting all
those aspects of concrete fact which the mechanical scheme excludes. But
we also saw that the nature of our interest in psychological
investigation was predominantly (and, in the case of the study of
voluntary action, exclusively) of a different kind. Our interest in
these investigations was to obtain such a teleological representation of
psychical processes as might be made available for the appreciative
judgments of Ethics and History and their kindred studies. Thus, even
admitting the possibility of treating psychical life for some purposes,
by abstraction from its teleological character, as if it were a
mechanical sequence, the abstraction would be fatal for the purposes of
the concrete mental sciences, and is therefore inadmissible in them. A
teleological unity in which we are interested _as_ a teleological unity
cannot, without the stultification of our whole scientific procedure, be
treated in abstraction from its teleological character.

This rejoinder to the first of the determinist’s arguments is at the
same time a refutation of the second. It is true that any science which
aims exclusively at the discovery of “laws” or “uniformities” must adopt
the causal principle, and must resolutely shut its eyes to all aspects
of concrete fact which cannot be resolved into mechanical sequence of
“same result” on “same conditions.” But, as we saw in the first chapter
of this book, the characteristic task of Psychology, except in those
parts of it which appear to be mere temporary substitutes for the
Physiology of the future, is not the discovery of “_laws_ of mental
process,” but the representation in abstract and general form of the
teleological unity of processes which are the expression of subjective
interests. Psychology, then, in its most characteristic parts, is not
based upon the causal postulate of mechanical science, but on the
conception of teleological continuity.

Our answer to the determinist’s third argument is therefore that we
admit the truth of the allegation that Psychology and all the more
concrete mental sciences which make use of the symbolism of Psychology,
because essentially teleological in their view of mental process, would
be inconsistent with the mechanical postulates, if those postulates had
any claim to admission into mental science as its ruling principles. We
deny, however, that they have any such claim to recognition. Being, as
we now know that they are, mere methodological rules for the elimination
from our data of everything which is teleological, the mechanical
postulates are only legitimate in Psychology so far as Psychology
desires mechanical results. How far that is, we have learned in the
first two chapters of the present Book, and we have found that the
initiation of purposive action is not a process which Psychology can
fruitfully treat as mechanical.

§ 7. Turning now to the determinist’s allegations as to the factual
procedure of the mental sciences, we may make the following
observations:—(1) As to the argument from the psychological treatment of
“motives” as the determining antecedents of choice, we say that it is
either an empty tautology or a fallacy, according to the sense you
please to put on the much-abused term “motive.” Choice is causally
determined by the “strongest motive”; what does this mean? If the
“strongest motive” simply means the line of action we do in fact choose,
the argument amounts to the true but irrelevant observation that we
choose what we do choose, and not something else. But if “motives” are
to be regarded as antecedents causally determining choice in proportion
to their strength, as mechanical “forces” determine the path of a
particle in abstract Mechanics, we must suppose the “strength” of the
various “motives,” like the mass of an attracting body, to be previously
fixed, independent of the choice they determine. In other words, the
determinist argument requires us to hold that alternative possibilities
of action are already “motives” apart from their relation to the purpose
of the agent who has to choose between them, and moreover have, also in
independence of the purpose or “character” of the chooser, a “strength”
which is in some unintelligible way a function of—it would not be easy
to say of _what_, though it is incumbent on the determinist to know. And
this seems no better than rank nonsense. An alternative is not a
“motive” at all, except in relation to the already existing, but not
fully defined, purpose of some agent, and whether it is a “strong” or a
“weak” motive depends likewise on the character of the agent’s purpose.
The attempt to conceive of “motives” as somehow acting on a mind with an
inherent “strength” of their own, as material particles attract other
material particles proportionately to their masses, is so palpable an
absurdity, that nothing more than the candid statement of it is needed
for its complete exposure.

And (2) there is an equal absurdity inherent in the determinist view as
to the kind of prediction of conduct which is possible in concrete
cases. We have seen already in our Third Book that no infallible
prediction of the course of events in an individual case is ever
possible. Mechanical calculation and prediction we found to be possible
in the physical sciences simply because they deal with the average
character of a vast aggregate of processes which they never attempt to
follow in their concrete individual detail. And trustworthy prediction
of human conduct by the aid of “causal laws” was seen to be of the same
kind. Your uniformities might hold good, so long as they professed to be
nothing more than statistical averages got by neglecting the individual
peculiarities of the special cases composing them, but nothing but
acquaintance with individual character and purpose would justify you in
making confident predictions as to the behaviour of an individual man.

Now, when the determinist says, “if you knew a man’s character and his
circumstances you could predict his conduct with certainty,” it is not
this kind of individual acquaintance which he has in view. He means that
the “character” of an individual man could be reduced to a number of
general formulæ or “laws of mental action,” and that from these “laws,”
by simply putting them together, you could logically deduce the man’s
behaviour. To see how irrational this assumption is, we need only ask
what is meant exactly by the “character” which we suppose given as one
of the elements for our supposed calculation. If it means the sum-total
of the congenital “dispositions” with which we are born, then—apart from
the difficulty of saying precisely what you mean by such a
“disposition”—the determinist statement is not even approximately true.
For (_a_) though it may be true that a man’s behaviour in a given
situation is an expression of his “character,” yet the “character” is
not the same thing as “congenital disposition.” Disposition is the mere
raw material of the “character,” which is formed out of it by the
influence of circumstance, the educational activity of our social
circle, and deliberate self-discipline on our own part. And the
“character” thus formed is not a fixed and unvarying quantity, given
once and for all at some period in the individual’s development, and
thenceforward constant; it is itself, theoretically at least, “in the
making” throughout life, and though you may, from personal intimate
acquaintance with an individual man, feel strongly convinced that his
“character” is not likely to undergo serious changes after a certain
time of life, this conviction can never amount to more than what we
properly call “moral” certainty, and is never justified _except_ on the
strength of individual familiarity.

(_b_) This leads us to our second point. If—to suppose the practically
impossible—you did know a man’s “character” with the knowledge of
omniscience, you would clearly also know every act of his life. For his
“character” is nothing but the system of purposes and interests to which
his outward deeds give expression, and thus to know it completely would
be to know them completely too. But—and this is what the determinist
regularly overlooks—you could not possibly have this knowledge of the
man’s “character” until you were already acquainted with the whole of
his life. You could not possibly thus know “character” as a datum given
in advance, from which to calculate, with mathematical precision, the as
yet unknown future acts of the man in question, because, as we have
seen, the “character” is, in fact, not there as a given fact _before_
the acts through which it is formed. Your data could at best be no more
than a number of “dispositions” or “tendencies,” and from such data
there can be no infallible prediction, because, in the first place,
“dispositions” are not always developed into actual fixed habits; and,
in the second, your data, such as they are, are incomplete, seeing that
“dispositions” may, and often do, remain latent and escape detection
until the emergence of a situation adapted to call them out. So that,
even if it were true that complete knowledge of a man’s original stock
of “dispositions” would enable you to calculate his career from its
elements, it would still be impossible to be sure that your knowledge of
his “dispositions” _was_ complete.

Thus, if a “science of human nature” really means a power to calculate
human conduct in advance from its elements, we must admit that there is
not and can be no such science. As a fact, however, what we really mean
by a “science of human nature,” when we speak of it as possible or as
partly existent already, is something quite different. We mean either
Psychology, individual and social, which is simply an abstract symbolism
for the representation of teleological process in its general nature, or
History, which is the detection of coherent purpose in human action,
_after the event_; or, again, Ethics and Politics, which are
appreciations of such purpose by an ideal standard of _worth_. Not one
of these sciences has ever attempted the calculation of human action in
advance by general laws; such forecasts of the future as we do make,
with rational confidence, are palpably based, wherever they are of
value, on concrete experience, our own or that of others, and not upon
the principles of an imaginary mechanics of the human mind.

§ 8. _Indeterminism._ With the fallacies of the indeterminist we must
now deal more briefly. This is the more possible as Indeterminism,
though common enough in popular moralising, has never won anything like
the position of the rival doctrine as the professed creed of scientific
investigators. The essence of the indeterminist position is the denial
of the principle affirmed alike by the doctrine of self-determination
and, in an unintelligent travesty, by the determinist theory that
conduct results from the reaction of “character” upon circumstances.
Seeing that, if all human action is mechanically determined in advance
by its “antecedents,” and is thus theoretically capable of being deduced
from its “elements,” there can be no true moral freedom, and, not seeing
that the essence of true freedom is teleological as opposed to
mechanical determination, the indeterminist thinks himself compelled to
assert that human action is, in the last resort, not “determined” even
by human character. There is a “free will of indifference” inherent in
human nature, in virtue of which a man’s acts, or at least those of them
in respect of which he is morally “accountable,” are free, in the sense
of being independent of his character.

Freedom, according to this view, consists in the ability indifferently
to adopt either of two alternative courses; so long as one alternative
is closed to you (whether by your “character” or by external
circumstances makes no difference according to the indeterminist), you
are not “free” and not acting as a moral and accountable being. You are
only acting freely in following your purpose when you could equally well
follow its direct opposite. The arguments by which this doctrine is
supported, over and above the general contention that determination by
antecedents is incompatible with moral responsibility, are chiefly of
the nature of appeals to immediate feeling. Thus we are told (1) that
when we act from choice and not under compulsion we always have the
immediate feeling that we could equally well act in the opposite sense;
and (2) that it is a matter of direct experience that, in resisting
temptation, we can and do act “in the line of _greatest_ resistance,”
and that the “will” is therefore independent of determination by
“motives.”

The detailed discussion of the actuality of the alleged facts belongs,
of course, to Psychology, and I do not propose to enter into it here.
But it should be manifest that, even admitting the facts to be as the
indeterminist states them, they do not warrant the inference he bases on
them. Thus (1) it is no doubt true that I often am aware, in resolving
on a certain course of action, that I could, _if I pleased_, act
differently. But the conditional clause by its presence makes all the
difference between teleological determination and no determination at
all. It is, _e.g._, no genuine fact of experience that I am aware that I
could violate all the habits of a lifetime, practise all the crimes I
most abhor, and neglect all the interests to which I am most devoted. I
could do all this “if I pleased,” but before I could “please” I should
have to become a different man; while I am the man I am, it is a
manifest absurdity to hold that I can indifferently express in my
behaviour the purposes which constitute my individuality or their
opposites.

(2) The argument from the successful resistance of temptations is
equally fallacious. We have seen already that the determinist assumption
against which it is directed, namely, that conduct is mechanically
determined by the inherent “strength” of “motives,” is itself unmeaning.
“Motives” are, if they are anything, another name for the interests
which constitute our character, not external influences which “work
upon” that character, and thus their relative “strength” is nothing
independent of character, but a new expression for the structure of the
individual character itself. But the counter-argument of Indeterminism
is just as unmeaning. To talk of the “conquest” of temptation as the
“line of greatest resistance” is to use the very same unintelligible
mechanical analogy as the determinist uses in talking of the antecedent
“strength” of a “motive.” There are, in fact, only two possible
interpretations of the indeterminist’s contention, and neither of them
supports his conclusion. Either the “resistance” of which he speaks must
be measured by our actual success in resisting the suggestion to act,
and in that case the very fact that we do not yield to the temptation
shows that for us yielding would have been the “line of greatest
resistance”; or else “resistance” must be measured by the extent to
which the rejected alternative still persists as a psychical fact after
its rejection. Then the alleged experience simply amounts to this, that
we can and sometimes do, in obedience to training or conviction, refuse
to act upon suggestions which as psychical facts have sufficient
intensity to remain before the mind even after our refusal. And this,
interesting and suggestive as it is, seems no particular reason for
denying the teleological determination of our conduct.[210]

The real metaphysical objection to Indeterminism however, is not that it
is an unprovable and unnecessary hypothesis, but that it involves the
denial of rational connection between human actions. By declaring that
conduct is not determined by character, it virtually asserts that it is
chance which ultimately decides how we shall actually behave in a
concrete case. And chance is simply another name for the absence of
rational connection. This is illustrated, _e.g._, by the use we make of
the conception of chance in the various empirical sciences. Thus, when I
say that it is a matter of chance what card I shall draw from the pack,
what I mean is that the result depends in part upon conditions which I
do not know, and therefore cannot use as data for a conclusion in favour
of one result rather than another. I do not, of course, mean that the
result is not conditioned at all, or that, with a sufficient knowledge
of the conditions it might not have been calculated in advance, but
merely that I in particular have not this sufficient knowledge. Hence
the admission of chance in the relative sense of “conditions not at
present accurately known” does not conflict with the fundamental axiom
of all thinking, the principle that all existence is a rational unity or
scheme of some sort. In fact, since we never can know the “totality of
the conditions” of anything, it would be true to say that there is an
element of chance, in this relative sense, in all concrete actualities.

But absolute chance, such as the doctrine of an indeterminate free will
maintains, would amount to the simple absence of any rational connection
whatever between the facts which are alleged to issue from such a will.
This is why the indeterminist view leads in the end, if consistently
carried out, to the same metaphysical absurdity as the determinist. From
failure to see that rational connection, such as is presupposed when we
impute praise or blame to an agent on the score of his conduct, means
teleological determination, both the rival theories in the end deny the
rational interconnection of human acts, the one replacing it by the
fiction of a purposeless mechanical “necessity,” the other by the equal
fiction of a “blind chance.” And the two fictions are really the same
thing under different names. For the only piece of definite information
that could be extracted either from the assertion that human conduct is
mechanically determined, or that it is the result of chance, is the
conclusion that in either case it is _not_ the expression of coherent
purpose.

§ 9. It is thus obvious that Indeterminism fails, in precisely the same
way as the opposing theory, to afford any theoretical basis for moral
responsibility. True, I cannot be “responsible” for deeds which are the
outcome of a purely mechanical system of antecedents, because such
deeds, not issuing from the purposes of my self, are in no true sense
mine; but the same would be equally true of the results of an
indeterminate free will. As not owing their existence to my purpose,
those results are in no real sense “my” acts, and the choice of the name
“free will” for their unknown source only serves to disguise this
consequence without removing it. Only as issuing from my character, and
as the expression of my individual interests, can acts be ascribed to me
as “mine” and made the basis of moral approbation in censure of my
“self.”

Thus we see that the determinist and the indeterminist are led alike to
impossible results because of the common error involved in their point
of departure. Both start with the false assumption that the causal
determination of an event by its “antecedents”—which we have in our
earlier books seen to be a postulate ultimately not in accord with
reality, but permissible in so far as it permits us to obtain useful
results by treating events as if they were thus determined—is ultimately
real as a feature of concrete existence. Having thus at the outset
excluded genuine teleological determination from their conception of the
world of change, both theorists are alike debarred from the correct
understanding of those psychical processes for the comprehension of
which teleological categories are indispensable.

In the terms of theories which treat determination as purely mechanical,
the factors which manifestly are the determining conditions of conduct,
namely, character and the alternative possibilities of action,
inevitably come to be conceived of as the temporal “antecedents” of the
act which issues from them. And when once this notion of character as a
sort of pre-existing material upon which “motives” from without operate
has been framed, it matters little in principle whether you take
“character” and “motive” by themselves as the complete antecedents by
which action is determined, or add a third “antecedent” in the form of
an inexplicable arbitrary “free will.” In either case all possibility of
a truthful representation of the freedom actually implied in moral
accountability was surrendered when the “character” which expresses
itself through an act, and the “motive” which is another name for that
character as particularised by reference to circumstances, were falsely
separated in thought from each other, and then further treated as the
temporal antecedents of the act in which they are expressed. In our own
treatment of the problem of freedom we were able to escape both sides of
the dilemma, because we recognised from the first that the categories of
mechanical determination are not the expression of real fact, but
limitations artificially imposed upon facts for special purposes of a
kind which have nothing in common with the ethical and historical
appreciation of human conduct, and therefore irrelevant and misleading
when applied out of their rightful sphere.

_Consult further_:—H. Bergson, _Sur les données immédiates de la
conscience_; F. H. Bradley, _Ethical Studies_, Essay 1; W. R. B. Gibson,
“The Problem of Freedom” (in _Personal Idealism_); T. H. Green,
_Prolegomena to Ethics_, bk. i. chap. 3, bk. ii. chap. 1; W. James,
_Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. chap. 26; _Will to Believe_ (_The
Dilemma of Determinism_); J. Locke, _Essay concerning Human
Understanding_, bk. ii. chap. 21 (on _Power_); J. Martineau, _Types of
Ethical Theory_, vol. ii. bk. i. chap. 1; J. S. Mill, _Logic_, bk. vi.
chap. 2 ff.; J. Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second Series,
lect. 8; H. Sidgwick, _Methods of Ethics_, bk. i. chap. 5; _Lectures on
the Ethics of Green_, etc., pp. 15-29.

-----

Footnote 200:

See _Methods of Ethics_, bk. i. chap. 4, § 6 (pp. 72-76 of 5th ed.).

Footnote 201:

So Omar Khayyám—

“Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Emmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin.”
(FITZGERALD, ed. 4, stanza 80.)

And our own poet—

“Thou madest man in the garden; thou temptedst man, and he fell,” etc.

(For the original of the stanzas on Predestination in Fitzgerald’s
Omar, see, _e.g._, the Persian text of Whinfield, quatrains 100, 126,
197.)

Footnote 202:

Evaded, because, even granting the satisfactoriness of the solution
for the special case of Adam, there would still be the problem of
reconciling the alleged “free will” of his descendants with their
inheritance of “original sin.” The more rigid Calvinism, with its
insistence on the natural corruption of man’s heart and the
absoluteness of predestination, seems to secure logical consistency at
the expense of outraging our moral convictions. Like so many popular
theological problems, this of the conflict between God’s omniscience
and justice arises from a misconception of the issue. It is only when
the category of time is illogically applied to the _ex hypothesi_
perfect, and therefore timeless, nature of God that God’s knowledge
comes to be thought by as _fore_ knowledge _before the event_, and
thus occasions the difficulty which the “free-will” theory was
intended to remove. See on this point, Royce, _The World and the
Individual_, vol. ii. lect. 8, and compare Bradley, _Ethical Studies_,
p. 19. Of course, the case would be altered if we thought of God as
finite and imperfect, and therefore in time. But there would then be
no longer any reason for believing either in His omniscience or His
omnipotence, and so no problem would arise.

Footnote 203:

Remember that abstention from acting is itself action, just as in
Logic every significant denial is really an assertion. Hence our
proviso meets the case of wilful neglect to inform myself of the
material circumstances.

Footnote 204:

The only automatic acts of which we really _know_ the psychical
character are our own “secondarily automatic” or “habitual” acts. It
is, of course, a problem for the casuist how far any particular
reaction has become so completely automatic as to be no longer an
occasion for the imputation of merit or guilt.

Footnote 205:

For purposes of law it may often be impossible to draw the
distinction, and we may have to acquiesce in the rough-and-ready
alternative between entire accountability and complete
non-accountability. But in passing moral judgment on ourselves or
others _in foro conscientiæ_, we always recognise that accountability
is a thing of degrees. On this point see Mr. Bradley’s previously
quoted article in _Mind_ for July 1902.

Footnote 206:

It must, however, be carefully noted that will in the sense in which
it is equivalent to freedom must be taken to include what some
writers, _e.g._, Bradley, call a “standing” will—_i.e._ any series of
acts originally initiated by an idea of the resultant changes, which
is approved of by us unconditionally. In the actual execution of such
a series of acts many of the stages are habitual reactions which, as
such, are not accompanied by the “idea” of their specific result as a
determining condition of their occurrence. The sphere of moral freedom
is arbitrarily restricted when it is assumed that an _actual_ volition
is indispensable for every stage of the “free” action.

Footnote 207:

The reader should study for himself Locke’s famous chapter (_Essay_,
bk. ii. chap. 21). Locke’s treatment, hampered as it is by his
unfortunate retention of the discussion of his first edition side by
side with a somewhat modified re-statement, compares favourably for
clearness and sound sense with that of most subsequent philosophers,
notably with Kant’s unintelligible attempt to reconcile the absolute
freedom of man as “noumenon” (a fictitious quality of a fictitious
being) with his equally absolute unfreedom as “phenomenon” (another
equally palpable fiction).

For Leibnitz’s criticism of Locke, see _Nouveaux Essais_, II. xxi.,
particularly §§ 8-25. (The English translation by Langley can only be
used with extreme caution.) On the whole question the reader should
also consult Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, bk. ii chap. 1; Bradley,
_Ethical Studies_, Essay 1, and article in _Mind_ for July 1902; W. R.
B. Gibson, “The Problem of Freedom” (in _Personal Idealism)_.

Footnote 208:

Then, are “animals” free? I see no reason to deny that, since their
life, in as its degree, must have teleological continuity to be a life
at all, they too must possess a rudimentary degree of freedom, though
a degree not sufficient to fit them for a place as ἴσοι καὶ ὄμοιοι in
human society, and therefore, for the special purposes of human
ethical systems, negligible. Similarly, a human imbecile may possess a
degree of freedom which is important for the educator who is
interested in the “care of the feeble minded,” and yet may rightly be
treated for the different purposes of a penal code as simply unfree.

Footnote 209:

Compare with what follows, Bradley, _Ethical Studies_, Essay 1, and
the notes appended to it. For a typical statement of the determinist
case in its more sober form, see Mill, _System of Logic_, bk. vi.
chap. 2. It is harder to find a reasonable statement of the opposite
view, as most capable moral philosophers have adopted the doctrine of
self-determination. For a defence of thoroughgoing Indeterminism, see
James, _The Will to Believe_ (Essay on _The Dilemma of Determinism_).
In Professor Sidgwick’s statement of the indeterminist view (see,
_e.g._, his posthumous lecture on T. H. Green’s doctrine of freedom in
_Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer, and Martineau_, pp. 15-28),
Indeterminism seems to me to be qualified to the point of being in
principle surrendered.

Footnote 210:

See the admirable discussion of this experience in Dr. Stout’s _Manual
of Psychology_,^3 bk. iv. chap. 10, § 7.

-----

CHAPTER V

SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS
AND RELIGION

§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make provision
for the gratification of our ethical, religious, and æsthetic
interests. § 2. But we cannot assume that ethical and religious
postulates are necessarily _true_ in the forms in which our
practical interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while morality
would become impossible unless on the whole there is coincidence
between virtue and happiness, and unless social progress is a
genuine fact, “perfect virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite
progress” are logically self-contradictory concepts. § 4. But this
does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical ideals. § 5.
In religion we conceive of the ideal of perfection as already
existing in individual form. Hence ultimately no part of the
temporal order can be an adequate object of religious devotion. § 6.
This leads to the _Problem of Evil_. “God” cannot be a finite being
within the Absolute, because, if so, God must contain evil and
imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus _not_ the already
existing realisation of the ideal. § 7. This difficulty disappears
when we identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the Absolute
evil can be seen to be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be
true that religious feeling, to be practically efficient, may need
to imagine its object in an ultimately incorrect anthropomorphic
form. § 8. The existence, within the Absolute, of finite “divine”
personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on grounds of
general Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the “being of God.” The
principle of the “ontological” and “cosmological” proofs can be
defended against the criticism of Hume and Kant only if we identify
God with the Absolute. The “physicotheological proof” could only
establish the reality of finite superhuman intelligences, and its
force depends purely upon empirical considerations of evidence.

§ 1. The metaphysician is perhaps at times too ready to treat experience
as though it were constituted solely by intellectual interests; as
though our one concern in dealing with its deliverances, as they come to
us, were to construct out of them a system of knowledge satisfactory to
our demand for coherent thinking. This is, of course, a one-sided, and
therefore, from the standpoint of Metaphysics itself, an imperfect
expression of the nature of our attitude as intelligences towards the
world of our experience. Our moral, religious, and artistic, no less
than our logical, ideals represent typical forms of our general interest
as intelligent beings in bringing harmony and order into the apparently
discordant material of experience. Hence no study of metaphysical
principles, however elementary, would be complete without some
discussion of the light thrown by these various ideals upon the ultimate
structure of the system of Reality in which we and our manifold
interests form a part. If it is the fundamental principle of a sound
philosophy that all existence forms a harmonious unity, then, if we can
discover what are the essential and permanent features in the demands
made by art, morality, and religion upon the world, we may be sure that
these demands are somehow met and made good in the scheme of things.

For a world which met our ethical, religious, and aesthetic demands upon
life with a _mere_ negative would inevitably contain aspects of violent
and irreconcilable discord, and would thus be no true world or
systematic unity at all. In what follows I propose to discuss the double
question, What appears to be the “irreducible minimum” of the demands
which morality and religion make of the world, and how far the general
conception of existence defended in our earlier chapters provides for
their liquidation. The consideration of our aesthetic ideals and their
metaphysical significance I propose to decline, on the ground both of
its inferior practical interest for mankind at large, and of the very
special and thorough training in the psychological analysis of æsthetic
feeling which is, in my own judgment at least, essential for the
satisfactory treatment of the question.

§ 2. In dealing with the subject thus marked out, it will be necessary
to begin with a word, partly of caution, partly of recapitulation of
previous results, as to the attitude towards the practical ideals of
morality and religion imposed upon the metaphysician by the special
character of his interests as a metaphysician. It will thus be apparent
why I have spoken in the last paragraph of an “irreducible _minimum_” of
ethical and religious postulation. There is a marked tendency among
recent writers on philosophical topics, encouraged more specially by
Professor James and his followers, to urge that any and every ideal
which we think valuable for the purposes of morality and religion has no
less claim to be accepted in Metaphysics as of value for our conception
of Reality than the fundamental principles of logical thought
themselves. Logical thinking, it is contended, is after all only one of
the functions of our nature, by the side of others such as moral
endeavour towards the harmonising of practice with an ideal of the right
or the good, aesthetic creation of the beautiful, and religious
co-operation with a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.”
Why, then, should the metaphysician assume that the universe is more
specially bound to satisfy the demands of the logical intellect than
those of the “practical reason” of morality and religion or the
“creative reason” of art? Must we not say that the demand of the
logician that the world shall be intelligible stands precisely on the
same footing as the moralist’s demand that it shall be righteous, or the
artist’s that it shall be beautiful, and that all three are no more than
“postulates” which we make, in the last resort, simply because it
satisfies our deepest feelings to make them? Must we not, in fact, say
alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art,
“Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are
made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to
advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no
one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of
the others”?

The doctrine I have attempted to summarise thus briefly, I believe to be
partly irrelevant in Metaphysics, partly mistaken, and therefore, so far
as mistaken, mischievous. I pass lightly over the curious mental
reservation suggested by the claim to believe as you list “at your own
risk.” As George Eliot has reminded us in _Adam Bede_, it is a
fundamental fact of our position as members of a social order, that
nothing in the world can be done exclusively at the risk of the doer.
Your beliefs, so far as they receive expression at all, like all the
rest of your conduct, inevitably affect the lives of others as well as
your own, and hence it is useless to urge in extenuation of a false and
mischievous belief to which expression has been given—and a belief which
gets no kind of expression is no genuine belief at all—that it was
entertained at your “personal risk.” That no man liveth to himself is
just as true of the metaphysician as of any other man, and he has no
more claim than another to disregard the truth in practice.

To pass to a more important point. It is no doubt true that the
attainment of satisfaction for our intellectual need for a coherent way
of thinking about existence is only one of a number of human interests.
And thus we may readily grant that morality, religion, and art have a
right to existence no less than Logic. Further, the question whether any
one of the four has a _better_ right to existence than the others seems
to be really unmeaning. There seems to be no sense in asking whether any
typical and essential human aspiration has a superior claim to
recognition and fulfilment rather than another. But it does not seem to
follow that _for all purposes_ our divergent interests and attitudes are
of equal value, and that therefore they may not legitimately be used as
bases for mutual criticism. In particular, it does not seem to follow
that because Logic and morality, say, have an equal right to exist,
there must be an equal amount of _truth_ in the principles of Logic and
the postulates of Ethics. Truth, after all, is perhaps not the “one
thing needful” for human life, and it is not self-evident even that
truth is the supreme interest of morality and religion.

On the face of things, indeed, it seems not to be so. _Primâ facie_, it
looks as if the logician’s ideal of truth and the moralist’s ideal of
goodness were, in part at any rate, divergent. For it is by no means
clear that the widest possible diffusion of true thinking and the
general attainment of the highest standard of moral goodness must
necessarily go together. It may even be conducive to the moral goodness
of a community that many members of it should not think on certain
topics at all, or even should think erroneously about them.[211] And the
ideals of goodness and beauty, we may remind ourselves, seem to be
similarly divergent. It is by no means self-evident, and might even be
said to be, so far as history enables us to judge, probably untrue, that
the society in which the appreciation of beauty is most highly developed
is also the society with the highest standard of goodness.

Now, if truth and goodness are not simply identical, we cannot conclude
that the ultimate truth of a belief is proportionate to its moral
usefulness in promoting practical goodness. And therefore the
metaphysician, who takes ultimate truth as _his_ standard of worth,
would appear to be quite within his right in refusing to admit moral
usefulness as sufficient justification for a belief, just as the
moralist, from the point of view of his special standard of worth, may
rightly decline to take the aesthetic harmoniousness of a life as
sufficient evidence of its moral excellence. Until you have shown, what
the view I am here opposing appears tacitly to assume, that truth, moral
goodness, and beauty are one thing, you cannot rationally refuse the
metaphysician’s claim to criticise, and if necessary to condemn as not
finally true, the “postulates” of which Ethics is entitled to assent,
not that they are “true,” but that they are practically useful.

And, of course, the same liberty must be granted to Ethics itself. The
moralist, I would not only admit but insist, has a perfect right to
criticise, from his special standpoint, the doctrines of the
metaphysician. It may perfectly well be that certain “truths” are better
not generally known, in the interests of practical goodness, and the
moralist is fully justified in dwelling upon the fact. But when the
metaphysician asserts the truth of a proposition solely on the strength
of its value for the promotion of morality, he is deserting the
criterion of value which he is bound in his capacity of metaphysician to
respect. It is quite true that logic is not the only game at which it
interests mankind to play, and that no one need play this special game
unless he prefers it; but when you have once sat down to the game you
must play it according to its own rules, and not those of some other. If
you neglect this caution, you will most likely produce something which
is neither good Metaphysics nor sound Ethics. There is every reason for
Metaphysics to beware of a “will to believe” which in practice must mean
that licence to indulge in uncriticised assertion which Socrates in the
_Phædo_ calls by the appropriate name of “misology,” and identifies as
the psychological source of the worst forms of practical
“disillusionment with life.”[212]

It follows, if these reflections are sound, that we must not, as
metaphysicians, allow ourselves to assume the truth of any and every
conviction about the nature of the world which we find personally
inspiring and attractive, or even which we believe to have an
invigorating effect upon the moral practice of mankind in general. We
cannot, on _a priori_ grounds, dismiss the suggestion that it may make
for practical goodness that all of us to some extent, and many of us to
a very great extent, should be dwellers in the imperfectly illuminated
regions on the “mid way boundary of light and dark.”[213] On the other
hand, it would manifestly be incompatible with the presence of any
rational unity of structure in the experience-world that there should be
a final and absolute lack of harmony between that world, as it must be
conceived by true thinking, and as it must be if our ethical aspirations
are to be satisfied. Somehow and somewhere, if the world is a
teleological unity at all, these aspirations must be provided for and
made good by its real structure, though possibly not in the form in
which, with our present limited insight, we desire that they should be
met, and though, again, we may be unable ever to say precisely in _what_
form they are met. What is simply inconceivable in a rational world is
that our abiding aspirations should meet with blank defeat.

§ 3. What, then, appears to be the “indispensable minimum” of accord
between known truth and our “ethical postulates,” without which the
moral life itself would become irrational? On the whole, I think we may
say that morality cannot maintain itself except upon two
suppositions—(1) that in the main and on the whole the world is so
ordered that our moral struggle for fuller and stronger individuality of
life is successful; that by living the moral life our individual
character does become richer in coherent interest and more completely
unified; and (2) that the gain thus won by our private struggles does
not perish with our disappearance from this mortal scene, but is handed
on to the successors who replace us in the life of the social order to
which we belong. Speaking roughly, this means that unless morality is a
delusion, the moral life is, on the whole, the happy life, and that
there is such a thing as social progress. Now, both these conditions, I
would contend, are shown by the actual experience of mankind to be met
by the constitution of the real world. It was by the analysis of actual
social life, and not by an appeal to postulates of a transcendental
kind, that Plato and Aristotle showed that the good man is, in the main,
even in the present state of society, the “happy” man. And it is by a
similar analysis that the modern thinker must convince himself, if he
convinces himself at all, that human societies are progressive.

So far, then, no question of ultimate metaphysical issues seems to be
involved in the practical demand of the moral life. The case would, of
course, be different if we were with Kant to regard it as a necessary
demand of Ethics that the world shall be so constituted that, in the
end, and for every individual agent, happiness shall be exactly
proportioned to virtue. Still more so if we went on to assert that
morality is a delusion unless every individual is predestined, by the
nature of things, to the ultimate attainment of complete virtue and
complete happiness. Views of this kind would manifestly have to be
defended by an appeal to metaphysical principles which do not find their
complete justification in the empirically known structure of human
society. So too the demand that human society itself shall be
progressive beyond all limits, cannot be shown to be justified by what
is empirically known of the structure and the non-human environment of
our society. And if Ethics really does postulate either the complete
coincidence of virtue with happiness for the individual, or the infinite
progress of society, it is clearly committed to the postulation of very
far-reaching metaphysical doctrines.

Further, it must be frankly owned that these postulates, as they stand,
are inconsistent with the scheme of metaphysical doctrine expounded and
defended in the present work. For both moral goodness and moral progress
are bound up with finite individuality and its characteristic form of
existence, the time-process. Of “progress” this is manifest: all
progress is advance in time, and is advance from a relatively worse to a
relatively better. And with “virtue” it stands no otherwise. For to be
virtuous is not simply to _have_ an individuality which is at once
harmonious and rich in contents, but to _make_ such an individuality for
ourselves out of the raw material of disposition and environment. Only
in the progress towards fuller individuality are we moral agents, and,
just because we are finite, the complete attainment of an absolutely
harmonious individuality is for ever beyond us. Hence absolutely perfect
virtue—and consequently absolutely perfect happiness—are incompatible
with our nature as genuine but finite individuals. In all finite
individuality there is inevitably some aspect of imperfection and
consequently of sadness, though sin and sadness ought to fill, and can
be empirically seen to fill, an increasingly subordinate place in
proportion to the degree of individuality attained. The same reasoning
is equally applicable to the case of any finite society.

Nor does this seem any ground for regarding the constitution of the
universe as ethically unsatisfactory. To repeat the previously quoted
remark of Mr. Bradley, no one has a right to call the universe morally
unsatisfactory on the ground that it does not precisely apportion
happiness to virtue, unless he is prepared to show that more goodness
would be produced by making the correspondence exact, and to show this
is impossible. Still more absurd would it be to censure the universe
because neither _perfect_ virtue nor _perfect_ happiness is attainable.
For morality itself has no existence except as the creation of finite
individuals, and hence we cannot without absurdity censure the universe
on _moral_ grounds for containing finite individuals, and so providing
for the existence of morality.

§ 4. Would the case be altered if we had, or thought we had, grounds for
holding that the progress of human society has fixed and knowable bounds
set to it by the nature of things? If we could know, for instance, that
the physical environment of humanity is so constituted that human life
_must_ ultimately disappear from the earth? I cannot see that it would.
No doubt the widespread acceptance of a belief that the end of things
was at hand within a calculable period, might tend to lessen our moral
earnestness, and if the period were taken to be sufficiently short,
might lead to downright licence and wickedness. But so does a belief in
the approaching dissolution of any historic and wide-reaching social
order; and yet the fact that societies suffer dissolution is not
commonly regarded as reasonable ground for an indictment against the
universe. Nor is there any logical connection between such beliefs and
their consequences. We cannot say that because human society is
perishable, if it is perishable, its achievements must have been wasted
and therefore its progress useless. The result of our achievements
might, in some way unknown to us, survive our extinction as a race, even
as we can partly see that the results of the individual life are
preserved after our death.

And, in any case, it is beyond the power of Metaphysics to set any fixed
limits to the existence and progress of human society. As we have seen,
Metaphysics gives us no reason to deny, though it does not enable us to
affirm, that the social life begun under present conditions may be
continued under unknown conditions beyond the grave. And even the
disappearance of physical human life within a calculable period cannot
be shown to follow from any principle of Metaphysics. At most we can say
that _if_ certain assumed physical laws, especially that of the
dissipation of energy, are valid for all physical processes, and if
again, the psychical factor in living organisms is incapable of
reversing the “down-grade” tendency of energy to pass into forms
unavailable for work, then the human society we know must come to an end
within a calculable time. But whether the assumptions upon which this
conclusion is based are or are not true, Metaphysics by itself cannot
determine.

We are thus left in the following position. That on the whole the
virtuous life is also the happy life, and that there is genuine social
progress,[214] seem to be empirically known certainties. “Absolute
perfection” of the finite as finite, and “infinite progress” seem alike
excluded as metaphysical impossibilities. But no definite limits can be
set by Metaphysics to the possibilities of individual and social advance
towards greater virtue and greater happiness. As for the theories in
Physics which appear to threaten humanity with extinction within a
measurable time, their truth is, to say the least of it, not assured,
and we have, in our metaphysical conception of Reality as an individual
whole, the certainty that, whatever becomes of the human species,
nothing of all our aspirations and achievements can be finally lost to
the universe, though we may be quite unable to imagine the manner of
their preservation. And for the purposes of the moral struggle from a
worse to a better, this seems to be quite as much conformity to our
aspirations as we need ask of the world. For the suggestion that our
ideals are not worth living for unless _we_ enjoy the fruit of our
labours in the form we in particular should like, seems nothing better
than an appeal to the baser Egoism.

§ 5. When we consider the specially _religious_ attitude of mind, we
shall find that its demands upon the world go further than those of mere
Ethics, and are, in part, of a rather different character. It would be
impossible in a work like this to discuss at length the nature of the
religious attitude, but this much at least would probably be admitted as
beyond doubt. The religious attitude towards the world of experience is
distinguished from all others partly by the specific character of the
emotions in which it finds its expression, partly by the intellectual
beliefs to which those emotions give rise. Specifically religious
emotion, as we can detect it both in our own experience, if we happen to
possess the religious “temperament”,[215] and in the devotional
literature of the world, appears to be essentially a mingled condition
of exaltation and humility arising from an immediate sense of communion
and co-operation with a power greater and better than ourselves in which
our ideals of good find completer realisation than they ever obtain in
the empirically known time-order. In the various religious creeds of the
world we have a number of attempts to express the nature of such a power
and of our relation to it in more or less logically satisfactory
conceptual terms. But it is important to remember that, though a
theological belief when sincerely held may react powerfully upon
religious feeling, the beliefs are in the last resort based upon
immediate feeling, and not immediate feeling upon beliefs. In this
sense, at any rate, it is true that all genuine religious life implies
the practical influencing of feeling and action by convictions which go
beyond proved and known truth, and may therefore be said to be matters
of faith.

What the convictions to which we thus surrender the practical guidance
of life are, in any individual case, seems to be largely a question of
individual constitution and social tradition. Not only are the
convictions as to the nature of the higher power represented by the
great typical historical religions very various, but what we may call
the individual religion of different persons exhibits even greater
variety. There is hardly any important object of human interest which
may not acquire for some man the significance which belongs to the
completed realisation of his highest ideals. It is no more than the
truth to say that a mother, a mistress, a country, or a movement, social
or political, may be, as we often phrase it, a man’s “religion.”

Amid all this variety two general principles may be detected which are
of primary importance to the metaphysical critic of religious
experience. (1) It is essential to the religious experience that its
object should be accepted as the really existing embodiment of an ideal.
This is the point in which the religious attitude of mind differs most
strikingly from that of mere morality. In the ethical experience the
ideal is apprehended as something which does not yet exist, but has to
be brought into existence by human exertion. Hence for the purely
ethical attitude of mind the world has to be thought of as essentially
imperfect, essentially out of accord with what it ought to be in order
to correspond to our demands on it. Thus there is not for morality, as
we shall directly see there must be for religion, such a thing as the
“Problem of Evil.” That the world, as it comes to us in the temporal
order, contains imperfection and evil which must be done away with, is a
practical presupposition without which morality itself would have no
_raison d’être_.

But in religion the case is otherwise. It is only in so far as the
object of our adoration, whatever it may be, is taken to be the really
existing embodiment of our highest ideals, that it can produce, in our
spiritual communion with it, that combined emotion of exaltation and
abasement, that feeling of being at once ourselves already perfect so
far as our will is one in its contact with our ideal, and absolutely
condemned and “subject to wrath” so far as it is not, which
distinguishes the religious from all other states of mind. But all real
existence, as we saw in our Second Book, is essentially individual.
Hence it is of the essence of religion that it looks upon the ideal as
already existing _in individual form_. This is why devotion to an
abstract principle, such as nationality, socialism, democracy, humanity,
proves so much inferior as a permanent expression of religious life, to
devotion to a person, however imperfect.[216]

(2) It follows that mere appearance in the time-order cannot be the
ultimate object of religious devotion. For the time-order itself, as we
have seen, is essentially unfinished and incomplete, and no part of it,
therefore, can be perfectly individual. The completely individual, if it
exists at all, must have an existence which is not temporal. Hence no
part of the temporal order of events, as such, can be finally
satisfactory as an object of religious adoration. So far as it is
possible to succeed in worshipping anything which forms part of that
order, such as a man or a cause, this can only be done by regarding the
temporal facts as an imperfect appearance of a reality which, because
completely and perfectly individual, is in its true nature timeless. And
it further follows that, since all finite individuality is, as we have
already seen, only imperfectly individual, and because imperfect is
temporal, the only finally adequate object of religious devotion must be
the infinite individual or timeless Absolute itself.

That the great philosophical religions of the world have felt the force
of this, is shown in history by the way in which they have inevitably
tended to credit their various “gods” with omnipotence. Thus the god of
the Hebrew religion, as at first presented to us in its earlier records,
is represented as limited in power by the existence of other divine
beings, and temporally changeable and mutable. But in the later Old
Testament writings, the New Testament, and the subsequent constructions
of ecclesiastical theology, we see the gradual development from these
Hebrew beginnings of an idea of a God who is “all in all,” and limited
neither by the existence of other divine beings with opposing aims and
interests, nor by the inherent resistance of “matter,” to His purposes.
So the Zoroastrian religion, in which the limitation of the power of the
good being Ahura Mazda by the existence of a co-ordinate bad being,
Angro Mainyus, was originally a fundamental tenet, is said to have
become among the modern Parsis a pure monotheism.

§ 6. Now, it should be noted that this inevitable tendency of Religion
itself to identify its object with ultimate Reality, conceived in its
timeless perfection as a complete and infinite individual whole, leads
to the difficult metaphysical “problem of evil.” For if God is the same
thing as the Absolute, it would appear that evil itself must be, like
everything else, a manifestation of His nature. And if so, can we say
that God is strictly speaking “good,” or is the complete realisation of
our ideals? It is this difficulty about evil, more than anything else,
which has led many philosophers in both ancient and modern times to
distinguish between the Absolute and God, and to regard God as simply
one, though the highest and most perfect, among the finite individuals
contained in the Absolute.[217] In the following paragraphs I propose
not so much to offer a solution of this time-honoured puzzle, as to make
some suggestions which may help to put the issue at stake clearly before
the reader’s mind.

The doctrine of the finitude of God does not appear in any way to remove
the difficulty about evil; in fact, it renders it, if anything, more
acute. For evil must now appear in the universe in a double form. On the
one hand, it admittedly is taken to exist outside God, as a hostile
factor limiting His power of shaping the world to His purpose. But
again, as we have seen, every finite individual, because finite, falls
short of complete internal harmony of structure, and thus contains an
element of defect and evil within itself. Thus evil will be inherent in
the nature of a finite God, as well as in that of the existence supposed
to be outside Him. We have, in fact, one more illustration of the
principle that all limitation involves self-limitation from within. It
is only by forgetting this fundamental truth that we can conceive the
possibility of a being who is “perfectly good” and yet is less than the
Absolute.

And even when we overlook this, our difficulties are not removed. For a
“finite” God with a further reality outside and in some way opposed to
His own nature, even when illogically thought of as perfectly good, must
be at best only such another being as ourselves, though on a larger
scale. He, like us, must be simply a partly successful, partly
unsuccessful, actor in a universe of which the constitution and ultimate
upshot are either unknown or known not to satisfy our religious demand
for the complete individual reality of our ideal.[218] This is the view
which has in history been actually adopted by religions like those of
the Hellenes and the Norsemen, in which the gods are regarded as
ultimately subject to an inscrutable and unethical Fate. But a finite
being struggling, however successfully, against such an alien Fate is,
after all, a fit object only for moral respect and sympathy, not for
religious adoration. Such a being, however exalted, is still not that
complete and harmonious individual realisation of all human aspiration
for which Religion yearns, and is therefore not, in the full and true
sense, God.

If, then, a finite ethical individual, however exalted, cannot be an
adequate object of religious devotion, how does the case stand with the
infinite individual whole of Reality? Can we worship the Absolute?[219]
This is a question which needs some careful examination before we can
venture on a positive answer.

§ 7. The problem, let it be observed, is not strictly psychological.
Experience shows that individual men can derive religious support from
belief in the most varied and most defective conceptions of the nature
of the Deity. Beliefs which bring one man “peace in believing” might, if
seriously entertained, blight another man’s life; one man’s God may be
another’s devil. This is, however, not the point. The real question is,
whether the Absolute can be made into an object of religious worship, as
we have seen that finite individuals cannot, without a breach of logic.
Has it the character which, as we have seen, anything which is to
correspond to our ideal of “God” must logically possess?

At first sight it certainly would seem that it has. For, as we have
seen, the Absolute contains all finite existence, and contains it as a
perfectly harmonious system. And therefore all finite aspiration must
somehow be realised in the structure of the Absolute whole, though not
necessarily in the way in which we, as beings of limited knowledge and
goodness, actually wish it to be realised. The Absolute whole is thus,
as nothing else can be, the concrete individual reality in which our
ideals have actual existence. As all our ideals themselves are but so
many expressions of our place in the system and our relation to the rest
of it, so the system itself is their concrete harmonious embodiment.

It is true, as we have already seen, that our ideals may not be realised
in the whole just in the form in which we conceive them, but it must be
remembered that in so far as we set up our private judgment and wishes
as standards to which the whole is bound to conform on pain of
condemnation, we are adopting an attitude which is at once illogical and
irreligious. It is illogical, because it implies the assumption that
with fuller knowledge of the system of Reality as a whole we should
still desire the fulfilment of our aspirations in the special way which
at present recommends itself to our imperfect insight. It is
irreligious, because the demand that human desires shall be fulfilled in
our way and not in “God’s way” involves the setting up of human wisdom
against God’s, and is thus irreconcilable with genuine union of heart
and will with the divine order.[220]

What then becomes, from this point of view, of the problem of evil? How
can the presence of moral evil in the temporal order be reconciled with
the thought of the Absolute whole as the complete and harmonious
realisation of human ideals? I need not say that the _detailed_ solution
of the problem is out of the question. As beings whose insight is
necessarily limited by our own finitude, we cannot hope to see how in
detail everything that appears to us as evil might, with larger
knowledge, be known as an integral constituent of a whole which, as a
whole, is the realisation of human aspiration, and therefore free from
evil. But it is at least possible to make suggestions which may show
that the problem is a mere consequence of the inevitable defects of our
insight, and that it would disappear with fuller knowledge. It is not
hard to see that there are two main reasons why the structure of the
universe seems to finite insight partly evil. Our insight into the
nature and connection of our purposes themselves is never complete; we
are all, in part, ignorant of exactly what it is to which we aspire.
Hence our purposes in part appear to be met by existence with a negative
just because we are only imperfectly aware of what they mean and whither
they tend. There is no more familiar fact than this, that even within
the limits of our human life growing experience is constantly teaching
us how confused and defective our judgment at any moment as to what we
really want, can be. Largely, then, our ideals seem to be at variance
with actual existence, because we never fully know what they are.

Again, our knowledge of the effects of our acts is always imperfect in
the extreme. We seem to fail because we cannot see far enough to
understand fully what it is we have effected. And both these causes of
the apparent discrepancy between the real and the ideal may be traced to
a single root. Existence appears to be in part evil, because we cannot
take it in at once and as a whole in its individual structure. We have
to make acquaintance with it by piecemeal, and as a succession of
fragmentary events in the time-series. And imperfection, we have seen,
belongs to the time-series. Hence we can see that evil is at once a mere
appearance, and an appearance which is inevitable to the finite
experience conditioned by the temporal form. The so-called “problem” is
thus in principle insoluble only so long as we falsely think of the
time-order itself as a characteristic of the Absolute whole in its real
individuality.[221]

May we say, then, that the Absolute or whole is known in Metaphysics to
be “good”? The answer depends upon the precise meaning we attach to the
statement. In the sense that it is the really existing embodiment of the
ideals we are trying amid our ignorance and confusion to realise, we
clearly must say “yes.” But if we use the word “good” in a narrower
sense, to mean “_ethically_ good,” we can hardly say without
qualification that the whole is good. For “ethical goodness” belongs
essentially to the time-order, and means the process of the gradual
assertion of the ideal against apparent evil. To be morally good is to
have an ideal that is not realised in the events of the time-order as
they come to us in our finite experience, and to mould those events into
conformity with the ideal. The moral life is from first to last a
struggle, and where the struggle is absent it is misleading to speak of
morality. Hence it is better not to call the Absolute “moral.”

But we must remember that the Absolute is only not moral, because it is
something very much more than moral, only not ethical because there is
in it no divorce of ideal from actuality, as there is in the imperfect
experience of its finite members. Or, as we might say, it is something
more than “good” precisely because it is already good. In morality, let
it be remembered, we have, as in all the experience of finite beings, a
process which is throughout directed upon a result that, once attained,
would transcend the process itself. Morality would not be content with
anything less than the total abolition of the evil in the world; and
with the disappearance of evil, the struggle against it would itself
disappear in some higher form of experience. Similarly, knowledge is
constantly striving to exhaust the object of knowledge. So long as the
object is in any respect unknown, the task of knowing is incomplete; yet
if once we could so know any object that nothing further remained to be
known about it, there would be no aspect of not-self in the object which
could distinguish it from the subject by which it is known, and
knowledge itself would thus be done away. Thus we may see from the side
alike of cognition and of will how the whole life of the finite being
forms a constant endeavour to widen experience into the complete
apprehension of a content which, because infinite, could not be
apprehended without the disappearance of finitude itself. Thus does
experience witness to the truth of our fundamental doctrine, that the
finite individual repeats in itself, in an imperfect and inadequate
form, the structure of the infinite individual of which it is an
appearance.

I do not know whether it is necessary to say more than a word with
reference to the thoughtless objection so often urged against all
philosophical and religious doctrines which deny the ultimate reality of
evil, or, what is the same thing, the existence of an independent devil.
If existence is already perfect, it is said, why should we seek to make
it better at great trouble and inconvenience to ourselves by moral and
political endeavour? Ought we not rather to sit with folded hands
acquiescing lazily in “things as they are”? The doubt might even be
carried further than this. For to “take things as they are” is just as
much a course of self-chosen action as any other line of conduct, and it
might hence be argued that abstention and moral effort are alike out of
place and absurd in a world where everything is “perfect.”

The objection, of course, turns upon a mere confusion of existence as it
is in its individual reality, and existence as it appears to us in the
time-series. The argument for Quietism is based purely upon attributing
to the essentially imperfect and incomplete series of temporal events
the perfection which only belongs to the timeless whole. In that perfect
whole our moral ideals and moral effort, as finite beings belonging to
the temporal order, are of course included along with everything else,
and its perfection is therefore no ground for treating them as nugatory.
Our own moral struggle with the apparent evil of the time-series is
itself an integral part of the Reality which, in its complete individual
character, is already perfect, if we could but win to a point of view
from which to behold it as it is. As Plotinus expresses it, “our
striving is after good and our turning away is from evil, and thought
with a purpose is of good and evil, and this is a good.”[222]

If we may not say without qualification that the Absolute is good, and
certainly must not say that it is in the proper sense “ethical,” still
less may we say that the Absolute is “morally indifferent.” For the
Absolute is only not ethical because it is already all that ethical life
consists in striving to become. Hence the higher a finite being stands
in the ethical scale, as judged by the double criterion of the wealth of
its interests in the world and the degree of harmony between them, the
more adequately does its structure repeat that of the whole, and the
higher is its degree of reality. And this means that the good man’s
ideals are realised in the world-order with less of modification and
reconstruction than the bad man’s. In a sense, as Professor Royce
maintains, even the bad man’s confused and warring ideals get their
fulfilment, since he too is aiming, however blindly, at a complete
individuality as the goal of all his striving. But he is seeking it
where it is not to be found, in the gratification of desires which
cannot be allowed the supreme place in the direction of life without
leading to the distraction and mutilation of the self. As Plato puts it,
the bad man “does as he pleases,” and for that very reason never “does
what he wills.” Hence the place of the good man in the economy of the
universe is very different from that of the bad, and the world-order
itself is the very reverse of “indifferent” to the distinction between
them.[223]

My own conclusion, then, which I offer to the reader simply as my own,
is that anything less than the Absolute is an inadequate object of
religious devotion, and that the Absolute itself has the structure which
such an object requires. If it should be further suggested that at any
rate, when we come to actual experience, we find that we cannot
represent the object of our worship to ourselves in an individual form
of sufficient concreteness to stir effectual emotion and prompt to
genuine action without clothing it in imagination with anthropomorphic
qualities which metaphysical criticism proves inapplicable to the
infinite individual, I should be inclined to reply that I admit the
fact. And I do not think we need shrink from the conclusion that
practical religion involves a certain element of intellectual
contradiction. Thus, though God is not truly God until we deny the
existence of any independent “evil” by which His nature is limited, it
seems probable that the thought of ourselves as “fellow-workers with
God” would hardly lead to practical good works unless we also
inconsistently allowed ourselves to imagine God as struggling against a
hostile power and standing in need of our assistance. But this only
shows that the practical value of religion in guiding action is not
necessarily dependent upon its scientific truth.

§ 8. Of course, it would be quite open to us to hold that there may be,
within the Absolute, finite beings of superhuman power and goodness with
whom humanity is capable of co-operating for ethical ends. Only such
beings, if they exist, would not be God in the same sense in which the
Absolute may be called God. They might deserve and win our reverence and
our co-operation, but because themselves finite and therefore only
imperfectly real and individual, they could not logically take the place
which belongs only to the completely and perfectly individual
realisation of the ideal. That would still fall partly outside them in
the nature, as a whole, of the system which harmoniously includes both
ourselves and them. Thus such beings would be “gods” in the sense of
polytheism rather than God in that of monotheism.

Further, I can see no means of deciding _a priori_ that there could be
only one such being in the universe. Even supposing the series of finite
beings to be itself finite, it is not evident that it could contain only
one “best” member. And supposing it infinite, could there be a “best”
member at all?[224] Also it appears quite beyond the power of
Metaphysics to find either proof or disproof of the existence and agency
of such finite but exalted beings. We cannot say that our general
conception of Reality is such as to negative the suggestion, and yet
again that general conception gives us no positive evidence in favour of
taking it as true. It would certainly be the grossest presumption to
maintain that the Absolute can contain no higher types of finite
individuality than those presented by human society; on the other hand,
it would be equally presumptuous to assert that we have reasoned
knowledge of their existence and their direct social relation with
ourselves. Hence we must, I think, be content to say that the
hypothesis, so far as it seems to be suggested to any one of us by the
concrete facts of his own individual experience, is a matter for the
legitimate exercise of Faith.

§ 9. These reflections may naturally lead to some remarks, which shall
be made as brief as possible, about the so-called philosophical
“arguments for the existence of God,” which played a prominent part in
Metaphysics before their discrediting at the hands of Kant and
Hume.[225] Kant’s great achievement lies in having demonstrated that the
whole force of the “proofs” depends upon the famous ontological
argument, best known in modern Philosophy in the form adopted by
Descartes in the fifth _Meditation_. Descartes there argues thus:—By
“God” I mean a completely perfect being. Now, existence is a perfection,
and non-existence an imperfection. Hence I cannot think of a
non-existing perfect being without self-contradiction. Hence God,
because by hypothesis perfect, must exist, and is the _only_ being whose
existence logically follows from its definition.

Kant’s even more famous criticism of this famous inference turns upon
the principle which he had learned from his study of Hume, that logical
necessity is “subjective.” If I think of a logical subject as defined by
certain properties, he argues in effect, I am _necessitated_ to ascribe
to it all the predicates implied in that definition. That is, I must
affirm them or contradict myself. Hence, if “existence” is originally
included among the perfections by which the subject “God” is defined,
the proposition _God exists_ is certainly necessary, but is also
tautological, and amounts, in fact, to the mere assertion that “an
existing perfect being is an existing perfect being.” But if the
“existence” spoken of in the predicate is something not included in the
definition of the subject, then you cannot infer it from that
definition. Now “real existence” is not a predicate which can be
included in the definition of a concept. The predicates by which an
imaginary hundred dollars are defined are the same as those of a real
hundred dollars. It is not by the possession of a new predicate, but by
being actually given in a concrete experience, that the real coins
differ from the imaginary. Hence all propositions asserting real
existence are _synthetic_, (_i.e._ assert of their subject something
which is not contained in the concept of it), and the real existence of
God or any other object can never be deduced from its definition.[226]

This Kantian criticism has itself been subjected to much criticism,
principally at the hands of Hegel and those subsequent philosophers who
have been specially affected by the Hegelian influence. What appears to
be the general principle of the Hegelian criticism has been most clearly
expressed in English philosophy by Mr. Bradley,[227] upon whose
discussion the following remarks are chiefly founded.

In estimating the worth of the ontological proof, we must distinguish
between the general principle implied in it and the particular form in
which it presents that principle. It is manifest that Kant is perfectly
right when he contends that, taking existence to mean presence in the
space and time-order, you cannot reason from my possession of any idea
to the existence of a corresponding object. You cannot say whatever I
conceive must exist as I conceive it. But the principle of the
ontological proof is perhaps not necessarily condemned by its failure to
be thus universally applicable. The principle involved appears to be
simply this. The idea and the reality outside its own existence as a
fact in the time-order which it “means” or “stands for” are mutually
complementary aspects of a whole Reality which include them both. For
there is, on the one side, no “idea” so poor and untrue as not to have
some meaning or objective reference beyond its own present
existence.[228] And, on the other, what has no significance for any
subject of experience is nothing. Hence in its most general form the
ontological argument is simply a statement that reality and meaning for
a subject mutually imply one another. But it does not follow that all
thoughts are equally true and significant. In other words, though every
thought _means_ something beyond its own existence, different thoughts
may represent the structure of that which they mean with very different
grades of adequacy. That which my thought means may be far from being
real in the form in which I think it.

Now, we may surely say that the more internally harmonious and
systematic my thought is, the more adequately it represents the true
nature of that which it means. If thoroughly systematic coherent thought
may be mere misrepresentation, our whole criterion of scientific truth
is worthless. How freely we use this ontological argument in practice
will be readily seen by considering the way in which, _e.g._, in the
interpretation and reconstruction of historical facts, the internal
coherency of a systematic and comprehensive interpretation is taken as
itself the evidence of its truth.[229] Hence it may be argued that if
there is a systematic way of thinking about Reality which is absolutely
and entirely internally coherent, and from its own nature must remain
so, however the detailed content of our ideas should grow in complexity,
we may confidently say that such a scheme of thought faithfully
represents the Reality for which it stands, so far as any thought can
represent Reality. That is, while the thought would not _be_ the Reality
because it still remains thought, which _means_ something beyond its own
existence, it would require no modification of structure but only
supplementation in detail to make it the truth.

But if we have anywhere thought which is thus internally coherent, and
from its own nature must remain so, however knowledge may extend, we
have it surely in our metaphysical conception of the real as the
absolutely individual. Thus the ontological proof appears, in any sense
in which it is not fallacious, to amount merely to the principle that
significant thought gives us genuine knowledge; and therefore, since the
thoroughgoing individuality of structure of its object is presupposed in
all significant thought, Reality must be a perfect individual. That this
perfect individual must further be “God,” _i.e._ must have the special
character ascribed to it by beliefs based upon specifically religious
emotions, does not follow. How far the “God” of religion is a correct
conception of the metaphysical Absolute, we can only learn from the
analysis of typical expressions of the religious experience itself. And
it is obvious that if by “God” we mean anything less than the Absolute
whole, the ontological proof ceases to have any cogency. It is
impossible to show that the possibility of significant thought implies
the presence of a special finite being, not empirically known to us,
within the Absolute.

The “cosmological” proof, or “argument from the contingency of the
world,” unlike the ontological, has the appearance, at first sight, of
starting with given empirical fact. As summarised by Kant for purposes
of criticism, it runs thus:—“If anything at all exists, there must be
also an absolutely necessary being. Now, I exist myself; _ergo_, the
absolutely necessary being exists.” To make the proof quite complete, it
would be necessary to show that the being whose existence is affirmed in
the minor premisses, to wit, myself, is not itself the “absolutely
necessary being,” and the argument thus completed would become in
principle identical with the second of the “proofs” given by Descartes
in the third _Meditation_, where it is inferred that if I, a dependent
being, exist, there must be a God on whom I and all things depend.[230]
As Kant has pointed out, the whole force of this inference rests upon
the previous admission of the ontological argument. By itself the
cosmological proof only establishes the conclusion that if any dependent
existence is real, independent existence of some kind must be real also.
To convert this into a “proof of the existence of _God_” you must
further go on to identify the “independent existence” thus reached with
the “most real” or “most perfect” being of the ontological proof. For
otherwise it might be suggested, as is done by one of the speakers in
Hume’s dialogue, that the series of phenomenal events itself, taken as
an aggregate, is the “necessary existence” upon which the “contingent
existence” of each several event depends. “Did I show you the particular
causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter,
I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what
was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in
explaining the cause of the parts.”

To avoid this objection, we must go on to maintain that only the “most
perfect being” can be an ultimately necessary being, and that its
“necessary existence” is a consequence of its character. This, as we
have seen, is the very assertion made in the ontological proof. Hence
our criticisms of the ontological proof will be equally applicable to
the cosmological. If we combine the two, restating them in accord with
our previous remodelling of the former, the argument will take the
following form. All propositions directly or indirectly refer to real
existence. Hence it would be self-contradictory to assert that nothing
exists. But existence itself is only conceivable as individual. Hence
the absolutely individual must be really existent. And this is identical
with the general principle of our own reasoning in Book II. of the
present work. Clearly, if valid, it is valid simply as an argument for a
metaphysical Absolute; it neither proves that Absolute itself to be what
we mean in religion by God, nor affords any ground for asserting the
existence of God as a finite individual within the Absolute.[231]

The _physico-theological_ argument, also known as the argument from
_design_, or the _teleological_ proof, differs from the preceding two in
being in its current forms honestly empirical. In the shape of an
inference from the apparent presence of order and a regard for human
good in the structure of nature to the existence of a wise and
benevolent being or beings as the author or authors of nature, it has
been the most popular of all theistic arguments both in the ancient
world, where, according to Xenophon, it was specially insisted upon by
Socrates, and in the modern defences of theological beliefs against
rationalistic criticism. It must, however, be observed that the
criticisms of Hume and Kant are absolutely fatal to the “argument from
design,” when it is put forward as a proof of the existence of a God of
_infinite_ goodness and wisdom. At best, as Kant says, the observed
order and harmony of Nature would enable us to infer a finite degree of
wisdom and goodness in its author. The assertion of the absolute
harmoniousness and goodness of Nature, which we require to justify the
inference to infinite wisdom and goodness in its author, goes far beyond
the limits of the empirically verifiable, and can itself only be upheld
by some form of the “ontological proof.” Hence the “argument from
design” could at best prove a God whose wisdom and goodness are, so far
as knowable, limited. As Hume forcibly puts the same point, if the
empirically known facts of the partial adaptation of Nature to human
purposes are valid, as they stand, to prove a wise and good
intelligence, are not the equally well-ascertained facts of the partial
want of adaptation equally valid to prove defective goodness or
defective wisdom?[232]

There is a deeper metaphysical reason for this difference between the
results of the physico-theological and of the other “proofs,” which may
be briefly pointed out. The whole conception of the order and systematic
unity of the world as due to preconceived “design” is only intelligible
if we suppose the author of that “design” to be finite, and subject,
like ourselves, to temporal mutability. For in the notion of design
itself are implied the severance of the mentally conceived ideal from
the actuality which waits to be brought into accord with it, and
consequently also the time-process, which we have already found to be
characteristic of all finitude. Hence the physico-theological proof, by
itself, can at best be used to establish the reality of finite “gods,”
not of “God,” because it works throughout with the categories of
finitude.

Upon the logical force of the argument, as thus limited by its initial
assumptions, only one observation need be made. What the reasoning
asserts is not merely that “Nature” is in reality a system exhibiting
individuality and purposive interest, or even “design,” but that it
reveals the particular design of assisting and fostering human progress.
Now, whether this is so or not would appear to be a question of
empirical fact only capable of determination by the methods applicable
to other problems of the same empirical kind. Probably the lines along
which it will have to be decided in the future are of the following
general kind. Evolutionary science seems clearly to have shown that in
the influences it knows, _e.g._, as “natural” and again as “sexual
selection,” we have processes which lead to beneficial results without
being, so far as we can see, in the least directed by the conscious
“design” of establishing those results.[233] We should have to ask,
then, whether there is actual ground for holding that such influences
are not of themselves sufficient to account for the development of human
civilisation, so far as it is due to factors belonging to the
“environment.” If they are so sufficient, the “physico-theological”
argument for benevolent super-human agency in moulding the course of
human development, becomes superfluous; if they are not, their failure
is, so far, good ground for the recognition of finite “designing”
intelligences of a non-human kind as forming a factor in our
environment. In either case the question appears to be one of empirical
fact, and to be incapable of determination in advance on general
metaphysical grounds.[234] Nor are we justified in assuming that “design
in nature,” supposing it to exist, must always be directed to securing
ends which are either intelligible to us, or, if intelligible,
“benevolent,” in the sense of furthering our own special human
interests. And here I must be content to leave the subject.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 25,
26; J. E. McTaggart, _Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_, chaps. 6, 8; J.
Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second Series, lects. 9, 10.

-----

Footnote 211:

To take a couple of concrete illustrations. It may be—I do not say it
is—conducive to moral goodness that there should be a general
conviction that in the long run our individual happiness is strictly
proportionate to our degree of virtue. But there is no means whatever
of showing that this belief is true, and, as Mr. Bradley once
pertinently argued against Professor Sidgwick, no philosopher is
entitled to assert its truth on moral grounds unless he is prepared to
maintain that he could produce more goodness and less badness by such
an exact proportioning of happiness to merit than without it. Again,
most of us would probably admit that ordinary moral rules, such as
that against wilful lying, have exceptions. But we are not bound to
hold it conducive to moral goodness that every one should be aware of
this.

Footnote 212:

I have not taken into account the argument from origins, because it
does not appear relevant. That our intellectual interest in “truth” is
historically a derivative from an interest in the “useful,” “science”
an offshoot of the arts, is, as we have seen for ourselves, true
enough, but it does not follow that the truth which is the ideal of
the developed intellect is the same thing as the “useful” from which
it has arisen. We rejected the claims of the mechanical postulate to
be final truth, not because of their origin in the needs of industrial
science, but because, as tested by the standard of final
self-consistency, they were unsatisfactory to the intellect.

Footnote 213:

ἐν μεταιχμίῳ σκότου, to use the poet’s phrase.

Footnote 214:

Not, of course, _pure_ progress. It does not require profound insight
to discover that moral progress, like everything else, has its price,
and that all “progressive evolution” implies “degeneration” as one of
its aspects. But the moral progress of society will be genuine if, on
the whole, our gain is—from the moralist’s special standpoint—more
than our loss. We have no reason to despair of our kind if the
impartial historian, comparing the facts—not the self-complacent
fictions of popular optimism—about our current social life with the
facts—not the fancies of Apologetics—about social life, say, in the
first century of the Roman Empire, can pronounce that there has been
advance on the whole.

Footnote 215:

The “religious” temperament is apparently shown by experience to be,
in its intenser manifestations, quite as much an idiosyncrasy of
congenital endowment as the “æsthetic.” There are persons, not
otherwise mentally defective, who seem to be almost devoid of it, just
as there are others who have little or no sense of humour or feeling
for beauty. As many of these persons are ethically excellent, some of
them exceptionally so, and as again the religious temperament is often
found strongly developed in persons of quite inferior ethical
development, there seems to be no _direct_ connection between
religious sensibility and moral excellence, though, of course,
religious feeling is the most powerful of moral influences when it is
conjoined in the same person with ethical fervour. For a masterly
description of some typical forms of religious feeling and belief the
reader should consult Professor James’s _Varieties of Religious
Experience_. He will find my own views as to the philosophical
interpretation of religion, if he cares to know them, in the final
chapter of my _Problem of Conduct_.

Footnote 216:

So Hegel insisted that the fundamental significance of the Christian
religion lies neither in the historical career nor in the moral
teaching of Jesus (which indeed contained little that had not already
been uttered in the form of precept or principle), but in the
recognition by the Christian community of the union of God and Man as
a fact already realised in individual form in the person of Christ.
See Dr. McTaggart’s essay on “Hegelianism and Christianity” in
_Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_.

Footnote 217:

So Plato suggested in the second book of the _Republic_, that God is
not the cause of all that happens to us, but only of the good things
that befall us. Perhaps, however, Plato is here consciously adapting
his expression to current theological doctrine of which he did not
fully approve. For a modern defence of the same conception of a finite
God, see Dr. Rashdall’s essay in _Personal Idealism_. Other reasons
which have often led to the same view, such as the desire to think of
God as a mutable being like ourselves, capable of being influenced in
His attitude toward us by our attitude towards Him, seem to rest too
much upon idiosyncrasies of private feeling to be of serious
philosophical weight. If private feeling is to count at all, one does
not see why that of those who would feel outraged by such a conception
of a finite changeable God should not be allowed an equal significance
with that of their opponents. It is a palpable mistake to treat
private feeling, whatever its worth may be, as all on one side in this
matter.

Footnote 218:

For if we once suppose that we know the universe, in which “God” is
only one finite being among others, to be so constituted as to
correspond to this demand, it will be the whole of which “God” is one
factor, and not “God” by Himself, which will become the supreme object
of religious emotion. Thus we may say, until God is thought of as the
individual whole, He is not fully God.

Footnote 219:

It should be scarcely necessary to point out that the Absolute, if it
can be worshipped at all, can be worshipped only as conceived as fully
individual. When it is falsely thought of as a “collection” or
“aggregate” or “totality” of independent things, it is no more divine
than any other collection. This is the fatal objection to vulgar
“Pantheism.” How far any of the serious thinkers who are popularly
charged with “Pantheism” have countenanced this view of the Absolute
as a mere collection, is another matter.

Footnote 220:

I am afraid that this essentially irreligious feeling has a great deal
to do with the complaints sometimes urged against the Absolute as a
poor substitute for a “living God.” Partly these complaints spring, no
doubt, from the mistaken notion that the Absolute is not a concrete
individual but a mere “collective concept.” But they seem also to be
motived by a suspicion that a finite Deity might be more amenable than
the Absolute to our wish to have our ideals gratified in our own
fashion. And so far as this is the motive of them, such complaints are
essentially impious.

Footnote 221:

The reader will naturally think of the famous Socratic paradox, that
“wrong doing is error,” “vice is ignorance.” If we interpret this to
mean that the fundamental advantage of the good man over the bad lies
in his truer insight into what he seriously wants, it seems to be
true.

Footnote 222:

_Enneads_, I. 8, 15 (quoted and translated in Whittaker, the
_Neoplatonists_, p. 83). Plotinus had just previously made the correct
observation that to deny the existence of evil in any and every sense
means to deny the existence of good. (κακόν γε εἴ τις λέγοι τὸ παράπαν
ἐν τοῖς οὖσι μὴ εἶναι, ἀνάγκη αὐτῷ καὶ τὸ ἀφαθὸν ἀναιρεῖν καὶ μηδὲ
ὀπεκτὸν μηδὲν εἶναι.) We might thus say, if good is to be at all, evil
must have some kind of relative or phenomenal existence as its
antecedent condition. But, as thus serving as a condition for the
realisation of good, evil is itself, from a more universal point of
view, good, and therefore its existence _as_ evil only apparent. On
the whole question of the position of evil in the world-order, see the
admirable essay on “Sin” in Dr. McTaggart’s _Studies in Hegelian
Cosmology_.

Footnote 223:

When it is said that the Absolute, if it exists, must be morally
indifferent, there is often a conscious or unconscious confusion of
thought. The Absolute must certainly be “indifferent” in the sense
that it does not feel the internal discord of hatred and animosity
against any of its constituents. Deus, as Spinoza says, neminem potest
odio habere. For the Absolute is not one of the two combatants; it is
at once both combatants and the field of combat. But to infer that the
Absolute, because devoid of the feelings of hatred and private
partisanship, must be indifferent in the sense that our goodness and
badness make no difference to our place in it, is a fallacy of
equivocation for which unconsciousness and _bona fides_ are scarcely
sufficient excuse.

Footnote 224:

Thus I do not understand why, apart from respect for the traditions of
Christianity, Dr. Rashdall should hold that God, in his sense of the
word, is one and not many. His argument appears to me to identify God
with the Absolute, where it is required to maintain God’s unity, and
to distinguish them as soon as it becomes a question of proving God’s
“Personality” (see his essay in _Personal Idealism_). Professor James
appears more logical in his obvious readiness to reckon with
polytheism as a possible consequence of his denial of God’s infinity
(_Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 524 ff.).

Footnote 225:

Kant’s famous onslaught will be found in the _Kritik der Reinen
Vernunft_, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. ii. div. 3 (“The Ideal of
Pure Reason”), §§ 3-7. Hume’s criticisms are contained in his
posthumous _Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_.

Footnote 226:

Kant’s criticism had been in part anticipated on the first circulation
of the _Meditations_ by both Mersenne and Gassendi. See particularly
Gassendi’s strictures on Descartes’ confusion of existence with
properties in the “Fifth Objections,” with Descartes’ unsatisfactory
reply. Leibnitz repeated the same objection, and proposed to amend the
Cartesian proof by a formal demonstration that God’s existence is
_possible_, _i.e._ does not imply a formal contradiction. He then
argues—If God’s existence is possible, He exists (by the Cartesian
proof). But God’s existence is possible, therefore God exists. See,
_e.g._, Leibnitz, Works, ed. Erdmann, p. 177; and Latta, _Monadology
of Leibniz_, p. 274. Hume’s comments are even more akin to Kant’s.
“Whatever we conceive as existent we can also conceive as
non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence
implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being whose
existence is demonstrable.” (_Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_,
part 9.)

Footnote 227:

_Appearance and Reality_, chap. 24.

Footnote 228:

No thought can be merely and absolutely false, any more than any act
can be merely and without qualification bad. Though _words_ may be
entirely meaningless, thoughts cannot be.

Footnote 229:

The appeal to experiment is no objection to the principle. For in
making the experiment we do not, of course, get out of the circle of
our thoughts, and the experiment only affords a criterion of truth in
so far as it leaves us with a new thought which can only be brought
into systematic harmony with our old ideas in one determinate way.
Except as interpreted by thought, the experiment has no bearing on our
knowledge.

Footnote 230:

This was also a favourite argument with Leibnitz, as Kant notes. For
an acute examination of Leibnitz’s use of it and the other “proofs,”
see B. Russell’s _Philosophy of Leibniz_ chap. 15. For Hume’s
objections to it, see the already quoted part 9 of the _Dialogue
concerning Natural Religion_. The other “proof” of the _Third
Meditation_, namely, that my possession of an idea of God, which I
could not have derived from empirical sources, proves the reality of
the idea’s object, is only a special form of the ontological argument
from idea to existence.

Footnote 231:

As thus remodelled, the double ontologico-cosmological argument might
be attacked on two grounds—(1) That it only proves, once more, that
_if_ we admit that all propositions are concerned with real existence,
either directly or remotely, we must admit the existence of the
Absolute, but does not demonstrate that all propositions _are_ so
concerned. (2) That in saying that existence is only _conceivable_ as
individual we fall back into the Cartesian misconception of existence
as a predicate. I should reply, (1) that the validity of the premiss
in question cannot be denied without being confirmed in the act of
denial. _I.e._ unless the suggested proposition that “some
propositions at least have no reference to a reality beyond their own
presence as psychical facts in my mind,” itself has the very objective
reference in question, it has no meaning, and is therefore no genuine
proposition; (2) that we must distinguish between the _what_ and the
_that_ of existence. The “that” of existence is not conceivable at
all, but our position is that this inconceivable _that_ is only
logically, not really, separable from a _what_, and that it is
precisely this inseparability of the _that_ and the _what_ which we
mean by “individuality.”

Footnote 232:

_Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_, part 11.

Footnote 233:

This is quite consistent with our own view, that all real processes
are teleological in the sense of being marked by subjective interest.
For (_a_) not by any means all teleological process is actual “design”
or “volition” (impulse, organic craving, habit, etc., are all cases in
point); and (_b_) actual volition need not always be volition for the
result it actually produces. Sexual selection in man would be an
instance of a process which may take the form of actual volition, but
in that case is rarely, if ever, volition for that improvement of the
stock which _de facto_ issues from it.

Footnote 234:

Cf. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 200, 496-497 (1st ed.).
Professor Flint’s attempted reply to the Humian and Kantian criticism
of the theistic “proofs” (_Agnosticism_, chap. 4) has not induced me
to modify any of the opinions expressed in this chapter.

-----

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

§ 1. Can our Absolute Experience be properly called the “union of
Thought and Will”? The Absolute is certainly the final realisation
of our intellectual and our practical ideals. But (1) it includes
aspects, such as, _e.g._ æsthetic feeling, pleasure, and pain, which
are neither Thought nor Will. (2) And it cannot possess either
Thought or Will _as such_. Both Thought and Will, in their own
nature, presuppose a Reality which transcends _mere_ Thought and
_mere_ Will. § 2. Our conclusion may in a sense be said to involve
an element of Agnosticism, and again of Mysticism. But it is only
agnostic in holding that we do not know the precise nature of the
Absolute Experience. It implies no distrust of the validity of
knowledge, so far as it goes, and bases its apparently agnostic
result on the witness of knowledge itself. Similarly, it is mystical
in transcending, not in refusing to recognise, the constructions of
understanding and will. § 3. Metaphysics adds nothing to our
information, and yields no fresh springs of action. It is finally
only justified by the persistency of the impulse to speculate on the
nature of things as a whole.

§ 1. It seems advisable, in bringing this work to a conclusion, to bring
together by way of recapitulation a few important consequences of our
general principle which could not receive all the notice they deserve in
the course of our previous exposition. Our main contention, which it may
be hoped our discussion of special problems has now confirmed, was that
the whole of Reality ultimately forms a single infinite individual
system, of which the material is psychical matter of fact, and that the
individuality of this system lies ultimately in a teleological unity of
subjective interest. Further, we saw that all subordinate reality is
again in its degree individual, and that the contents of the Absolute
thus form a hierarchy of ascending orders of reality and individuality,
and that in this way, while all finite individual existence is, as
finite, appearance and not ultimate Reality, appearances, themselves are
of varied degrees of worth, and that, apart from the appearances, there
is no reality at all. And finally, we learned that all the aspirations
of finite individuals must be somehow met and made good in the ultimate
Reality, though not necessarily in the form in which they are
consciously entertained by the finite aspirant.

This last conclusion naturally suggests the question, whether it would
be a correct description of the ultimate Reality to call it the “union
of Thought and Will.” I will briefly indicate the reasons why such a
description appears to be misleading. (1) The Absolute may no doubt be
called the “union of Thought and Will,” in the sense that its complete
individual structure corresponds at once to our logical ideal of
systematic interconnection, and our ethico-religious ideal of realised
individual purpose. But it must be added that the Absolute appears to
possess aspects which cannot fairly be brought under either of these
heads. Æsthetic feeling, for instance, and the æsthetic judgments based
upon it, must somehow be included as an integral aspect in the absolute
whole of experience; yet æsthetic feeling cannot properly be regarded
either as thought or as will. And the same objection might be raised in
the case of pleasure. However closely pleasure may be connected with
conative efforts towards the retention or renewal of the pleasant
experience, it seems quite clear that the “pure” pleasures[235] are not
forms of conscious “conation,” and that even in those “mixed” pleasures,
which depend in part for their pleasantness upon relief from the tension
of precedent craving or desire, analysis enables us to distinguish two
elements, that of direct pleasure in the new experience, and that of the
feeling of relief from the craving. Hence, if it be admitted that the
Absolute contains pleasure, it must also be admitted that it contains
something which is neither thought nor will. The same argument would
hold good, I think, even if we held with the pessimists, that the
Absolute contains a balance of pain over pleasure. For, intimate as the
connection is between pain and thwarted conation, it seems a
psychological monstrosity to maintain that felt pain is always and
everywhere an experience of the frustration of actual conscious effort;
and unless this monstrosity can be maintained, we must recognise in pain
too a fundamental experience-quality irreducible to thought or will.
Thus, at best, the description of the Absolute, as the union of thought
and will, would be incomplete.

(2) But, further, the description, if taken to mean that the Absolute
itself has thought and will, _as such_, would be not only incomplete but
false. For actual thought and actual will can easily be shown to be
essentially finite functions, neither of which could ever reach its goal
and become finally self-consistent, without ceasing to be mere thought
or mere will. Thus actual thought always involves an aspect of
discrepancy between its content and reference. It is always thought
_about_ a reality which falls, in part, outside the thought itself, is
only imperfectly represented by the thought’s content, and for that very
reason is a not-self to the thought for which it is an object. And the
whole process of thinking may be described as a series of attempts on
the part of thought to transcend this limitation. So long as the content
of the thought is not adequate to the reality which it thinks, so long,
that is, as there is anything left to know about the reality, thought
restlessly presses forward towards an unreached consummation. But if the
correspondence _ideae cum ideato_ ever became perfect, thought’s object
would cease to contain anything which went beyond thought’s own content.
It would no longer be an “other” or “not-self” to the thought which knew
it, and thus thought and its object would have become a single thing.
But in this consummation thought would have lost its special character
as an actual process, just as the object would have lost its character
of a something, partly at least, “given” from without. Both mere thought
and mere existence, in becoming one, would cease to have the character
which belongs to them in finite experience precisely in virtue of our
failure completely to transcend the chasm between them.

The same is the case with will. If, indeed, by will we mean a genuine
actual process of volition, this result is already included in our
criticism of the claim of thought as such to persist unchanged in the
Absolute. For all genuine will implies possession of and actuation by an
idea which is entertained explicitly as an unrealised idea, and is thus
inseparable from thought. (This, I may incidentally observe once more,
is why we carefully avoided speaking of the “subjective interest” we
found in all experience-processes as “will.”) But even if we improperly
widen the interpretation of the term “will” to include all conative
process, the general conclusion will remain the same. For all such
processes imply the contrast between existence as it comes to us in the
here and now of actual feeling, and existence as it should be, and as we
seek to make it, for the satisfaction of our various impulses, cravings,
and desires. It is the felt, even when not explicitly understood,
discrepancy between these two aspects of a reality, which is ultimately
one and harmonious under the discrepancy, that supplies all actual
conative process with its motive force. And hence we seem driven to hold
that conation as such, _i.e._ as actual striving or effort, can find no
place in an experience in which the aspects of ideality and real
existence are once for all finally united.

If we cannot avoid speaking of such an experience in terms of our own
intellectual, and again of our own volitional processes, we must at
least remember that while such language is true in the sense that the
all-embracing harmonious experience of the Absolute is the unattainable
goal towards which finite intellect and finite volition are alike
striving, yet each in attaining its consummation, if it ever could
attain it, would cease to be itself as we know it, and pass into a
higher and directer form of apprehension, in which it could no longer be
distinguished from the other. In the old mediæval terminology, the
Absolute must be said to contain actual intellect and actual volition,
not _formaliter_ but _eminenter_.[236]

§ 2. It follows from all this that, just because the absolute whole is
neither mere thought nor mere will, nor an artificial synthesis of the
two, mere truth for the intellect can never be quite the same thing as
ultimate Reality. For in mere truth we get Reality only in its
intellectual aspect as that which affords the highest satisfaction to
thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object.
And, as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by
thought itself. For thought, to remain thought, must always be
something less than the whole reality which it knows. The reality must
always contain a further aspect which is not itself thought, and is
not capable of being apprehended in the form of a thought-content. Or,
what is the same thing, while all reality is individual, all the
thought-constructions through which we know its character must remain
general. We are always trying in our thought to grasp the individual
as such, and always failing. As individual, the reality never becomes
the actual content of our thought, but remains a “transcendent” object
to which thought _refers_, or which it _means_. And hence our truest
thought can at best give us but an imperfect satisfaction for its own
demand of congruence, between thought’s content and its object. The
reality can never be ultimately _merely_ what it is for our thought.
And this conclusion obviously lends a certain justification both to
the agnostic and to the mystic. It is important to understand how far
that justification extends.

First, then, a word as to the limits of justifiable Agnosticism. Our
conclusion warranted us in asserting that Reality must contain aspects
which are not thought, and again must combine thought with these other
aspects in a unity which is not itself merely intellectual. In other
words, we had to confess that we cannot understand the concrete
character of the Infinite Experience, or, to put it in a more homely
way, we do not know how it would feel to be “God.” And if this is
Agnosticism, we clearly shall have to own that we too are agnostics. But
our result gave us no ground for doubting our own general conviction as
to the place which intellect and truth hold in the Absolute. On the
other hand, it left us with every reason for trusting that conviction.
For our conclusion that mere truth cannot be the same thing as ultimate
Reality was itself based upon the principle that only harmonious
individuality is finally real, and this is the very principle employed
by the intellect itself whenever it judges one thought-construction
relatively higher and truer than another.

Thus _our_ Agnosticism, if it is to be called so, neither discredits our
human estimate of the relative truth of different theories about the
real, nor lends any support to the notion that “Knowledge is relative”
in the sense that there may conceivably be no correspondence between
Reality and the scheme of human knowledge as a whole. It is based not on
the distrust of human reason, but upon the determination to trust that
reason implicitly, and it claims, in declaring mere truth to fall short
of Reality, to be expressing reason’s own verdict upon itself. Hence it
does not, like vulgar Agnosticism, leave us in the end in pure
uncertainty as to the ultimate structure and upshot, so to say, of the
world, but definitely holds that we have genuine and trustworthy
knowledge of the type of that structure and the nature of its materials.
And it is upon this positive knowledge, and not upon an uncritical
appeal to unknown possibilities, that it rests its denial of the simple
identity of Reality with thought itself. For all we know, says the
common Agnosticism, our thought is sheer illusion, and therefore we must
confess that we have in the end no notion what the reality of the world
may be. Thought is not illusory, says our systematic Idealism, and
therefore its own witness that Reality is an individual whole of
experience which is more than thought is a positive contribution to our
knowledge. Between these two positions there may be a superficial
resemblance, but there is an essential difference in principle.

So again with the mystical element in our result. In holding that all
genuine individuality, finite or infinite,[237] involves a type of
immediate felt unity which transcends reduction to the relational
categories of thought and will, we may fairly be said to have reached a
conclusion which, in a sense, is mystical. But our result is not
Mysticism, if by Mysticism is meant a doctrine which seeks ultimate
Reality in mere unanalysed immediate feeling as such. The results of
intellectual and volitional construction have not been treated by us as
illusory and as a sort of intellectual and moral mistake. On the other
hand, we urged that the ultimate unity of the real must transcend, and
not merely fall short of, the rational scheme of thought and will. And
we consequently insisted that our result, so far as it is a mystical
one, can only be justified by following out the constructions of the
logical intellect and the ethical will to their final consequence, and
showing that each of them itself demands completion in an individual
Reality which includes and transcends both. To quote the admirable words
of Dr. McTaggart: “A Mysticism which ignored the claims of the
understanding would no doubt be doomed. None ever went about to break
logic, but in the end logic broke him. But there is a Mysticism which
starts from the standpoint of the understanding, and only departs from
it in so far as that standpoint shows itself not to be ultimate, but to
postulate something beyond itself. To transcend the lower is not to
ignore it.” And it is only in this sense that philosophy is justified in
asserting “above all knowledge and volition one all-embracing unity,
which is only not true, only not good, because all truth and all
goodness are but shadows of its absolute perfection.”[238]

§ 3. The reader who has persevered to the conclusion of this volume may
perhaps, on laying it down, experience a certain feeling of
dissatisfaction. Our investigations, it might be complained, have added
nothing to our stock of scientific information about the contents of the
world, and have supplied no fresh practical incentives towards the
strenuous pursuit of an elevated moral or religious ideal. I must at
once admit the justice of this hypothetical criticism, and dispute its
relevancy. Quite apart from the defects due to personal shortcomings and
confusions, it is inherent in the nature of metaphysical study that it
can make no positive addition to our information, and can of itself
supply no motives for practical endeavour. And the student who turns to
our science as a substitute for empirical Physics or Psychology, or for
practical morality, is bound to go away disappointed. The reason of this
we have already had occasion to see. Metaphysics has to presuppose the
general principles of the various sciences and the general forms of
practical experience as the materials upon which it works. Its object as
a study is not to add to or to modify these materials, but to afford
some coherent and systematic satisfaction for the intellectual curiosity
which we all feel at times as to the general nature of the whole to
which these various materials belong, and the relative truth and
clearness with which that general nature is expressed in the different
departments of experience. Its aim is the organisation, not the
enlargement of knowledge. Hence for the student whose interests lie more
in the enlargement of human knowledge by the discovery of new facts and
laws, than in its organisation into a coherent whole, Metaphysics is
probably undesirable, or desirable only as a protection against the
intrusion of unrecognised and uncriticised metaphysical assumptions into
the domain of empirical service. And similarly for the practical man
whose interests in life are predominantly ethical, the main, if not the
sole, value of metaphysical study lies in its critical function of
exposing false metaphysical assumptions, which, if acted upon, might
impair the vigour of spontaneous moral effort.

But for those in whom the speculative desire to form some coherent
conception of the scheme of things to which we belong as a whole is
strong, Metaphysics has a higher importance. In such minds the impulse
to reflect on the nature of existence as a whole, if debarred from
systematic and thorough gratification, is certain to find its outlet in
unsystematic and uncriticised imaginative construction. Metaphysics they
will certainly have, and if not conscious and coherent, then unconscious
and incoherent Metaphysics. The soul that is not at rest in itself
without some “sight of that immortal sea which brought it hither,” if
hindered from beholding the object of its quest through the clear glass
of rational reflection, will none the less seek to discern it amid the
distorting hazes and mists of superstition. It is in such seekers after
the Infinite that Metaphysics has its natural and proper followers, and
for them the study is its own justification and its own reward. If a
work like the present should prove of any help to such students, whether
by offering positive suggestions which they can accept, or by assisting
them to know definitely why they reject its conclusions, it will perhaps
have achieved as much as its writer could reasonably expect.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 27; J.
E. McTaggart, _Studies m Hegelian Cosmology_, chap. 9.

-----

Footnote 235:

I use the epithet in its familiar Platonic sense. The “pure” pleasure
is that which is not dependent, in whole or in part, for its
pleasantness upon a previous ἔνδεια, or actual experience of craving
or desire. I do not mean, as Plato possibly did, that a “mixed”
pleasure, preceded by such ἔνδεια, is a contrast-effect without
positive quality of its own.

Footnote 236:

Compare the argument of _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 26, pp.
469-485 (1st ed.), and the famous scholium to Prop. 17 of part 1 of
Spinoza’s _Ethics_, where it is contended that “if intellect and
volition belong to the eternal essence of God, each of these
attributes must at least be understood in a different sense from the
current.”

Footnote 237:

I say “finite or infinite” advisedly. The mystic’s condemnation of the
relational scheme as inadequate to express the full nature of the
real, holds good just as much in application to actual finite
experience as in application to the ultimate whole. We may say not
only of “God,” but of human persons, that they are much more than the
“union of thought and will” as such. And in personal human love, no
less than in the saint’s “beatific vision” or the philosopher’s
“intellectual love of God,” we have a type of experience which may for
some psychological purposes be analysed into a combination of
ideational and volitional processes, but emphatically does not, in its
concrete existence, consist of a synthesis of actual ideas and actual
volitions. See _ante_, p. 152.

Footnote 238:

_Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_, p. 292.

-----

------------------------------------------------------------------------

INDEX

Absolute, meaning of, 53 ff.;
general character of, 60 ff.;
not unknowable, 71 ff.;
not a “self,” 343 ff.;
is it a society? 100, 347 ff.;
a spiritual individual, 98 ff.;
not necessarily the same as “God,” 399 ff.;
not “union of thought and will,” 409 ff.
Activity not identical with conation, 55;
and causation, 169;
empirical nature of, 189.
Agnosticism, 68, 69, 71, 72;
how far justifiable, 412.
Appearance and Reality, connection between, 105 ff.
Aristotle, 6, 42, 97, 266, 361, 386.
Attention, selective, 55, 66, 80;
“span” of, 226, 244.
Avenarius, 35, 45, 80, 121, 174, 298 ff. 315.

Baldwin, J. M., 206.
Berkeley, 26, 64 ff., 75, 184, 185, 201 ff.
Body, my own, as describable object, 282.
Body, my own, and others, 203 ff.
Body and Soul, theories of, 313 ff.;
in what sense the same, 332.
Bosanquet, B., 19, 26, 164.
Bradley, F. H., 9, 11, 23, 26, 55, 67, 88, 90, 131, 146, 199, 227, 243,
259, 289, 318, 326, 335, 338, 355, 364, 370, 384, 411.

Causation, 165 ff.;
cause not identical with ground, 166;
causation a postulate, 167 ff.;
popular as distinguished from scientific sense, 169;
causation and the indefinite regress, 177 ff.;
continuity of causation, 171 ff.;
Immanent and Transeunt Causality, 183 ff.;
psychophysical causation, 322 ff.
Causes, Plurality of, 180 ff.
Chance, “pure,” meaning of, 231, 232;
chance and “free-will,” 378.
Change, 158-164.
Character and freedom, 374.
Choice and motives, 373.
Consciousness, a misleading term, 79.
Consequence (_see_ Ground).
Continuity, nature of, 171
(_see_ Causation);
continuity of space and time, 244, 250.
Contradiction, principle of, 19 ff.
Cosmology Rational, nature of, 43-49, 192-197.
Couturat, L., 149, 260.

Dedekind, 116, 149, 171.
Degrees of Reality, 108 ff.
Descartes, 128, 185, 318, 400 ff.
Description, as scientific ideal, 174;
in physical Science, 280 ff.;
in Psychology, 308 ff.
Determinism, 370-376.
Discontinuity of teleological series, 311.
Distance in space and time, 250.

Ends in Nature, 272, 405, 406.
Energy, conservation of, 292;
kinetic and non-kinetic, 291;
doctrine of, and psychophysical interaction, 322 ff.
Epiphenomenalism, 317, 318-320.
Epistemology and Metaphysics, 16.
Evil, problem of, 391 ff., 395 ff.
Evolution, not identical with mere change, 267;
implies real ends, 268 ff.;
is of finite beings only, 274 ff.;
implies real progress and degeneration, 275;
originates new individuals, 276.
Experience, what, 23 ff., 33 ff.;
“pure,” 35, 54.

Feeling, 23 ff., 55;
in the Absolute, 467 ff.
Freedom, meaning of, 359 ff.
Free-will, origins of belief in, 361 ff.

Geulincx, 184, 185, 186, 317.
Gibson, W. R. B., 288, 329, 366.
God, proofs of being of, 400 ff.
Ground and Consequence, meaning of principle of, 164, 165.

Harmony, Pre-established, 187, 317.
Hegel, 40 ff., 42 ff., 391, 401.
Herbart, 39, 42, 68.
Hobhouse, L. T., 74, 137, 138, 199.
Hume, 29, 7, 133, 169, 172, 183, 400 ff.

Identity, Psychophysical, doctrine of, 102, 321, 331, 332.
Identity, a teleological concept, 335.
(_See also_ Unity of Thing).
Imitation, significance of, for personality, 206.
Immanent Causality, 183 ff.
Immediacy, 32.
“Immortality,” 354 ff.
Indeterminism, 376-379.
Individuality, nature of, 57, 98 ff.;
degrees of, 109 ff.;
infinite and finite, 115 ff.
Infinite Regress, 148 ff., 156;
in space and time, 255 ff., 259;
in causal relation, 177.
Infinity, meaning of, 116.
Interaction, Psychophysical, 317, 329-331.
Introjection, meaning of, 81;
origin of, 81, 299 ff.;
justification of, 301 ff.

James, W., 53, 91, 318, 370, 383, 390, 400.

Kant, 11, 24, 39, 43, 69, 134, 188, 242 ff., 259, 359, 366, 387, 400
ff.

Law, meaning of, 218 ff.
Laws in Nature, 196, 229.
Leibnitz, 68, 82, 86, 91 ff., 117, 187 ff., 317, 366, 401, 404.
Locke, 128, 136, 200, 318, 353, 365, 366.
Lotze, 41, 42, 133, 224, 289.

Mach, E., 174, 175, 192, 223, 228, 283, 290.
Machine, nature of a, 236, 237.
McTaggart, J. E., 345, 357, 391, 398, 413.
Malebranche, 184, 185, 317.
Mass, definition of, 289;
conservation of, 290;
a relative concept, 290, 291.
Matter, meaning of, 198 ff.
Mechanical view of Nature, 233 ff., 237 ff., 283 ff.;
postulates of, 284, 292 ff.
Mechanism, meaning of, 196, 237 ff.
Method of Metaphysics, 38 ff.
Mill, J. S., 24, 180 ff., 370.
Monadism, 86, 91, 94.
Monism, 85.
Münsterberg, H., 45, 67, 198, 283, 303 ff., 315, 318, 321, 324, 329.
Mysticism, 14, 33, 153;
in what sense justifiable, 413.

Necessity and causal relation, 183.
Newton, 128, 200.
Nietzsche, 276.
Number-series, 151 ff., 248-250, 259.

Occasionalism, 184, 317.
Ontology, character of, 42.
Order, a teleological concept, 118;
order in space and time, 251.
Organism, nature of a, 96.

Parallelism, Psychophysical, 317, 320-329.
Pearson, K., 75, 290.
Phenomenalism, 10, 136.
Physical order, nature of the, 194 ff., 198, 208, 282.
Plato, 3, 55, 77, 95, 276, 366, 386, 393, 398, 409.
Pleasure-pain, 55, 344.
Plotinus, 398.
Pluralism, 86 ff.
Position not a principle of individuation, 58;
relativity of, 253.
Pragmatism, 317.
Prediction in science, 219 ff.
Progress not infinite, 387-389.
Psychical order, nature of the, 298 ff.
Psychology, character of, as a science, 296 ff.
Psychology and Physiology, 303 ff.
Psychology, Rational, nature of, 43 ff.
Purpose, nature of, 55 ff.

Qualities, primary and secondary, 128 ff.
Quality and relation, 140 ff.
Quality and substance, 128 ff.
Quality, spatial and temporal, 244.

Rashdall, H., 347, 393, 400.
Realism, Agnostic, 68, 71, 72;
Dogmatic, 69, 72-75.
Relation and quality, 140 ff.
Relations and relatedness, 155.
Religion, metaphysical presuppositions of, 389 ff.
Responsibility and the self, 335.
Royce, J., 13, 33, 51, 56, 76, 116, 145, 148 ff., 206, 226, 239, 263,
270, 277, 307, 398.
Russell, B., 36, 58, 91, 142, 189, 243, 250, 253, 404.

Self, 98, 107;
nature of, 334-340;
a teleological concept, 335;
temporal character of, 341, 342.
Self-consciousness, genuine and fictitious, 79.
Sidgwick, H., 130, 359, 370.
Space, perceptual, 243-245;
conceptual genesis of, 245-249;
infinity of, 247;
divisibility of, 248;
continuity of, 248, 250;
homogeneity of, 251;
relativity of, 251;
is it one or many? 253, 257;
is not ultimate, 254-257;
antinomies of, 259 ff.;
of what is it phenomenal? 260.
Spencer, H., 40, 68.
Spinoza, 62, 101 ff., 318, 399, 411.
Stout, G. F., 33, 67, 135, 154 ff., 208, 247, 318, 324, 332, 378.
Subjectivism, what, 75;
fallacy of, 76-81, 204 ff.
Substance, concept of, 128 ff.;
and quality, 128-140.
Sufficient Reason, principle of, 164.

Teleological description not impossible, 309.
Teleological series, discontinuity of, 311.
Teleology, nature of, 55, 99, 125, 287, 371 ff.;
in Psychology, 305 ff.;
in Biology, 308;
and Psychophysical Parallelism, 326 ff.
Thought and the Absolute, 61;
not ultimate, 409.
Time, perceptual, 243-245;
conceptual, genesis of, 245-249;
infinity of, 247;
divisibility of, 248;
continuity of, 248, 250;
homogeneity of, 251;
relativity of, 251;
is it one or many? 253, 257;
not ultimate, 254-257;
antinomies of, 259 ff.;
of what is it phenomenal? 262;
time and the self, 341, 344.
Truth, degrees of, 214.

Uniformities, statistical, 220 ff.
Uniformity in physical nature, 222, 227.
Unity of things teleological, 123-128.

Ward, J., 45, 64, 174, 225, 228, 289 318, 324, 326-328.
Whole and Part, category of, 96.
Will, nature of, 61, 118;
not ultimate, 410.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s Note

Two words on the first line of p. 70 of this edition (noted below) were
missing (blank). They have been supplied from the 5th edition, published
in 1920.

On p. 226, a footnote at (226.42) refers to Mr. H. G. Wells’s tale, _The
New Accumulator_, which is certainly a reference to his 1901 tale “The
New Accelerator”.

On p. 340, the first paragraph refers to ‘two points’, and prefaces the
first with ‘(a)’. But there is no ‘(b)’ to denote the second point. It
seems likely that ‘(b)’ should precede the next paragraph, or perhaps
following the introductory ‘Further’.

The Index reference to p. 467 for ‘Feeling in the Absolute’ cannot be
verified. The page does not exist, and no other page can be identified
with certainty.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.

The most common error is missing punctuation: 6.14 purpose[.], 38.29
inquiry[.], 44.12 periphery[.], 44.41 other[.], 56.47 failure[.], 58.27
theory[.], 62.39 “purposive[”], 67.17 life[.], 67.19 subject[.], 79.46
“matter[”], 82.13 it[.], 88.40 exclusive[.], 89.41 facts[.], 99.13
purpose[.], 108.24 admitted[.], 128.23 [“]substance”, 143.19 arisen[.],
215.10 [“]Nature, 224.22 purpose[.], 236.14 based[.], 251.45 series[.],
274.16 advance[.], 320.32 _fatum_[.], 361.22 considerations[.], 390.5
“temperament[”], 410.22 thing[.]

The name of Professor Hugo Münsterberg is spelled variably as
Münsterberg, Munsterberg, and occasionally with a partial umlaut. The
spelling has been rendered as Münsterberg to facilitate text searches at
215.5, 305.15, 315.8, 329.40, 418.3.

Other corrected errors are:

xviii.11 to a[s]certain Inserted.
xxiii.12 The concept of _[e]volution_ Restored.
37.9 carry out ou[t/r] programme Replaced.
46.46 _Grundz[u/ü]ge der Psychologie_ Replaced.
66.44 on which it “works.[’/”] Replaced.
70.1.1 a modification of your [experience]. Restored.
70.1.2 to ask what [you] mean Restored.
82.22 to know your own meaning[./,] Replaced.
134.42 too diffuse and technical[,/.] Replaced.
136.24 does no[t] destroy Restored.
149.12 in our illustration 1^2, [2^3/2^2], 3^2 ... Replaced.
180.46 increases indefinitely[)]. Removed.
215.6 _Grundz[u/ü]ge der Psychologie_ Replaced.
215.12 [“]J. Ward Removed.
229.16 deal only with the problem[,/.] Replaced.
306.4 the physical order was const[r]ucted Inserted.
318.8 H[o/ö]ffding Replaced.

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