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Title: The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893
A quarterly magazine
Author: Various
Editor: Paul Carus
Release date: September 16, 2025 [eBook #76881]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co, 1892
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONIST, VOL. 3, 1892-1893 ***
THE MONIST
A
QUARTERLY MAGAZINE
VOL. III.
CHICAGO:
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
1892-1893
COPYRIGHT, 1893,
BY
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.
PAGE
ARTICLES.
Auta, The Doctrine of. By C. Lloyd Morgan 161
Cruelty and Pity in Woman. By Guillaume Ferrero 220
Doctrine of Auta, The. By C. Lloyd Morgan 161
Education, Nationalisation of, and the Universities. By H. von
Holst 493
Evolutionary Love. By Charles S. Peirce 176
Foundations of Theism, The. By E. D. Cope 623
Founder of Tychism, The: His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.
Editor 571
Fourth Dimension, The By Hermann Schubert 402
Hindu Monism. By Richard Garbe 51
Insects, The Nervous Ganglia of. By Alfred Binet 35
Intuition and Reason. By Christine Ladd Franklin 211
Issues of “Synechism,” The. By G. M. McCrie 380
Love, Evolutionary. By Charles S. Peirce 176
Man’s Glassy Essence. By Charles S. Peirce 1
Meaning and Metaphor. By Lady Victoria Welby 510
Mental Mummies. By Felix L. Oswald 30
Modern Science, Religion and. By F. Jodl 329
Monism, Hindu. By Richard Garbe 51
Nationalisation of Education and the Universities. By H. von Holst 493
Necessitarians, Reply to the. By Charles S. Peirce 526
Necessity, The Idea of: Its Basis and Its Scope. Editor 68
Necessity, The Superstition of. By John Dewey 362
Panbiotism, Panpsychism and. Editor 234
Panpsychism and Panbiotism. Editor 234
Reason, Intuition and. By Christine Ladd Franklin 211
Religion and Modern Science. By F. Jodl 329
Religion of Science, The. Editor 352
Renan: A Discourse Given at South Place Chapel, London. By Moncure
D. Conway 201
Reply to the Necessitarians. By Charles S. Peirce 526
Science, The Religion of. Editor 352
Superstition of Necessity, The. By John Dewey 362
“Synechism,” The Issues of. By G. M. McCrie 380
Theism, The Foundations of. By E. D. Cope 623
Thought in America, The Future of. By E. D. Cope 23
Tychism, The Founder of: His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.
Editor 571
Universities, Nationalisation of Education and the. By H. von Holst 493
Woman, Cruelty and Pity in. By Guillaume Ferrero 220
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
France. By Lucien Arréat 111, 258
France, The Religious Outlook in. By Theodore Stanton 450
Germany. By Christian Ufer 264, 640
New French Books. By Lucien Arréat 456
Recent Evolutionary Studies in Germany. By Carus Sterne 97
CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
A Letter from Mr. Herbert Spencer 272
Comte and Turgot. By Louis Belrose, Jr. 118
Is Monism Arbitrary? Editor 124
James’s Psychology, Observations on Some Points of. By W. L.
Worcester 285
Logic as Relation Lore. By F. C. Russell 272
Mathematics a Description of Operations with Pure Forms. Editor 133
Reply to a Critic, A. By Edward T. Dixon 127
Sensation, Prof. Ernst Mach’s Term 298
Some Remarks Upon Professor James’s Discussion of Attention. By
Hiram M. Stanley 122
BOOK REVIEWS.
_Acht Abhandlungen, Herrn Professor Dr. Karl Ludwig Michelet zum
90. Geburtstag_ 478
Arréat, Lucien. _Psychologie du Peintre_ 142
Baets, l’Abbé Maurice de. _L’école d’anthropologie criminelle_ 649
Becker, George F. _Finite Homogeneous Strain, Flow, and Rupture
of Rocks_ 480
Berendt, M. and J. Friedländer. _Der Pessimismus im Lichte einer
höheren Weltauffassung_ 477
Binet, Alfred. _Les Altérations de la Personnalité_ 145
Blackwell, Antoinette Brown. _The Philosophy of Individuality, or
the One and the Many_ 649
Cattell, James McKeen, and George Stuart Fullerton. _On the
Perception of Small Differences_ 141
Delbœuf, J. _L’Hypnotisme devant les Chambres Legislatives Belges_ 318
Dessoir, Max. _Ueber den Hautsinn_ 319
Dixon, Edward T. _An Essay on Reasoning_ 138
Dreher, Eugen. _Der Materialismus, eine Verirrung des menschlichen
Geistes, widerlegt durch eine zeitgemässe Weltanschauung_ 479
Edinger, L. _Vergleichend-entwickelungsgeschichtliche und
anatomische Studien im Bereiche der Hirnanatomie. 3.
Riechapparat und Ammonshorn_ 648
Engel, Gustav. _Die Philosophie und die sociale Frage_ 478
Eucken, Rudolf. _Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart_ 650
Friedländer, J. and M. Berendt. _Der Pessimismus im Lichte einer
höheren Weltauffassung_ 477
Fullerton, George Stuart, and James McKeen Cattel. _On the
Perception of Small Differences_ 141
George, Henry. _A Perplexed Philosopher_ 482
Gutberlet, Constantin. _Die Willensfreiheit und ihre Gegner_ 646
Hiller, H. Croft. _Against Dogma and Free-Will_ 649
Hirth, Georges. _Physiologie de L’Art_ 143
Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. _Hand-Commentar zum neuen Testament.
IV. Evangelium, Briefe und Offenbarung des Johannes_ 643
Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. _Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen
Einleitung in das neue Testament_ 150
Janet, Pierre. _État mental des hystériques les stigmates mentaux_ 648
Joël, Karl. _Der echte und der Xenophontische Sokrates_ 480
Jones, E. E. Constance. _An Introduction to General Logic_ 314
Lindemann, Ferdinand. _Vorlesungen über Geometrie_ 314
Lotze, Hermann. _Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion_ 140
Lubbock, John. _The Beauties of Nature_ 323
Meynert, Theodore. _Sammlung von populär-wissenschaftlichen
Vorträgen über den Bau und die Leistungen des Gehirns_ 151
Mik, J. _Graber’s Leitfaden der Zoologie für die oberen Classen
der Mittelschulen_ 322
Münsterberg, Hugo. _Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie_ 304
Oelzelt-Newin, Anton. _Ueber sittliche Dispositionen_ 323
Offner, Max. _Ueber die Grundformen der Vorstellungsverbindung_ 479
Paszkowski, Wilhelm. _Wie steht es jetzt mit der Philosophie, und
was haben wir von ihr zu hoffen?_ 478
Paulsen, Friedrich. _Einleitung in die Philosophie_ 466
Rolfes, Eugen. _Die Aristotelische Auffassung vom Verhältnisse
Gottes zur Welt und zum Menschen_ 311
Royce, Josiah. _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_ 306
Royer, Clémence. _Recherches d’optique physiologique et physique_ 320
Salter, William M. _First Steps in Philosophy_ 470
Schellwien, Robert. _Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche_ 311
Schmidt, Johannes. _Die Urheimath der Indogermanen und das
europäische Zahlsystem_ 149
Schmidkunz, Hans. _Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfasslicher Darstellung_ 317
Sharp, Frank Chapman. _The Æsthetic Element in Morality_ 650
Sidgwick, Alfred. _Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs_ 312
Spencer, Herbert. _Social Statics and Justice_ 136
Sterne, Carus. _Natur und Kunst_ 323
Topinard, Paul. _L’Homme dans la Nature_ 146
Topinard, Paul. _L’Anthropologie du Bengale_ 322
Tufts, James Hayden. _The Sources of Development of Kant’s
Teleology_ 312
Verworn, Max. _Die Bewegung der lebendigen Substanz_ 321
Williams, C. M. _A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on
the Theory of Evolution_ 474
Wundt, Wilhelm. _Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele_ 300
Wundt, Wilhelm. _Hypnotismus und Suggestion_ 315
Wundt, Wilhelm. _Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie_ 648
PERIODICALS 153-160; 325-328; 488-492; 651-658.
APPENDIX.
Plates belonging to the article “The Nervous Ganglia of Insects.”
(In No. 1 of this volume.)
VOL. III. OCTOBER, 1892. NO. 1.
THE MONIST.
MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE.
In _The Monist_ for January, 1891, I tried to show what conceptions
ought to form the brick and mortar of a philosophical system. Chief
among these was that of absolute chance for which I argued again in last
April’s number.[1] In July, I applied another fundamental idea, that of
continuity, to the law of mind. Next in order, I have to elucidate, from
the point of view chosen, the relation between the psychical and physical
aspects of a substance.
The first step towards this ought, I think, to be the framing of
a molecular theory of protoplasm. But before doing that, it seems
indispensable to glance at the constitution of matter, in general. We
shall, thus, unavoidably make a long detour; but, after all, our pains
will not be wasted, for the problems of the papers that are to follow in
the series will call for the consideration of the same question.
All physicists are rightly agreed the evidence is overwhelming which
shows all sensible matter is composed of molecules in swift motion and
exerting enormous mutual attractions, and perhaps repulsions, too.
Even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who wishes to explode action at
a distance and return to the doctrine of a plenum, not only speaks of
molecules, but undertakes to assign definite magnitudes to them. The
brilliant Judge Stallo, a man who did not always rightly estimate his
own qualities in accepting tasks for himself, declared war upon the
atomic theory in a book well worth careful perusal. To the old arguments
in favor of atoms which he found in Fechner’s monograph, he was able to
make replies of considerable force, though they were not sufficient to
destroy those arguments. But against modern proofs he made no headway
at all. These set out from the mechanical theory of heat. Rumford’s
experiments showed that heat is not a substance. Joule demonstrated that
it was a form of energy. The heating of gases under constant volume, and
other facts instanced by Rankine, proved that it could not be an energy
of strain. This drove physicists to the conclusion that it was a mode of
motion. Then it was remembered that John Bernoulli had shown that the
pressure of gases could be accounted for by assuming their molecules to
be moving uniformly in rectilinear paths. The same hypothesis was now
seen to account for Avogadro’s law, that in equal volumes of different
kinds of gases exposed to the same pressure and temperature are contained
equal numbers of molecules. Shortly after, it was found to account for
the laws of diffusion and viscosity of gases, and for the numerical
relation between these properties. Finally, Crookes’s radiometer
furnished the last link in the strongest chain of evidence which supports
any physical hypothesis.
Such being the constitution of gases, liquids must clearly be bodies in
which the molecules wander in curvilinear paths, while in solids they
move in orbits or quasi-orbits. (See my definition _solid_ II, 1, in the
“Century Dictionary.”)
We see that the resistance to compression and to interpenetration between
sensible bodies is, by one of the prime propositions of the molecular
theory, due in large measure to the kinetical energy of the particles,
which must be supposed to be quite remote from one another, on the
average, even in solids. This resistance is no doubt influenced by finite
attractions and repulsions between the molecules. All the impenetrability
of bodies which we can observe is, therefore, a limited impenetrability
due to kinetic and positional energy. This being the case, we have
no logical right to suppose that absolute impenetrability, or the
exclusive occupancy of space, belongs to molecules or to atoms. It is
an unwarranted hypothesis, not a _vera causa_.[2] Unless we are to give
up the theory of energy, finite positional attractions and repulsions
between molecules must be admitted. Absolute impenetrability would amount
to an infinite repulsion at a certain distance. No analogy of known
phenomena exists to excuse such a wanton violation of the principle of
continuity as such a hypothesis is. In short, we are logically bound
to adopt the Boscovichian idea that an atom is simply a distribution
of component potential energy throughout space, (this distribution
being absolutely rigid,) combined with inertia. The potential energy
belongs to two molecules, and is to be conceived as different between
molecules _A_ and _B_ from what it is between molecules _A_ and _C_. The
distribution of energy is not necessarily spherical. Nay, a molecule may
conceivably have more than one centre; it may even have a central curve,
returning into itself. But I do not think there are any observed facts
pointing to such multiple or linear centres. On the other hand, many
facts relating to crystals, especially those observed by Voigt,[3] go to
show that the distribution of energy is harmonical but not concentric.
We can easily calculate the forces which such atoms must exert upon one
another by considering[4] that they are equivalent to aggregations of
pairs of electrically positive and negative points infinitely near to one
another. About such an atom there would be regions of positive and of
negative potential, and the number and distribution of such regions would
determine the valency of the atom, a number which it is easy to see would
in many cases be somewhat indeterminate. I must not dwell further upon
this hypothesis, at present. In another paper, its consequences will be
further considered.
I cannot assume that the students of philosophy who read this magazine
are thoroughly versed in modern molecular physics, and therefore it
is proper to mention that the governing principle in this branch of
science is Clausius’s law of the virial. I will first state the law,
and then explain the peculiar terms of the statement. This statement is
that the total kinetic energy of the particles of a system in stationary
motion is equal to the total virial. By a _system_ is here meant a
number of particles acting upon one another.[5] Stationary motion is a
quasi-orbital motion among a system of particles so that none of them are
removed to indefinitely great distances nor acquire indefinitely great
velocities. The kinetic energy of a particle is the work which would
be required to bring it to rest, independently of any forces which may
be acting upon it. The virial of a pair of particles is half the work
which the force which actually operates between them would do if, being
independent of the distance, it were to bring them together. The equation
of the virial is
(Transcriber’s Note: Italics have been removed from the
formulæ for readability.)
½Σmv² = ½ΣΣRr.
Here _m_ is the mass of a particle, _v_ its velocity, _R_ is the
attraction between two particles, and _r_ is the distance between them.
The sign Σ on the left hand side signifies that the values of _mv_²
are to be summed for all the particles, and ΣΣ on the right hand side
signifies that the values of _Rr_ are to be summed for all the pairs of
particles. If there is an external pressure _P_ (as from the atmosphere)
upon the system, and the volume of vacant space within the boundary of
that pressure is _V_, then the virial must be understood as including
³⁄₂_PV_, so that the equation is
½Σmv² = ³⁄₂PV + ½ΣΣRr.
There is strong (if not demonstrative) reason for thinking that
the temperature of any body above the absolute zero (-273° C.), is
proportional to the average kinetic energy of its molecules, or say _aθ_,
where _a_ is a constant and _θ_ is the absolute temperature. Hence, we
may write the equation
aθ = ½m̅v̅²̅ = ³⁄₂PV̅ + ½ΣR̅r̅
where the heavy lines above the different expressions signify that the
average values for single molecules are to be taken. In 1872, a student
in the University of Leyden, Van der Waals, propounded in his thesis for
the doctorate a specialisation of the equation of the virial which has
since attracted great attention. Namely, he writes it
aθ = (P + (c⁄V²))(V-b).
The quantity _b_ is the volume of a molecule, which he supposes to
be an impenetrable body, and all the virtue of the equation lies in
this term which makes the equation a cubic in _V_, which is required
to account for the shape of certain isothermal curves.[6] But if the
idea of an impenetrable atom is illogical, that of an impenetrable
molecule is almost absurd. For the kinetical theory of matter teaches
us that a molecule is like a solar system or star-cluster in miniature.
Unless we suppose that in all heating of gases and vapors internal
work is performed upon the molecules, implying that their atoms are at
considerable distances, the whole kinetical theory of gases falls to the
ground. As for the term added to _P_, there is no more than a partial
and roughly approximative justification for it. Namely, let us imagine
two spheres described round a particle as their centre, the radius of
the larger being so great as to include all the particles whose action
upon the centre is sensible, while the radius of the smaller is so large
that a good many molecules are included within it. The possibility of
describing such a sphere as the outer one implies that the attraction
of the particles varies at some distances inversely as some higher
power of the distance than the cube, or, to speak more clearly, that
the attraction multiplied by the cube of the distance diminishes as the
distance increases; for the number of particles at a given distance
from any one particle is proportionate to the square of that distance
and each of these gives a term of the virial which is the product of
the attraction into the distance. Consequently unless the attraction
multiplied by the cube of the distance diminished so rapidly with the
distance as soon to become insensible, no such outer sphere as is
supposed could be described. However, ordinary experience shows that such
a sphere is possible; and consequently there must be distances at which
the attraction does thus rapidly diminish as the distance increases. The
two spheres, then, being so drawn, consider the virial of the central
particle due to the particles between them. Let the density of the
substance be increased, say, _N_ times. Then, for every term, _Rr_, of
the virial before the condensation, there will be _N_ terms of the same
magnitude after the condensation. Hence, the virial of each particle will
be proportional to the density, and the equation of the virial becomes
aθ = PV̅ + c⁄V̅.
This omits the virial within the inner sphere, the radius of which
is so taken that within that distance the number of particles is
not proportional to the number in a large sphere. For Van der Waals
this radius is the diameter of his hard molecules, which assumption
gives his equation. But it is plain that the attraction between the
molecules must to a certain extent modify their distribution, unless
some peculiar conditions are fulfilled. The equation of Van der Waals
can be approximately true therefore only for a gas. In a solid or
liquid condition, in which the removal of a small amount of pressure
has little effect on the volume, and where consequently the virial must
be much greater than _PV̅_, the virial must increase with the volume.
For suppose we had a substance in a critical condition in which an
increase of the volume would diminish the virial more than it would
increase ³⁄₂_PV̅_. If we were forcibly to diminish the volume of such
a substance, when the temperature became equalised, the pressure which
it could withstand would be less than before, and it would be still
further condensed, and this would go on indefinitely until a condition
were reached in which an increase of volume would increase ³⁄₂_PV̅_ more
than it would decrease the virial. In the case of solids, at least, _P_
may be zero; so that the state reached would be one in which the virial
increases with the volume, or the attraction between the particles does
not increase so fast with a diminution of their distance as it would if
the attraction were inversely as the distance.
Almost contemporaneously with Van der Waals’s paper, another remarkable
thesis for the doctorate was presented at Paris by Amagat. It related
to the elasticity and expansion of gases, and to this subject the
superb experimenter, its author, has devoted his whole subsequent life.
Especially interesting are his observations of the volumes of ethylene
and of carbonic acid at temperatures from 20° to 100° and at pressures
ranging from an ounce to 5000 pounds to the square inch. As soon as
Amagat had obtained these results, he remarked that the “coefficient of
expansion at constant volume,” as it is absurdly called, that is, the
rate of variation of the pressure with the temperature, was very nearly
constant for each volume. This accords with the equation of the virial,
which gives
dp⁄dθ = a⁄V̅ - dΣR̅r̅⁄dθ.
Now, the virial must be nearly independent of the temperature, and
therefore the last term almost disappears. The virial would not be
quite independent of the temperature, because if the temperature (i.
e. the square of the velocity of the molecules) is lowered, and the
pressure correspondingly lowered, so as to make the volume the same,
the attractions of the molecules will have more time to produce their
effects, and consequently, the pairs of molecules the closest together
will be held together longer and closer; so that the virial will
generally be increased by a decrease of temperature. Now, Amagat’s
experiments do show an excessively minute effect of this sort, at least,
when the volumes are not too small. However, the observations are well
enough satisfied by assuming the “coefficient of expansion at constant
volume” to consist wholly of the first term, _a_/(_V_). Thus, Amagat’s
experiments enable us to determine the values of _a_ and thence to
calculate the virial; and this we find varies for carbonic acid gas
nearly inversely to (_V_)⁰˙⁹. There is, thus, a rough approximation to
satisfying Van der Waals’s equation. But the most interesting result of
Amagat’s experiments, for our purpose at any rate, is that the quantity
_a_, though nearly constant for any one volume, differs considerably with
the volume, nearly doubling when the volume is reduced fivefold. This
can only indicate that the mean kinetic energy of a given mass of the
gas for a given temperature is greater the more the gas is compressed.
But the laws of mechanics appear to enjoin that the mean kinetic energy
of a moving particle shall be constant at any given temperature. The
only escape from contradiction, then, is to suppose that the mean mass
of a moving particle diminishes upon the condensation of the gas. In
other words, many of the molecules are dissociated, or broken up into
atoms or sub-molecules. The idea that dissociation should be favored
by diminishing the volume will be pronounced by physicists, at first
blush, as contrary to all our experience. But it must be remembered
that the circumstances we are speaking of, that of a gas under fifty
or more atmospheres pressure, are also unusual. That the “coefficient
of expansion under constant volume” when multiplied by the volumes
should increase with a decrement of the volume is also quite contrary
to ordinary experience; yet it undoubtedly takes place in all gases
under great pressure. Again, the doctrine of Arrhenius[7] is now
generally accepted, that the molecular conductivity of an electrolyte is
proportional to the dissociation of ions. Now the molecular conductivity
of a fused electrolyte is usually superior to that of a solution. Here is
a case, then, in which diminution of volume is accompanied by increased
dissociation.
The truth is that several different kinds of dissociation have to be
distinguished. In the first place, there is the dissociation of a
chemical molecule to form chemical molecules under the regular action of
chemical laws. This may be a double decomposition, as when iodhydric acid
is dissociated, according to the formula
HI + HI = HH + II;
or, it may be a simple decomposition, as when pentachloride of phosphorus
is dissociated according to the formula
PCl₅ = PCl₃ + ClCl.
All these dissociations require, according to the laws of
thermochemistry, an elevated temperature. In the second place, there is
the dissociation of a physically polymerous molecule, that is, of several
chemical molecules joined by physical attractions. This I am inclined to
suppose is a common concomitant of the heating of solids and liquids;
for in these bodies there is no increase of compressibility with the
temperature at all comparable with the increase of the expansibility.
But, in the third place, there is the dissociation with which we are now
concerned, which must be supposed to be a throwing off of unsaturated
sub-molecules or atoms from the molecule. The molecule may, as I have
said, be roughly likened to a solar system. As such, molecules are able
to produce perturbations of one another’s internal motions; and in this
way a planet, i. e. a sub-molecule, will occasionally get thrown off and
wander about by itself, till it finds another unsaturated sub-molecule
with which it can unite. Such dissociation by perturbation will naturally
be favored by the proximity of the molecules to one another.
Let us now pass to the consideration of that special substance, or
rather class of substances, whose properties form the chief subject
of botany and of zoölogy, as truly as those of the silicates form the
chief subject of mineralogy: I mean the life-slimes, or protoplasm.
Let us begin by cataloguing the general characters of these slimes.
They one and all exist in two states of aggregation, a solid or nearly
solid state and a liquid or nearly liquid state; but they do not pass
from the former to the latter by ordinary fusion. They are readily
decomposed by heat, especially in the liquid state; nor will they bear
any considerable degree of cold. All their vital actions take place at
temperatures very little below the point of decomposition. This extreme
instability is one of numerous facts which demonstrate the chemical
complexity of protoplasm. Every chemist will agree that they are far more
complicated than the albumens. Now, albumen is estimated to contain in
each molecule about a thousand atoms; so that it is natural to suppose
that the protoplasms contain several thousands. We know that while they
are chiefly composed of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, a large
number of other elements enter into living bodies in small proportions;
and it is likely that most of these enter into the composition of
protoplasms. Now, since the numbers of chemical varieties increase at
an enormous rate with the number of atoms per molecule, so that there
are certainly hundreds of thousands of substances whose molecules
contain twenty atoms or fewer, we may well suppose that the number of
protoplasmic substances runs into the billions or trillions. Professor
Cayley has given a mathematical theory of “trees,” with a view of
throwing a light upon such questions; and in that light the estimate of
trillions (in the English sense) seems immoderately moderate. It is true
that an opinion has been emitted, and defended among biologists, that
there is but one kind of protoplasm; but the observations of biologists,
themselves, have almost exploded that hypothesis, which from a chemical
standpoint appears utterly incredible. The anticipation of the chemist
would decidedly be that enough different chemical substances having
protoplasmic characters might be formed to account, not only for the
differences between nerve-slime and muscle-slime, between whale-slime
and lion-slime, but also for those minuter pervasive variations which
characterise different breeds and single individuals.
Protoplasm, when quiescent, is, broadly speaking, solid; but when it is
disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without
external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking, liquid. A moner
in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its
matter; a slime-mould slowly flows by force of gravity. The liquefaction
starts from the point of disturbance and spreads through the mass. This
spreading, however, is not uniform in all directions; on the contrary it
takes at one time one course, at another another, through the homogeneous
mass, in a manner that seems a little mysterious. The cause of
disturbance being removed, these motions gradually (with higher kinds of
protoplasm, quickly) cease, and the slime returns to its solid condition.
The liquefaction of protoplasm is accompanied by a mechanical
phenomenon. Namely, some kinds exhibit a tendency to draw themselves
up into a globular form. This happens particularly with the contents
of muscle-cells. The prevalent opinion, founded on some of the most
exquisite experimental investigations that the history of science
can show, is undoubtedly that the contraction of muscle-cells is due
to osmotic pressure; and it must be allowed that that is a factor in
producing the effect. But it does not seem to me that it satisfactorily
accounts even for the phenomena of muscular contraction; and besides,
even naked slimes often draw up in the same way. In this case, we seem
to recognise an increase of the surface-tension. In some cases, too, the
reverse action takes place, extraordinary pseudopodia being put forth,
as if the surface-tension were diminished in spots. Indeed, such a slime
always has a sort of skin, due no doubt to surface-tension, and this
seems to give way at the point where a pseudopodium is put forth.
Long-continued or frequently repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm
results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call
fatigue. On the other hand repose in this state, if not too much
prolonged, restores the liquefiability. These are both important
functions.
The life-slimes have, further, the peculiar property of growing. Crystals
also grow; their growth, however, consists merely in attracting matter
like their own from the circumambient fluid. To suppose the growth
of protoplasm of the same nature, would be to suppose this substance
to be spontaneously generated in copious supplies wherever food is
in solution. Certainly, it must be granted that protoplasm is but a
chemical substance, and that there is no reason why it should not be
formed synthetically like any other chemical substance. Indeed, Clifford
has clearly shown that we have overwhelming evidence that it is so
formed. But to say that such formation is as regular and frequent as the
assimilation of food is quite another matter. It is more consonant with
the facts of observation to suppose that assimilated protoplasm is formed
at the instant of assimilation, under the influence of the protoplasm
already present. For each slime in its growth preserves its distinctive
characters with wonderful truth, nerve-slime growing nerve-slime and
muscle-slime muscle-slime, lion-slime growing lion-slime, and all the
varieties of breeds and even individual characters being preserved in the
growth. Now it is too much to suppose there are billions of different
kinds of protoplasm floating about wherever there is food.
The frequent liquefaction of protoplasm increases its power of
assimilating food; so much so, indeed, that it is questionable whether in
the solid form it possesses this power.
The life-slime wastes as well as grows; and this too takes place chiefly
if not exclusively in its liquid phases.
Closely connected with growth is reproduction; and though in higher
forms this is a specialised function, it is universally true that
wherever there is protoplasm, there is, will be, or has been a power
of reproducing that same kind of protoplasm in a separated organism.
Reproduction seems to involve the union of two sexes; though it is not
demonstrable that this is always requisite.
Another physical property of protoplasm is that of taking habits. The
course which the spread of liquefaction has taken in the past is rendered
thereby more likely to be taken in the future; although there is no
absolute certainty that the same path will be followed again.
Very extraordinary, certainly, are all these properties of protoplasm;
as extraordinary as indubitable. But the one which has next to be
mentioned, while equally undeniable, is infinitely more wonderful. It
is that protoplasm feels. We have no direct evidence that this is true
of protoplasm universally, and certainly some kinds feel far more than
others. But there is a fair analogical inference that all protoplasm
feels. It not only feels but exercises all the functions of mind.
Such are the properties of protoplasm. The problem is to find a
hypothesis of the molecular constitution of this compound which will
account for these properties, one and all.
Some of them are obvious results of the excessively complicated
constitution of the protoplasm molecule. All very complicated substances
are unstable; and plainly a molecule of several thousand atoms may be
separated in many ways into two parts in each of which the polar chemical
forces are very nearly saturated. In the solid protoplasm, as in other
solids, the molecules must be supposed to be moving as it were in orbits,
or, at least, so as not to wander indefinitely. But this solid cannot
be melted, for the same reason that starch cannot be melted; because
an amount of heat insufficient to make the entire molecules wander is
sufficient to break them up completely and cause them to form new and
simpler molecules. But when one of the molecules is disturbed, even
if it be not quite thrown out of its orbit at first, sub-molecules of
perhaps several hundred atoms each are thrown off from it. These will
soon acquire the same mean kinetic energy as the others, and therefore
velocities several times as great. They will naturally begin to wander,
and in wandering will perturb a great many other molecules and cause
them in their turn to behave like the one originally deranged. So many
molecules will thus be broken up, that even those that are intact will no
longer be restrained within orbits, but will wander about freely. This is
the usual condition of a liquid, as modern chemists understand it; for in
all electrolytic liquids there is considerable dissociation.
But this process necessarily chills the substance, not merely on account
of the heat of chemical combination, but still more because the number
of separate particles being greatly increased, the mean kinetic energy
must be less. The substance being a bad conductor, this heat is not at
once restored. Now the particles moving more slowly, the attractions
between them have time to take effect, and they approach the condition of
equilibrium. But their dynamic equilibrium is found in the restoration of
the solid condition, which therefore takes place, if the disturbance is
not kept up.
When a body is in the solid condition, most of its molecules must be
moving at the same rate, or, at least, at certain regular sets of rates;
otherwise the orbital motion would not be preserved. The distances of
neighboring molecules must always be kept between a certain maximum and
a certain minimum value. But if, without absorption of heat, the body be
thrown into a liquid condition, the distances of neighboring molecules
will be far more unequally distributed, and an effect upon the virial
will result. The chilling of protoplasm upon its liquefaction must also
be taken into account. The ordinary effect will no doubt be to increase
the cohesion and with that the surface-tension, so that the mass will
tend to draw itself up. But in special cases, the virial will be
increased so much that the surface-tension will be diminished at points
where the temperature is first restored. In that case, the outer film
will give way and the tension at other places will aid in causing the
general fluid to be poured out at those points, forming pseudopodia.
When the protoplasm is in a liquid state, and then only, a solution of
food is able to penetrate its mass by diffusion. The protoplasm is then
considerably dissociated; and so is the food, like all dissolved matter.
If then the separated and unsaturated sub-molecules of the food happen
to be of the same chemical species as sub-molecules of the protoplasm,
they may unite with other sub-molecules of the protoplasm to form new
molecules, in such a fashion that when the solid state is resumed, there
may be more molecules of protoplasm than there were at the beginning.
It is like the jack-knife whose blade and handle, after having been
severally lost and replaced, were found and put together to make a new
knife.
We have seen that protoplasm is chilled by liquefaction, and that this
brings it back to the solid state, when the heat is recovered. This
series of operations must be very rapid in the case of nerve-slime and
even of muscle-slime, and may account for the unsteady or vibratory
character of their action. Of course, if assimilation takes place, the
heat of combination, which is probably trifling, is gained. On the
other hand, if work is done, whether by nerve or by muscle, loss of
energy must take place. In the case of the muscle, the mode by which
the instantaneous part of the fatigue is brought about is easily traced
out. If when the muscle contracts it be under stress, it will contract
less than it otherwise would do, and there will be a loss of heat. It is
like an engine which should work by dissolving salt in water and using
the contraction during the solution to lift a weight, the salt being
recovered afterwards by distillation. But the major part of fatigue has
nothing to do with the correlation of forces. A man must labor hard to do
in a quarter of an hour the work which draws from him enough heat to cool
his body by a single degree. Meantime, he will be getting heated, he will
be pouring out extra products of combustion, perspiration, etc., and he
will be driving the blood at an accelerated rate through minute tubes at
great expense. Yet all this will have little to do with his fatigue. He
may sit quietly at his table writing, doing practically no physical work
at all, and yet in a few hours be terribly fagged. This seems to be owing
to the deranged sub-molecules of the nerve-slime not having had time to
settle back into their proper combinations. When such sub-molecules are
thrown out, as they must be from time to time, there is so much waste of
material.
In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and firmly
assimilated into a broken molecule of protoplasm, it is necessary not
only that it should have precisely the right chemical composition, but
also that it should be at precisely the right spot at the right time
and should be moving in precisely the right direction with precisely
the right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled, it will
be more loosely retained than the other parts of the molecule; and
every time it comes round into the situation in which it was drawn in,
relatively to the other parts of that molecule and to such others as
were near enough to be factors in the action, it will be in special
danger of being thrown out again. Thus, when a partial liquefaction of
the protoplasm takes place many times to about the same extent, it will,
each time, be pretty nearly the same molecules that were last drawn in
that are now thrown out. They will be thrown out, too, in about the same
way, as to position, direction of motion, and velocity, in which they
were drawn in; and this will be in about the same course that the ones
last before them were thrown out. Not exactly, however; for the very
cause of their being thrown off so easily is their not having fulfilled
precisely the conditions of stable retention. Thus, the law of habit is
accounted for, and with it its peculiar characteristic of not acting with
exactitude.
It seems to me that this explanation of habit, aside from the question
of its truth or falsity, has a certain value as an addition to our
little store of mechanical examples of actions analogous to habit. All
the others, so far as I know, are either statical or else involve forces
which, taking only the sensible motions into account, violate the law
of energy. It is so with the stream that wears its own bed. Here, the
sand is carried to its most stable situation and left there. The law of
energy forbids this; for when anything reaches a position of stable
equilibrium, its momentum will be at a maximum, so that it can according
to this law only be left at rest in an unstable situation. In all the
statical illustrations, too, things are brought into certain states
and left there. A garment receives folds and keeps them; that is, its
limit of elasticity is exceeded. This failure to spring back is again an
apparent violation of the law of energy; for the substance will not only
not spring back of itself (which might be due to an unstable equilibrium
being reached) but will not even do so when an impulse that way is
applied to it. Accordingly, Professor James says “the phenomena of habit
... are due to the plasticity of the ... materials.” Now, plasticity
of materials means the having of a low limit of elasticity. (See the
“Century Dictionary,” under _solid_.) But the hypothetical constitution
of protoplasm here proposed involves no forces but attractions and
repulsions strictly following the law of energy. The action here, that
is, the throwing of an atom out of its orbit in a molecule, and the
entering of a new atom into nearly, but not quite the same orbit, is
somewhat similar to the molecular actions which may be supposed to
take place in a solid strained beyond its limit of elasticity. Namely,
in that case certain molecules must be thrown out of their orbits, to
settle down again shortly after into new orbits. In short, the plastic
solid resembles protoplasm in being partially and temporarily liquefied
by a slight mechanical force. But the taking of a set by a solid body
has but a moderate resemblance to the taking of a habit, inasmuch as
the characteristic feature of the latter, its inexactitude and want of
complete determinacy, is not so marked in the former, if it can be said
to be present there, at all.
The truth is that though the molecular explanation of habit is pretty
vague on the mathematical side, there can be no doubt that systems of
atoms having polar forces would act substantially in that manner, and
the explanation is even too satisfactory to suit the convenience of an
advocate of tychism. For it may fairly be urged that since the phenomena
of habit may thus result from a purely mechanical arrangement, it is
unnecessary to suppose that habit-taking is a primordial principle of the
universe. But one fact remains unexplained mechanically, which concerns
not only the facts of habit, but all cases of actions apparently
violating the law of energy; it is that all these phenomena depend upon
aggregations of trillions of molecules in one and the same condition and
neighborhood; and it is by no means clear how they could have all been
brought and left in the same place and state by any conservative forces.
But let the mechanical explanation be as perfect as it may, the state of
things which it supposes presents evidence of a primordial habit-taking
tendency. For it shows us like things acting in like ways because they
are alike. Now, those who insist on the doctrine of necessity will for
the most part insist that the physical world is entirely individual.
Yet law involves an element of generality. Now to say that generality
is primordial, but generalisation not, is like saying that diversity
is primordial but diversification not. It turns logic upside down. At
any rate, it is clear that nothing but a principle of habit, itself
due to the growth by habit of an infinitesimal chance tendency toward
habit-taking, is the only bridge that can span the chasm between the
chance-medley of chaos and the cosmos of order and law.
I shall not attempt a molecular explanation of the phenomena of
reproduction, because that would require a subsidiary hypothesis, and
carry me away from my main object. Such phenomena, universally diffused
though they be, appear to depend upon special conditions; and we do not
find that all protoplasm has reproductive powers.
But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness
belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to
be accounted for? The slime is nothing but a chemical compound. There
is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the
laboratory, out of its chemical elements; and if it were so made, it
would present all the characters of natural protoplasm. No doubt,
then, it would feel. To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and
ultra-puerile. By what element of the molecular arrangement, then, would
that feeling be caused? This question cannot be evaded or pooh-poohed.
Protoplasm certainly does feel; and unless we are to accept a weak
dualism, the property must be shown to arise from some peculiarity of
the mechanical system. Yet the attempt to deduce it from the three laws
of mechanics, applied to never so ingenious a mechanical contrivance,
would obviously be futile. It can never be explained, unless we admit
that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical
events. But once grant that the phenomena of matter are but the result
of the sensibly complete sway of habits upon mind, and it only remains
to explain why in the protoplasm these habits are to some slight extent
broken up, so that according to the law of mind, in that special clause
of it sometimes called the principle of accommodation,[8] feeling becomes
intensified. Now the manner in which habits generally get broken up is
this. Reactions usually terminate in the removal of a stimulus; for the
excitation continues as long as the stimulus is present. Accordingly,
habits are general ways of behavior which are associated with the removal
of stimuli. But when the expected removal of the stimulus fails to occur,
the excitation continues and increases, and non-habitual reactions take
place; and these tend to weaken the habit. If, then, we suppose that
matter never does obey its ideal laws with absolute precision, but that
there are almost insensible fortuitous departures from regularity, these
will produce, in general, equally minute effects. But protoplasm is
in an excessively unstable condition; and it is the characteristic of
unstable equilibrium, that near that point excessively minute causes may
produce startlingly large effects. Here then, the usual departures from
regularity will be followed by others that are very great; and the large
fortuitous departures from law so produced, will tend still further to
break up the laws, supposing that these are of the nature of habits.
Now, this breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity will,
according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of
feeling. The nerve-protoplasm is, without doubt, in the most unstable
condition of any kind of matter; and consequently, there the resulting
feeling is the most manifest.
Thus we see that the idealist has no need to dread a mechanical theory
of life. On the contrary, such a theory, fully developed, is bound to
call in a tychistic idealism as its indispensable adjunct. Wherever
chance-spontaneity is found, there, in the same proportion, feeling
exists. In fact, chance is but the outward aspect of that which within
itself is feeling. I long ago showed that real existence, or thing-ness,
consists in regularities. So, that primeval chaos in which there was
no regularity was mere nothing, from a physical aspect. Yet it was not
a blank zero; for there was an intensity of consciousness there in
comparison with which all that we ever feel is but as the struggling of a
molecule or two to throw off a little of the force of law to an endless
and innumerable diversity of chance utterly unlimited.
But after some atoms of the protoplasm have thus become partially
emancipated from law, what happens next to them? To understand this, we
have to remember that no mental tendency is so easily strengthened by the
action of habit as is the tendency to take habits. Now, in the higher
kinds of protoplasm, especially, the atoms in question have not only long
belonged to one molecule or another of the particular mass of slime of
which they are parts; but before that, they were constituents of food of
a protoplasmic constitution. During all this time, they have been liable
to lose habits and to recover them again; so that now, when the stimulus
is removed, and the foregone habits tend to reassert themselves, they do
so in the case of such atoms with great promptness. Indeed, the return is
so prompt that there is nothing but the feeling to show conclusively that
the bonds of law have ever been relaxed.
In short, diversification is the vestige of chance-spontaneity; and
wherever diversity is increasing, there chance must be operative. On the
other hand, wherever uniformity is increasing, habit must be operative.
But wherever actions take place under an established uniformity, there
so much feeling as there may be takes the mode of a sense of reaction.
That is the manner in which I am led to define the relation between the
fundamental elements of consciousness and their physical equivalents.
It remains to consider the physical relations of general ideas. It may
be well here to reflect that if matter has no existence except as a
specialisation of mind, it follows that whatever affects matter according
to regular laws is itself matter. But all mind is directly or indirectly
connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less regular way; so
that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter. Hence, it
would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects
of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the
outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other
things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its
immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. These two
views are combined when we remember that mechanical laws are nothing
but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind, including the
tendency to take habits, itself; and that this action of habit is nothing
but generalisation, and generalisation is nothing but the spreading
of feelings. But the question is, how do general ideas appear in the
molecular theory of protoplasm?
The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each action of
that habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and replaced by
others. Upon all the different occasions it is different atoms that are
thrown off, but they are analogous from a physical point of view, and
there is an inward sense of their being analogous. Every time one of the
associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less vague sense that
there are others, that it has a general character, and of about what this
general character is. We ought not, I think, to hold that in protoplasm
habit never acts in any other than the particular way suggested above. On
the contrary, if habit be a primary property of mind, it must be equally
so of matter, as a kind of mind. We can hardly refuse to admit that
wherever chance motions have general characters, there is a tendency for
this generality to spread and to perfect itself. In that case, a general
idea is a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any
regularity or general relation between chance actions.
The consciousness of a general idea has a certain “unity of the ego,”
in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It
is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a person is
only a particular kind of general idea. Long ago, in the _Journal of
Speculative Philosophy_ (Vol. III, p. 156), I pointed out that a person
is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea; but my views were,
then, too nominalistic to enable me to see that every general idea has
the unified living feeling of a person.
All that is necessary, upon this theory, to the existence of a person
is that the feelings out of which he is constructed should be in
close enough connection to influence one another. Here we can draw a
consequence which it may be possible to submit to experimental test.
Namely, if this be the case, there should be something like personal
consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely
sympathetic communion. It is true that when the generalisation of
feeling has been carried so far as to include all within a person, a
stopping-place, in a certain sense, has been attained; and further
generalisation will have a less lively character. But we must not
think it will cease. _Esprit de corps_, national sentiment, sympathy,
are no mere metaphors. None of us can fully realise what the minds of
corporations are, any more than one of my brain-cells can know what
the whole brain is thinking. But the law of mind clearly points to the
existence of such personalities, and there are many ordinary observations
which, if they were critically examined and supplemented by special
experiments, might, as first appearances promise, give evidence of the
influence of such greater persons upon individuals. It is often remarked
that on one day half a dozen people, strangers to one another, will take
it into their heads to do one and the same strange deed, whether it be
a physical experiment, a crime, or an act of virtue. When the thirty
thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor were in New
York, there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion of sweetness and
light. If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere, it should
be in the church. The Christians have always been ready to risk their
lives for the sake of having prayers in common, of getting together and
praying simultaneously with great energy, and especially for their common
body, for “the whole state of Christ’s church militant here in earth,”
as one of the missals has it. This practice they have been keeping up
everywhere, weekly, for many centuries. Surely, a personality ought to
have developed in that church, in that “bride of Christ,” as they call
it, or else there is a strange break in the action of mind, and I shall
have to acknowledge my views are much mistaken. Would not the societies
for psychical research be more likely to break through the clouds,
in seeking evidences of such corporate personality, than in seeking
evidences of telepathy, which, upon the same theory, should be a far
weaker phenomenon?
C. S. PEIRCE.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I am rejoiced to find, since my last paper was printed, that a
philosopher as subtle and profound as Dr. Edmund Montgomery has long
been arguing for the same element in the universe. Other world-renowned
thinkers, as M. Renouvier and M. Delbœuf, appear to share this opinion.
[2] By a _vera causa_, in the logic of science, is meant a state of
things known to exist in some cases and supposed to exist in other cases,
because it would account for observed phenomena.
[3] Wiedemann, _Annalen_, 1887-1889.
[4] See Maxwell on Spherical Harmonics, in his _Electricity and
Magnetism_.
[5] The word _system_ has three peculiar meanings in mathematics. (_A._)
It means an orderly exposition of the truths of astronomy, and hence
a theory of the motions of the stars; as the Ptolemaic _system_, the
Copernican _system_. This is much like the sense in which we speak of the
Calvinistic _system_ of theology, the Kantian _system_ of philosophy,
etc. (_B._) It means the aggregate of the planets considered as all
moving in somewhat the same way, as the solar _system_; and hence any
aggregate of particles moving under mutual forces. (_C._) It means a
number of forces acting simultaneously upon a number of particles.
[6] But, in fact, an inspection of these curves is sufficient to show
that they are of a higher degree than the third. For they have the line
_V_ = 0, or some line _V_ a constant for an asymptote, while for small
values of _P_, the values of (_d_²)_P_/(_dV_)² are positive.
[7] Anticipated by Clausius as long ago as 1857; and by Williamson in
1851.
[8] “Physiologically, ... accommodation means the breaking up of a
habit.... Psychologically, it means reviving consciousness.” Baldwin,
_Psychology_, Part III ch. i., § 5.
THE FUTURE OF THOUGHT IN AMERICA.
History teaches us the nature of the degenerative and destructive
agencies in national life. These are of various kinds, but they may be
generally included under the heads of Physical Vices, Superstitions,
and Selfish Ambitions. These have become possible through excess of
emotional, and deficiency of rational states of the mind. When a large
part of a population is influenced by emotional rather than by rational
modes of thought, unethical conduct has full opportunity, and suffering
and destruction are sure to follow. All races and nations are subject to
such disorders, if only in some cases during their periods of infancy and
of degeneracy.
The peoples of Europe have difficulties and dangers which are due to
their own peculiar situation. The people of North America have to meet
certain risks of a somewhat different character, owing to our peculiar
position. In Europe we see an accumulation of many races who reached
their _Ultima Thule_ at the coast of the Atlantic, and who have had
to accommodate themselves to each other as best they could. Speaking
different languages and having different political organisations, they
have consolidated into separate nations. This result has only been
reached after many conflicts, and the result has been the combination and
absorption of smaller states into greater, such as we find them to-day.
This result has not terminated conflicts; it has reduced their frequency
but has increased their scope and importance. To-day the antagonisms of
these nations impose great burdens upon them, but they are at the same
time productive of great good.
With men as with other animals excellence is the result of use and
exercise. With animals this exercise has been compulsory, and has been
due largely to the pressure of hunger. Among men intellectual and ethical
excellence may be due to compulsion, or it may result from the capacity
to develop lofty ideals. In the former case man is driven; in the latter
case he is led. Now the organisation of human society is such, that if
man will not be led, he is driven. The “mills of the Gods” are ever ready
for those who lag behind in the progress of the race. But there are
mills and mills, and no mill has yet appeared in human history better
calculated to grind out a good grist from an intellectual point of view,
than western Eurasia, or Europe. The emulations and antagonisms of so
many nations have stimulated men to do their best, and have stimulated
governments to aid them in doing it, for several centuries. The result
has been modern art, modern science pure and applied, and modern
philosophy. To produce all this however, Europe has been under pressure,
and the pressure has been in some, if not all of its countries, more or
less galling.
The European, in order to escape local tyranny, political, social, or
theological, or to better his chances of physical living, has come to
America. He has taken possession, and has bettered his condition from a
physical point of view, most successfully. The question that interests
us now, is whether he has bettered himself in any other way, and whether
he is going to continue the mental progress which has so distinguished
his history in Europe. Population is rapidly increasing, and the
increasing severity of the “struggle for existence” which will follow,
will stimulate men to increased excellence in their methods of obtaining
a livelihood, but will it develop the mind in any other direction? We
have before us in the case of China, the effect of close industrial
competition in a dense population, without corresponding intellectual
development. What is the outlook for the American? Will the process of
natural selection only, the “devil-take-the-hindmost” doctrine of Darwin,
be sufficient to develop the higher mental faculties, or having developed
them, to enable them to survive and to become general, or not?
In the first place we lack in America the great stimulus to mental
progress already referred to, international jealousy and emulation. In
this respect we are situated very much like the Chinese, but if anything
less favorably. We practically own the continent. We have no fear of
Tartar invasions from the west nor Japanese from the north east. The
Canadians are of identical race with ourselves, and are almost certain
to become identical in nationality with us. We are accustomed to boast
ourselves of this, and to look with great satisfaction on our isolated
position among nations. But our self-gratulation must be greatly tempered
by the reflection that such isolation is only beneficial so long as we
can maintain our ideals without external stimulus. And this is something
that few nations have so far been able to accomplish. It is true,
however, that the Atlantic ocean is not so wide as it was formerly, and
we are truly one of the family of the Indo-European nations. But we will
miss the effect of the daily stimulus which they afford each other, and
the daily contact which transmits so much from man to man.
What is our present intellectual rank among these nations to-day; meaning
by this our status in actual production of intellectual work, and leaving
aside history? Without any great competence to speak on many branches
of such work, I may be not far from correct; if I summarise as follows:
In music and sculpture unproductive; in painting and literature (as an
art) good, but weak in quantity in comparison with our population. In
sciences, feeble in many branches, but very productive in some others. I
refer to pure science. In applied science we stand high. In philosophy as
a nation, weak.
But we have the future before us. If there is a demand for the products
of pure thought in this country, the supply will come. Much may be
expected of our race. We will hope that the demand will grow, for at
present it is not as large as it ought to be. It is of course easy for
thought to “run in accustomed channels,” and many people there are in
this as in all other countries, who believe that sufficient is already
known, and that he who would disturb current opinions is a “disturber of
the peace.” Strange as it may seem, in this comparatively new country we
have one special inducement to this habit of mind. This is to be found
in our political system, which requires an unhesitating submission to the
will of the majority.
* * * * *
Here is our second danger. We are apt to confuse mental submission with
physical submission. Physical submission to the will of the majority
is generally necessary for physical reasons, with which we are all
familiar. Ballots are simply a peaceful representation of bullets, and
we anticipate the submission to the latter by submission to the former.
But the mind should be free. Current or popular opinions are not always
correct. In fact if they were, reform or progress would be unnecessary.
A proposal for change always begins with a minority, and much time may
often elapse before such change becomes acceptable to the majority.
Before the majority accepts a new step of progress the progressive idea
cannot govern physically. It must be content to be unpopular for a
greater or less time. Now the politician naturally dreads unpopularity,
for it is political death. And just in proportion as we are politicians
do we share in this unfortunate mental attitude. And how many Americans
are not politicians? It is the prevalent ethical disease of Americans. If
it becomes general, the progress of this country is ended, and her fate
among nations is sealed. Her manhood is gone, and woman may well feel her
hand itch to
“Defeat their dirty tricks
Confound their politics.”
The prevalence of the habit of submission to what we know to be wrong
in this country is simply detestable. Herbert Spencer has given us
some excellent advice on this subject, and we will do well to heed
it. The habit extends all the way through political, scientific, and
domestic economy. The unpopularity of the reformer is expressed in the
term “kicker,” which is applied to him among the lower classes in this
country. As one of its advocates once said to me, it is the “American
System,” and there was a strong element of truth in his assertion. With
such people, criticism is identical with quarrelling, for they cannot
conceive of any motive for endeavoring to reform some abuse or correct
some error, but personal rancor. Such an attitude is a sure mark of
intellectual mediocrity and ethical incapacity, and it infinitely
increases the pains of the reformer, and readily converts him into a
martyr. However, there are a good many men left in this country, and
there are agencies at work which will probably keep up the supply.
In the absence of compulsion in the form of external or civil wars and
other disasters, the churches are doing a good work in keeping ideals
before the people, and in inviting corresponding practical life. It is
true that their efforts are more or less retarded by the insistence
on erroneous and even absurd opinions about some things, but they do
infinite service in teaching that “man shall not live by bread alone,”
nor by the mere display of physical possessions. They teach that there
are ideals of truth and beauty better worth living for, and that the
mind is the greater part of man. It is the churches which make the
majority of scientists and philosophers, as they formerly did of
painters. Then let the churches flourish. Like the nations of Europe,
their emulations and antagonisms bring out the truth. The Presbyterians
have to solve the knotty questions of biblical inspiration and divine
order. The Methodists will have to study the nature and value of human
emotions. The Friends will know what is to be known of immediate divine
influence. The Catholics have learned how to restrain in some measure
the most thoughtless of mankind. The Unitarians and Ethical Culturists
are proving that man may retain and live up to high ideals without much
or any theology. So long as there is no philosophy or none to speak of
in America, the evolution of thought will come from the conflicts of
the theologies; a peaceful war which is far less wasteful than physical
wars. Theology has been generally in Europe the parent of philosophy,
and so it will be here. From the various stages and conditions of the
agitation will spring science and art. By this method man is led into
progress by measures which involve the best attributes of his nature,
instead of being driven by appeals to his lower motives, or by physical
force. In this progress moral courage is not lost, but it is developed;
and criticism is truth’s best weapon, and is not a cause of offense.
That this progress in the churches is real, is proven by our Woodrow,
McQueary, Briggs, and others, and it will go on as long as the love of
truth and moral courage exist in those organisations.
It is interesting to remember that this struggle of opinions has passed
through the same stages in Europe wherever the love of truth has had an
abiding place. This is especially true of Germany, where also philosophy
has had so large a development in relatively modern times. But we need
something more than opinions to counteract the dangers which threaten
earnestness of character in this country, which I have pointed out.
Active organisations are necessary, which shall resist tendencies
to crystallisation from both sides. Non-theological people must be
stimulated to maintain ethical ideals; and theological people must be
restrained from smothering them under useless and obstructive dogmas and
practices. It is too true that while some theological dogmas include
high ethical ideals, other dogmas discredit them by deriving them from
incredible sources, and seeking to sustain them by incredible sanctions.
Where such dogmas are sincerely held, true thought is suppressed,
knowledge makes slow progress, and ethical life is more difficult.
As already remarked, we cannot yet claim to be, as a nation,
distinguished for profound thinking on the subjects of highest human
interest; nor yet are we the most thoughtless. Ignorance of the
possibilities of mind is not so general as in some parts of Europe, but
it is greater than in others. Material objects and interests occupy
almost as exclusively the minds of the majority of our citizens whom we
are accustomed to consider “intelligent,” as among the unintelligent.
Hence our proneness to boast of our material greatness, instead of our
intellectual conquests. Hence that weakest of all forms of self-praise,
the publication of the dimensions of our country and its rapid growth,
as though these were indications of our superiority as a people or
as a race. This is repeated _ad nauseam_, while our real merits, our
contributions to the stock of the world’s progress in thought, knowledge,
and mental power, are passed by in silence. Our newspaper press reflects
this state of affairs, since they generally think it their best policy to
follow rather than lead public opinion. There are, however, noteworthy
exceptions to this character of the press both in the east and the west,
which we owe to the superiority of the men who edit and direct them.
In the conduct of our schools and of our scientific organisations, we
have a corresponding exhibition of mediocrity or worse, with a few noble
and distinguished exceptions. A mere interest in education and research
does not confer competency to direct and sustain them; yet an interest
in such matters is generally the only qualification demanded of the
directors of such institutions, provided they understand how to buy,
sell, and invest money. It is to be hoped that this state of affairs will
some day pass away, and that men who are influential in such matters
will some time know enough themselves to distinguish between the false
and the true, and between men of ability and adventurers who are after
the money and position with which our institutions of learning and our
scientific enterprises can endow them. This reform will progress exactly
in proportion as it is understood how much human happiness depends on
true research and on correct thinking, and how little on revelation and
on ancient dogma.
It is not, I repeat, sufficiently understood, how much human conduct
depends on correct thinking. How much financial dishonesty would be
averted by a rational thought as to the inevitable consequences? How much
social irregularity would be prevented by a similar treatment of the
subject? How much hatred and wasteful antagonism would the world lack, if
the ordinary conditions of living were understood and acted on! So the
cultivation of the rational mind is of incalculable importance, and if
we wish to prosper as a nation we must bend our energies to the pleasant
task this problem presents to us. Neglect of our mental powers means
degeneracy and decay; while their cultivation means power and happiness.
Wealth, except as a means of attaining this end, after physical
necessities are supplied, is simply useless.
E. D. COPE.
MENTAL MUMMIES.
If we should name the most important factor in the changes which
have gradually widened the contrast between modern science and the
scholasticism of the Middle Ages, we might define it as a “progressive
recognition of hereditary influences.”
There was a time when each individual of the human race was considered
a separate accident, called into existence by an act of unlimited,
arbitrary power, and apt to be as suddenly changed, even unto a complete
inversion of his former moral being, by a merciful, or revengeful,
caprice of the same power.
Biology has since taught us to apply the doctrine of evolution to the
problems of our own moral and physical nature, to trace the tendencies of
bygone times to their effects in the present age, to consider individuals
the outcome of a long series of precedent influences, and to recognise
the truth that the length of those influences is proportioned to the
persistence of the result.
Intelligent statesmen were the first to appreciate the practical value
of those facts. The advisers of Alexander II. did not waste their time
in a hopeless attempt to convert the freedom-worshipping natives of the
Caucasus into devotees of Muscovite despotism, but at once confronted
them with the alternative of exile or death. Our Indian commissioners
early realised the impossibility of turning the descendants of a long
ancestry of deer-hunters into tillers of the soil, and transferred the
survivors of the long race-war to a territory where they could for
better or worse, indulge their incurable penchant. The Groot Fontein
penitentiary of the Transvaal Republic became the grave of so many
Caffirs that the managers at last abandoned the plan of inuring nomads to
the restraints of sedentary occupation, and saved the lives, if not the
souls of their convicts by sending them about in chain-gangs to mend the
irrigation ditches of the border settlements.
Hereditary influences cannot be obliterated by force of rhetoric or of
government edicts and it would solve many riddles if we would apply that
principle to phenomena of ethical and religious evolution. How else
shall we explain the fact that in less than sixty years the doctrine of
Protestantism spread from central Germany to the highland hamlets of
Scotland and Scandinavia, while in Spain, Portugal, and Italy a very
decided progress in general intelligence has failed to lead to a similar
result? How shall we account for the success of Christian missionaries in
Tasmania and Otaheiti and their utter failure in Burmah and Hindostan?
How for the persecution-proof vitality of Judaism, the ready collapse of
Mormonism, or the revival of crass mystic delusions in the midst of our
realistic civilisation?
There is no doubt that the average Spanish sailor, or village-shopkeeper
of to-day possesses a larger stock of general information than the
average Brunswick school-teacher of the sixteenth century. Yet one of the
least learned of those school-teachers could, by instinct, sufficiently
appreciate the significance of the Protestant revolt to celebrate its
triumph by a big bonfire and what our western friends would, call a
“grand war-dance,” on a height near the little town of Wolfenbüttel. Why
does Pedro Gonzales still cross himself at the mention of a heretic,
while Peter Jansen would as soon return to the pig-sty hovels of the
mediæval serfs as crawl back under the yoke of Jesuitry? How could the
bogs of foggy Ireland and the vegas of sunny Spain nourish equally
imperishable roots of a plant that failed to get a firm foot-hold in the
sands of Brandenburgh?
The solution of those enigmas can be found in the circumstance that the
doctrine of anti-naturalism had extended its influence to the character
of many European nations, and that the character-traits of a race are
less amenable to rapid changes than its intellectual standards. On the
soul-organism of the Latin races the thousand years influence of monastic
tyranny has left traces which the light of science will fail to efface
for centuries to come. The propaganda of a manlier creed has thus been
defeated, not only by their ignorance, but by their aversion to mental
efforts, by their habitual reliance on miracles, by their incurable
indifference to the claims of truth and the merits of intellectual
independence, by their hereditary mistrust in the competence of their
natural instinct. To their moral palate a doctrine which nauseates their
northern neighbors has become a pleasant narcotic; they have been forced
to swallow the opium of pessimism till a craving for the repetition of
the mind-enervating dose has become a second nature; they hug the cross
that has proved a symbol of death to their noblest reformers.
Against that influence of perverted instincts the logic of mental
revelations avails but little. “Propositions which would appear
self-evident to certain mental constitutions,” says Dr. Carpenter,
“are apt to be very differently received by others, according to their
conformity or discordance with that _aggregate of preformed opinion_
which has grown up in the minds of each. For just as we try whether a
new piece of furniture which is offered us does or does not fit into a
certain recess in our apartment, and accept or decline it accordingly,
so we try a new proposition which is offered to our mental acceptance.
If it either at once fits in or can by argument or discussion be brought
to fit in to some recess in our fabrics of thought, we give our assent
to it by admitting it to its appropriate place. But if it neither fits
in the first instance nor can by any means be brought to fit, the mind
automatically rejects it.”
It is true that logical demonstrations may become complete enough to defy
dissent, but even from facts which force themselves upon the acceptance
of every rational human being, different individuals will draw widely
different inferences. That the mind of man may become a receptacle for
irreconcilable doctrines is strikingly illustrated, by the simultaneous
acceptance of the Old and New Testament of our heterogeneous scripture,
and in the same way obstinate bigots manage to associate scientific truth
and dogmatic absurdities. Darwin and Moses may occupy adjoining quarters
in the fabric of the same cosmogony; the rule of three may become a
passive concomitant of Trinitarian dogmas. The torch of truth may be
permitted to flicker in a secluded recess of souls which refuse it the
privilege of throwing its rays in certain directions. Education may fail
to reclaim hereditary bigotry. In the winter of 1559 the rabble of Madrid
assembled to witness the death of Don Carlos de Seso, a Spanish nobleman
whose ancestors had fought at Granada and Toledo. His brother had been
the favorite hunting-companion of Charles V.; one of his uncles had
sacrificed his life in deciding the victory of Pavia; Don Carlos himself
had acquired renown both as a soldier and a scholar, but in the latter
capacity he had confessed his sympathy with certain doctrines of Martin
Luther, and the Holy Inquisition had sentenced him to anticipate his doom
in the flames of the stake. King Philip II. honored the _auto da fé_
with his presence, and frowned in a way which the condemned freethinker
mistook for a disapproval of his sentence. “O King! can you thus witness
the torture of your subjects?” exclaimed De Seso. “Deliver us from so
cruel a death which even our enemies admit we have not deserved.” “I
would help carrying faggots to burn my own son,” replied the King, “if
he had incurred your unspeakable guilt.” Yet Philip the Second was one
of the best-educated princes of his century. In mathematics, astronomy,
ancient and modern languages, geography, and history, he was far better
informed than Landgraf Philip of Hessen, who would have risked his own
life to save that of a loyal cavalier.
There are mental mummies who cannot be revived by removing their
grave-shrouds and clothing them in modern drapery; the principle of
conservatism has penetrated their very veins and the marrow of their
bones. It is by no means unconceivable that a popular leader like
Garibaldi or Porfirio Diaz should succeed in persuading a million of his
countrymen to renounce the yoke of Rome and build Protestant chapels, but
the result would be largely limited to a change of nomenclature. Before
long the dissenters would march in procession with a wonder-working tooth
of John Wesley or kiss a shred from the petticoat of the Holy Maid of
Kent. They would groan at the mention of Rome, but exorcise spooks with
the initials of Ulric Zwingli, and abstain from work on the anniversary
of every Protestant martyr. They would try to redeem drunkards by
sprinkling them with consecrated water from the holy rivers of Kansas,
and celebrate Arbor Day only by invoking the spirit of Prof. G. P.
Marsh, as a patron-saint of climate-improving forests. Under the stimulus
of industrial influences, they might transfer the cross from way-side
shrines to telegraph-poles, but they would persist in the worship of
sorrow.
The creed which has turned the happiest countries of our globe into
a grave of their former prosperity, is a medley of miraculism and
anti-naturalism, and the experience of the last century has proved that
both can survive the repudiation of Rome and even of Galilee. The mania
of renunciation, after the abolishment of monasteries and nunneries,
continued its dismal rites in Quaker-garb and Shaker temples of celibacy.
The miracle-hunger of millions who have learned to scorn the clumsy
tricks of the cowled exorcist, gratifies its appetite in the mystic gloom
of the dark cabinet. Rustic supernaturalists, deprived of such luxuries,
indemnify themselves by retailing the marvels of the serpent-charm and
joint-snake superstition.
A curious psychological problem suggests itself in the question how
far the charm of the “sour-grape philosophy” may contribute to the
persistence of certain forms of moral nihilism. Condemned criminals
almost invariably “renounce the vanities” of a life which the Court
of Appeals has refused to save, and in a scaffold-speech, quoted in
Galignani’s _Messenger_ of May 6th, 1837, the English murderer Joseph
Greenacre expressed his conviction that his crime had been the means
of saving his soul, because “death on the gibbet was one of the surest
passports to heaven.”
For similar reasons degenerate nations, after realising the doom of their
national welfare, are apt to renounce the glory of a forfeited world,
and to consider misery, poverty, and shame so many stepping-stones to
the bliss of a better life beyond the grave. After habitual sins against
the health-laws of nature have avenged themselves in cureless diseases,
decrepit bigots may find solace even in that most insane tenet of their
dualistic creed which teaches them to despise the body as the enemy of
the soul.
A natural effect of pessimism may thus, in course of time, become one of
its perpetuating causes.
FELIX L. OSWALD.
THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.
I.
Although the internal structure of the brain of insects has been the
object of numerous and important investigations, among which we must
place those of Dietl, Flögel, Bellonci, and Viallanes (who have applied
the method of sections to the study of this organ), no attention has as
yet been paid to the other nerve-centres of insects, and in particular
to the ganglia of the ventral chain. Writers have contented themselves
with describing the external form of these ganglia, and their anatomical
relations to the other organic parts; but nothing has been done to throw
light upon their inward structure. All the knowledge which we have on
this subject is very meagre and dates far back to the works of the old
writers, who, like Newport, had at their disposal no other means of study
than the microscopic examination of organs viewed either transparently
or in dilacerated preparations. A method so defective could render but
incomplete results, and indeed in many cases erroneous ones.
We have sought to supply this much to be regretted lack of entomological
knowledge, by applying to the ventral ganglia of insects the admirable
method of sectional cutting, which has brought about such marked advances
in contemporaneous zoölogy.
I need hardly insist on the interest of this research. We shall only
remark that all anatomical study bears an unfinished aspect, up to the
moment at which we grasp the meaning of the organs which we describe;
physiology is a necessary complement of anatomy, it is that which gives
to it a meaning. Therefore, when we dissect an organ, which, as in the
case of an insect’s brain, is endowed with the most complex psychical
properties of which these animals are capable, we find ourselves in the
presence of parts whose functions almost entirely escape us. What is,
for example, that peculiar organ to which we have given the name of the
“pedunculate” body? Anatomists have described with the greatest care its
connections and portrayed its external contour; but we cannot discover,
or even conjecture its uses. It would be necessary to understand the
habits of thought and the feelings of an insect, to be able to assign a
rôle to parts so complex and so delicate as those contained within its
brain.
The study of the ventral ganglia seems to us to be capable of
conducting us to a better result, for in everything that concerns these
nerve-masses, physiology is more advanced, and, in all cases, clearer.
The ganglia of the thorax, for example, are in the main motory centres;
the principal nerves that are sent out from them are to be found in the
wings and in the feet; the study of the terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial
locomotion of insects has already formed the subject of quite a number
of important scientific works; we are now upon well-known ground, and we
may hope that it will be possible to establish some connection between
the anatomical structure of ventral ganglia and the functions which these
ganglia control.
This hope appears to us to be the more legitimate, because we can make
use of all the resources of comparative anatomy to work out the problem.
If we consider any particular function, for example, that of flying,
we notice that in species which resemble each other this function is
exercised under totally different conditions; the same organ acquires
different uses, and these variations become singularly instructive
when we can trace their relationship to the particular structure of a
nerve-ganglion. Thus, one of the large wings of the dragon-fly, which
is almost like a bird in the range and power of its flight, becomes
the elytrum of the beetle; the elytrum is a stiff wing covered by
chitinised matter and serving as a protection to a part of the thorax
and abdomen. Sometimes the elytrum is used in flying, as in the case
of the cockchafer. In other lamellicorn insects, in the _Cetonia_ for
instance, the elytrum is not used in flight; it merely moves aside so
as to allow the second pair of wings to unfold. Its rôle becomes still
less active in the golden carabus, in _Procrustes_, in _Blaps_, and many
other _Coleoptera_, whose two elytra are found on one vertical line,
and form but one single and immovable portion; then the second pair of
wings disappear; from the physiological point of view, the animal becomes
apterous. In another and different order, the order _Diptera_, it is the
second pair of wings that undergo an important modification; they cease
to be used in flying, and are transformed into an organ of equipoise:
they are used for maintaining equilibrium.
All these physiological variations, taking place in the self-same organ,
must in all probability have their counterpart in the internal anatomy of
the ganglion that governs the organ, and the comparative study of this
ganglion in different species will enable us perhaps to discover the
functions of some of its parts. Thus, if we consider by hypothesis, as
the nerve-centre of flight, some small lobe which is found occupying this
or that place in a thoracic ganglion, the disappearance or modification
of this lobe in species not possessing the faculty of flying, might serve
to throw additional light upon such an interpretation.
What we have just said with regard to flight is equally applicable to
terrestrial locomotion, which also represents in itself many varieties.
The typal insect possesses three pairs of feet, whence the name of
hexapods, but there are particular species which drop a pair of feet,
for instance, the _Lepidoptera_ of the genus _Vanessa_; in others,
the physiological function of the foot varies; in the case of the
carrion-beetle (a necrophagus coleopter) it serves as an instrument of
tillage, to dig with; for the cricket, the third pair of feet are used
for the purpose of leaping; for the _Dytiscus_, it serves as an oar, and
so on. We must also bear in mind the curious fact that there exists in
the larvæ of certain insects what are called supplementary feet, having
only a transient existence and disappearing at maturity; the caterpillar,
the larva of the butterfly, has five pairs of supplementary feet. These
notable facts demonstrated by comparative anatomy, cannot fail to furnish
us with valuable information concerning the functions of the complex
organs found in the ganglia of the thorax.
But this is not all. We have not enumerated all the contributions of
comparative anatomy to the problem which we are now about to consider; we
may make use of the method of comparison without bringing the different
types into juxtaposition, but by viewing the nervous system of only
a single animal in its entirety. We know in fact that the body of an
insect is formed by a definite number of segments, all constructed on
the same fundamental plan and arranged in a linear series. Each one of
these segments is joined to a nerve-ganglion, which is all its own and
supplies it with sensibility and motility, the two elementary properties
of nervous activity. In the course of development, these ganglia have the
power of changing their positions; and it is not uncommon to find that
the greater number of the abdominal ganglia move up into the thorax; each
one, nevertheless, retaining its nerve-relationship to its own segment.
Now all the segments of an insect’s body are not called upon to play the
same rôle; a division of labor has been effected among them with regard
to the functions which they are found to exercise: as we have already
seen, the ganglia of the thorax are essentially centres of locomotion;
in the head, one of the ganglia, the sub-œsophageal, furnishes the
nerves of the buccal portions; the other one, the brain, is connected
with particular nerves and becomes the centre of the highest form of
psychical activity of which the creature is capable. We have here a
number of modifications superadded to the original plan. Yet the original
plan should again be met with in the ganglia that have been least
differentiated, such as those in the abdominal region; and the comparison
between an abdominal and a thoracic ganglion, for instance, is well
calculated to show what are the primal and fundamental structures, and
what are the secondary ones which have been superadded and have become
necessary for the execution of the more complex functions. The study
of embryonic and larval forms so easily observed in insects, will most
probably conduct us to the same result. And thus perhaps by continuous
efforts, all guided by the same governing idea, we shall ultimately
arrive at the analogies that exist between the cerebroid ganglia and the
humblest ganglia belonging to the ventral chain, and thus finally be
able to understand the action of the nerve-substance.
The importance of this object, which, be it clearly understood, can
never be attained except by the united effort of many workers, is well
calculated to command our strenuous exertions and to encourage us in
surmounting the difficulties of a study which is as yet almost entirely
new.
II.
We shall restrict ourselves in this article to the consideration of one
particular case; we shall describe a single ganglion of the insect. The
type we have chosen, for reasons too lengthy to enumerate, is a Coleopter
of the family of _Melolonthidæ_; the _Rhizotrogus solstitialis_, a small
beetle very commonly found in the southwest of France. We will now
proceed to the consideration of the first thoracic ganglion.
The prothoracic ganglion in the rhizotrogus is joined by very short
connective filaments to the second thoracic ganglion, and also to the
sub-œsophageal ganglion; this latter ganglion, we must note _en passant_,
being situated in the thorax. If with a pair of scissors we sever the
head of the rhizotrogus, we find that the remainder of the body contains
not only the thoracic ganglia, but also the sub-œsophageal; a peculiarity
which, from a physiological point of view, is very interesting.
The ganglion of the pro-thorax, which is greater in width than it is in
length, bears a vague resemblance to a cone the base of which is turned
towards the sub-œsophageal ganglion, whilst the apex points towards the
second ganglion of the thorax. From the lower part spring two large
nerves, their starting-point being nearer the ventral than the dorsal
surface, a fact clearly comprehended when we find that the fibres of
these nerves extend for the most part into the first pair of feet, that
is to say, into those organs that lie underneath the horizontal plane
of the ganglion. The connective filaments which penetrate the ganglion
anteriorly enter it nearer the dorsal surface than the ventral, this last
being extremely convex. Dissection throws no additional light upon the
anatomy of the ganglion. But by means of a series of sections, we find
that it is composed of a mass of fibrillar substance which occupies its
centre portion and of a layer of nerve-cells surrounding the fibrillar
substance. This fibrillar mass is, owing to its great volume, far the
most important, and constitutes in itself alone about four-fifths of the
organ. The fibrillary structure can only be satisfactorily analysed by
using on it osmic acid, or other equivalent reagents which dissociate
it and admit of its being reduced to a certain number of clearly
differentiated elements. Whenever osmic acid or a similar reagent has not
been employed, or has not sufficiently penetrated the ganglion, owing
to the obstacle presented by a thick conjunctival covering or envelope,
the fibrillar substance takes on a homogeneous aspect that effectually
renders all analysis of it impossible. Everything depends on the
employment of a good method of preparation.
When the ganglion has been properly prepared, we perceive a very material
difference in the appearance of the fibrillar substance when we compare
the dorsal with the ventral region of the ganglion. We can do this
very satisfactorily by a longitudinal section, extending through both
regions. In such a section close to the median line but not confounded
with it (see Cut 16)[9] we perceive that the ventral region is occupied
by a cord or string of substance which owing to the action of the osmic
acid has become very black, and which is formed of so dense a tissue,
that we can with difficulty separate it into fibres and fibrillæ. This
cord, which, by reason of its position and shape, I propose naming the
_ventral column_, extends over the ventral surface of the ganglion in a
longitudinal direction; at both its anterior and posterior extremities it
is carried on by fibres extending into the ventral columns of the other
ganglia, in such a manner that the entire series of ganglia are united by
one continuous ventral cord.
If we look at a transverse section (see Cut 26), the cord, which is
recognised by its dark color and by its position near the ventral surface
of the fibrillar substance, will be seen to have the form of two almost
perfect circles. The ventral column thus presents a circular section, is
duplex and symmetrical: there exist two separate and distinct ventral
columns, separate at least for a certain length; a fact which must be
considered in connection with the primitive duality of the ganglion.
In every section where the columns remain distinct from each other, they
are separated either by fibres and conjunctival cells, or by nerve-fibres
emanating from the cells of the ventral region and proceeding in an
upward direction between the two columns. At the other points, the two
columns join on the median line. This union is effected in different
ways, either by the two columns coming directly together, thus merging
into a single mass, or by a commissure which describes the arc of a
circle underneath the two columns, or else by the inferior ventral lobule.
We give the name of inferior ventral lobule to a small lobule of
fibrillar substance, situated beneath the ventral column. When looked
at in a horizontal section not passing through the median line (see Cut
17), this lobule presents the appearance of a rounded protuberance,
breaking the almost rectilinear contour of the ventral column. As this
characteristic peculiarity is repeated in the internal structure of
all the ganglia, we may use it to ascertain the number of the ganglia,
whenever these present the appearance of being fused into one compact
mass; we may see the practical application of this remark by observing
the sub-œsophageal ganglion.
In a succession of horizontal sections, the starting point of which is
the ventral region, the first mass of fibrillar substance met with by the
knife is the inferior ventral lobule, which is formed (see Cut 1) by two
rounded fasciculi, placed symmetrically on either side of the median line
and joined together by a transverse commissure.
In these sections, we also perceive fibres of the crural nerve, which,
after having extended over a certain length of the ganglion, penetrate
into the substance of the inferior ventral lobule (Cut 2). In transverse
sections (Cut 23) we find the two ventral lobules placed beneath the two
columns which they help to support, and into which they gradually merge;
and we also perceive the transverse commissure which joins the two.
We shall call this the _transverse commissure of the inferior ventral
lobule_.
Let us now pass on to the examination of the upper surface of the
ventral column. This surface is covered by a cluster of very fine fibrils
rather sparsely disposed; we can clearly follow their course by means
of a longitudinal section (Cut 17); we see them again in a horizontal
section (Cut 5). To continue the general description of the ganglion we
must now consider the dorsal region. It is, as we have previously stated,
occupied by a fibrillar substance not so dense as that which composes the
ventral column, and we will give the general name of dorsal lobe to this
region, reserving the name ventral lobe for the region which embraces the
ventral column and its adjoining parts. The dorsal lobe presents as its
distinctive characteristic the feature that it is crossed longitudinally
by a succession of connective filaments clearly seen in the longitudinal
section of Cut 16.
We have already stated that the ventral column receives fibres issuing
from the ganglion in front and sends out others to the ganglia in the
rear. We shall call the totality of these fibres _the connective ventral
filaments_, and shall call the totality of those that traverse the dorsal
lobe _the dorsal connective filaments_.
The connective filaments which join the sub-œsophageal to the first
thoracic ganglion, and which, between these two ganglia, are composed of
a dense fasciculus of fibres, distribute these fibres, at the point at
which they enter the prothoracic ganglia, in different directions; one
set of fibres proceeds towards the ventral column, these are the ventral
connective filaments; a second set traverses the dorsal lobe, and are the
dorsal connective filaments.
Whilst the ventral connective filaments soon merge into the very dense
substance of the ventral column, the dorsal connective filaments, on
the contrary, remain distinct from the organs which they traverse, and
preserve their individuality throughout. They take directions in three
different planes (see Cut 16), consequently they can be subdivided into
superior, medial, and inferior dorsal connective filaments.
Newport seems to have observed this distinction of fibres; and he has
given the name of sensory column to this first division, and that of
motor column to the second. Unfortunately the drawings and figures he has
published, though schematically correct, are not clear. We do not adopt
his terminology, in the first place because he designates the organs
after their supposed functions, and we have made it a rule never to use
controvertible physiological suppositions to designate anatomical organs;
and besides, though the name of column is applicable to the connective
ventral filaments, we cannot apply it to the connective dorsal filaments,
which are subdivided into three pairs of fibrous fasciculi and do not in
the least resemble a column.
In the study of _Melolontha vulgaris_, we have been able to establish in
the most absolute manner that there exists a considerable histological
difference between the connective filaments of the ventral region and
those of the dorsal. Though we have not yet noticed this difference in
_Rhizotrogus_ in any marked degree, nevertheless it has seemed to us
needful to point it out here, because the fact is of such vast importance
that it cannot fail to be general. The dorsal connective filaments,
whilst they preserve their individuality in their passage across the
dorsal lobe of the ganglion, penetrate nevertheless into some small
masses of dotted substance which are found in the path of their entrance
into the ganglion. The mass annexed to the inferior dorsal connective
filament, is above all very important and is directly connected with
the ventral column. As the connective filaments are in pairs, each of
these possesses a distinct mass of fibrillar substance and both the
masses attached to the same pair of connective filaments are joined by a
commissure.
Let us now say a few words about the nerves which proceed toward the
prothoracic ganglion. There exists here but one single pair of nerves,
extremely important and very extensive. This is the crural nerve. To
this nerve are attached the organs which are superadded to the primary
structure of the ganglion, such as we have described it, and which in
consequence renders the primitive structure more complex. We shall
perceive the importance attached to the idea of a _superadded_ organ,
when we study the abdominal ganglia, where the organs we are about to
describe are either completely wanting or are but imperfectly developed.
If now we examine a transversal section taken a little in front of the
place from whence the crural nerves emerge (Cut 19), we shall notice
that the central part of the ganglion is occupied by the ventral column
and the upper part by the dorsal lobe. In addition to this, in the
lateral regions of the ganglion we find two important masses of fibrillar
substance. At this point these two masses remain distinct from the parts
we have just mentioned, and on the other hand they are in connection with
the crural nerves. The latter send a part, and unquestionably the greater
part, of their fibres into the lateral lobes. In a section slightly
posterior to the preceding one, also transversal, a very important change
has taken place; the two lateral lobules, always connected with the
crural nerves, have also established connections with the centre of the
ganglion, and in the sections further on the fusion is complete. As these
lateral lobules possess the characteristics mentioned, only at the point
at which the crural nerves emerge, we shall call them the _crural lobes_.
Thus we find in the prothoracic ganglion three principal lobes: (1) the
crural lobe, which is double, symmetrical, and lateral, (2) the dorsal
lobe, (3) the ventral lobe. These two last, in contradistinction to the
crural lobe, will be classed together under the common term _central
lobe_.
And now to finish this summary description of the prothoracic ganglion,
we will point out an important disposition of the connective tissue which
divides the ganglion into two halves, one anterior, the other posterior.
We can easily understand this disposition by looking at a longitudinal
section passing exactly through the median line. From the dorsal surface
of the ganglion, may be seen descending a bundle of cells and connective
fibres, which, in the form of a column, are directed toward the centre
of the ganglion; these cells and fibres do not meet any important organ
on their way, the dorsal connective filaments always taking a lateral
course. A fasciculus, similarly composed of cells and conjunctival
fibres, starting from the ventral surface of the ganglion, appears
to meet this conjunctival column (Cut 18). This curious disposition
appears to be, as M. Henneguy has ingeniously suggested to me, a trace
of the anterior development of the ganglion which had been formed of two
distinct portions that have been naturally _welded_ together along the
median line; the connective fasciculi corresponding to the point where
the welding has been incomplete, and representing the survival of a
portion of the walls of the two ganglia.
III.
As the ganglion which we have just described contains some structural
difficulties not easy of comprehension, let us proceed with our
description under another form, following the order of our illustrations.
Figure 1 is the first horizontal section, cut through the ventral region
of the ganglion; the knife has here met the lower ventral lobule, which
at this point shows itself double; the two halves being joined by a
double transversal commissure. Section 2, made at a point a little higher
than the preceding one, shows us at the centre the lower ventral lobule
as increased in size; and in the lateral part of the figure appears a new
organ, the crural lobule, which is here entirely merged into the lower
ventral lobule. The crural lobule is traversed by fibres from the crural
nerve, which instead of being entirely lost in its substance, proceed
still further, passing into the lower ventral lobule. Section 3 merely
brings into prominence an important transversal commissure. In Section
4, the inferior ventral lobule is replaced by the ventral column, which
appears double, is symmetrical, and united by a transversal commissure;
this commissure being formed of fibrillar substance. The ventral column
is closely connected on each side with the crural lobule; it is besides
crossed by the ventral connective fibres, which can be seen emerging
from its anterior and posterior extremities. Section 5 allows us to
examine thoroughly the disposition of those ventral connective fibres; we
see that while they penetrate the ganglion, they also pass through two
symmetrical masses of fibrillar substance; these two masses, which we
name the anterior ventral lobules, are joined together by a transversal
commissure. After having traversed the anterior ventral lobules, to which
it appears they give a portion of their fibres, the ventral connective
filaments pass through the ganglion in an antero-posterior direction, and
we see them penetrating the two posterior ventral lobules. The last named
lobules, which remind us by their position and appearance of the anterior
lobules, receive in addition fibres issuing from the crural lobules; but
they do not receive them all, because we notice quite a number of these
fibres advancing directly into the second thoracic ganglion. After
emerging from the posterior ventral lobules, the ventral connective
filaments pass into the second thoracic ganglion, where we see them
penetrate into the anterior ventral lobules.
With Figure 6, we leave the ventral lobe of the ganglion and come
to the lower portions of the dorsal lobule. The important filaments
crossing this section from the front to the back are called lower dorsal
connective filaments. We notice as they proceed some small masses of
dotted substance, and, in addition to these, dark colored dots which are
the result of the knife having cut crosswise through several fascicles of
ascending fibres. We shall find out by means of the sections taken from
different parts and placed so as to allow of our better observation, what
these ascending fibres are. The crural lobule, always exhibits the same
characteristics. We have given it a homogeneous aspect in our drawing. As
a fact it presents in its sections a vast number of structural details.
But these details being very difficult to understand, we prefer not to
dwell upon them.
Section 7 passes through the very midst of the lower dorsal connective
filaments; these filaments being in two pairs, one external and the
other internal. The external pair, situated somewhat lower, has here
disappeared, and the inner pair is the only one to be seen. Some
transversal fibres, whose direction appears to me difficult to follow,
divide the inside dorsal connective filaments at two different points,
and assume the figure of a square; this square has two black dots,
produced by the section of the ascending fibres.
A little higher, in Figure 8, the lower connective filaments have
disappeared and the fibrillar substance of the ganglion is furrowed by
long transversal fibres, of which a part seems to serve the function
of joining the two crural lobules, whilst the remainder, proceeding
towards the black dots before mentioned, continue their progress with
the fasciculi of ascending fibres. These are no other than ascending
fibres which, having changed their direction at the plane of the section,
proceed almost in a horizontal plane. In Section 9 we follow the course
of the medial dorsal connective filaments, separated from the lower
connective filaments by the fibres having a transverse direction, seen
in Figure 8. The medial dorsal connective filaments are four in number,
an outer pair and an inner pair. At the moment when they leave the
prothoracic ganglion, they cross a region where the fibrillar substance
is both thicker and darker. In Figure 10 the medial connective filaments
are on the point of disappearing; they receive certain fibres coming from
the crural lobules, which are now reduced in dimensions. Section 11 shows
us the lower dorsal connective filaments, which are the slenderest of all
and of which there are but one pair; the crural lobule now disappears. In
the middle of the figure, we observe a small collection of conjunctival
cells which, as we have supposed, indicates the point where in the course
of development the two symmetrical portions of the ganglion have not been
perfectly fused together. Finally Section 12 shows two lateral masses of
fibrillar substance, separated by a strip of conjunctival membrane.
We will now take up the series of longitudinal sections, the study of
which will demand very special attention. We shall there meet again with
the organs which we have already examined in the horizontal sections;
and we shall perceive that the alterations and modifications presented
to us by the difference in our point of observation, bring out very
important changes in the appearance of those organs. The sectional method
of examination is also one of analysis. In order to reconstruct an organ
in its complete form and to conceive of it in space, our mind must bring
into a single focus what the sections have represented in a fragmentary
manner: we must, in short, substitute synthesis for analysis.
Figure 13 represents the first and exterior longitudinal section; it
hardly touches the ganglion; in the front we see the starting point of
the crural nerve, and also a portion of the periphery of the crural
lobule. The crural nerve exhibits several roots, the most important of
which occupy the ventral region. Figure 14, though very elementary,
brings out many important points; we see here the crural lobule, which
has increased in size and extends from the ventral to the dorsal region;
a fact which has already been indicated in the horizontal sections, the
crural lobule having been shown in them at all points. This lobule is
almost circular in form. Along its ventral region, we perceive some of
the fibres of the crural nerve which do not penetrate into the lobule;
these are the ones we met with in the figures 2 and 3: they are the
fibres which pass directly into the lower ventral lobule. With Section
15, we leave the lateral regions of the ganglion and come to the dorsal
and ventral regions; we must notice that the crural lobule is continuous
with the central fibrillar mass and has no precise limits. In Section
15 the ventral column appears, reduced in size. In the front of it
we observe an incisure through which certain nerve-cells send their
prolongations into the fibrillar substance.
Figure 16 shows us the complete junction of all the connective filaments
traversing the ganglion; first the ventral column, with the connective
ventral filaments starting from both its extremities; and then the three
dorsal connective filaments, which preserve their individuality distinct,
while they cross the dorsal lobe of the ganglion. The lower dorsal
connective filament is distinguished from the others by a small compact
mass of fibrillar substance through which it passes. We must note that
the fibrillar substance becomes thicker at the point where the whole
series of connective filaments enter the ganglion, and the same thing
is repeated at the place where they leave the first thoracic ganglion
to enter into the second. The ventral column is distinguished from the
other parts of the ganglion by the dark color which it assumes through
the action of the osmic acid; it presents black granules which, examined
with a strong lens, show small fasciculi of fibres running in a parallel
direction. The cells which line the lower surface of the ventral column
do not throw out any prolongations; they are exceedingly small, but do
not otherwise present any special feature.
Figure 17 is but very slightly different from the preceding one: the
ventral column is simply strengthened on its lower surface by the lower
ventral lobule. The position of this lobule is interesting to note. We
have already mentioned that each ganglion is divided into two halves by
a column of conjunctival tissue, one anterior and the other posterior.
In Section 17 we see the granulated projection of the ventral portion
of this conjunctival column. In order to simplify it we have shown no
conjunctival tissue in our illustration. We may nevertheless notice,
that the nerve-cells at the point marked _c. c._ seem to separate one
from the other, and show a triangular space between them, filled with
conjunctival cells. If the segment had not been cut so obliquely, (and
this obliqueness in the sections is almost unavoidable when dealing with
such very small organs,) we should also perceive on the dorsal line
of the section the projection of the dorsal part of the conjunctival
column; in fact we shall see this projection in the figure which follows.
The presence of the conjunctival column separates, as we have said,
each ganglion into two parts, one anterior the other posterior. These
portions are not at all symmetrical. We see in Section 17 that the lower
ventral lobule is found only in the anterior part. Finally from the
ventral column rises an important fasciculus of ascending fibres, which
we have already seen in the horizontal diagrams; it is difficult for
us to ascertain what these fibres are. In the 18th and last section we
approach nearer the median line. The ventral column at this level has
the appearance of being divided into two trunks. The ventral connective
filaments are clearly seen upon its upper surface. Among the dorsal
connective filaments the middle one alone remains visible and receives a
certain number of fibres from the ascending fasciculus.
To complete our description let us glance at the series of transverse
sections. In Figure 19 the two crural lobules have not yet united and
are not yet merged into the dorsal-ventral lobe. This junction does not
take place until we come to Figure 20. Here, at this level, we see in
addition the circular segment of the two ventral columns, which by their
dark color are sharply outlined against the remainder of the fibrillar
substance. To the right and left of these two columns we perceive small
masses of dotted substance; we merely call attention to them and shall
not describe them. Figure 21 furnishes no noteworthy modifications of
the preceding. We simply see a few cells of the periphery sending out
their prolongations into the fibrillar substance. The point at which they
thus penetrate it has already been indicated in Figure 15. In Figure 22
we have a section of several dorsal connective filaments; among others
a lower root of the crural nerve is here seen to pass along the ventral
surface of the fibrillar substance without penetrating into the crural
lobule. Does there exist an upper root of the same nerve, which follows
the upper surface of the dotted substance? We do not dare to decide the
question. One thing is certain, and that is that if the nerve does exist
it is accompanied along its path by a great number of widely ramified
tracheæ, of which we see a drawing in _tr._ In the three figures which
follow (23, 24, 25) the ventral column presents an interesting series of
modifications. First of all, in Figure 23, it is surrounded by the lower
ventral lobule, of which the two masses are in a lateral position, and
whose commissures pass underneath the column. We see in the same Figure
23 the two lower roots of the crural nerve, advancing towards the column.
In the 24th section the two roots have reached the column, and two other
nerves cross the crural lobule; doubtless their destination is the lower
dorsal connective filaments, but of this we have no clear indication.
In the 24th section two other crural roots also enter the lower ventral
lobule. This section is very favorable for the examination of the
ascending fasciculus which we have already noticed in the longitudinal
sections. It seems to us certain that this fasciculus terminates in the
middle dorsal connective filament. Its origin is more uncertain. It seems
to spring from the ventral column, or else to come from crural roots
which, after having traversed the crural lobule, reascend towards the
dorsal lobe of the ganglion, describing a curve exteriorily concave. It
is possible that this ascending fasciculus has both these origins. The
26th and last section shows us the ventral column on a larger scale;
the two columns being distinct from each other, though united at the
lower extremity by a commissure. The _ensemble_ of the figure strikingly
reminds one of a section of the abdominal ganglion.
Here our description ends. We have not sought to follow up every fibre in
all its details, nor to describe completely the anatomy of each organ.
Our intention has merely been to give a synthetic notion of a nervous
ganglion. Subsequent studies made on other ganglia will demonstrate the
general application of this idea.
ALFRED BINET.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] For the cuts, see the plates in the Appendix of this number.
HINDU MONISM.
WHO WERE ITS AUTHORS, PRIESTS OR WARRIORS?
Among all the forms of government class government is the worst. Carthage
was governed by merchants, and the mercantile spirit of its policy led
finally to the destruction of the city. Sparta was governed by warriors,
and in spite of the glory of Thermopylæ it was doomed to stagnation.
India was governed by priests, and the weal of the nation was sacrificed
with reckless indifference to their interests. It appears that for the
welfare of the community the harmonious co-operation of all classes is
not only desirable but also indispensable.
Yet it is often claimed that mankind is greatly indebted to nations or
states ruled by class government, for having worked out the particular
occupation of the ruling class to a perfection which otherwise it would
not have reached. This is at least doubtful.
Carthage was eager to establish monopolies, but she contributed little to
the higher development of commerce and trade among mankind.
Sparta raised brave men, but was not progressive, even in the science
of war, and was worsted by so weak an adversary as Thebes. Modern
strategists could learn something from Epaminondas, but little, if
anything, from the Lacedæmonians.
Priestcraft has attained to a power in India unparalleled in the history
of other nations, and it is no exaggeration to say that priest-rule
was the ruin of the country. Yet the wisdom of the Brahmans has become
proverbial. Their philosophy is praised as original and profound, and it
is well known that the first monistic world-conception was thought out
in ancient India. But we shall see later on what the real share of the
Brahmans in this great work has been.
In the very earliest ages of Hindu antiquity, revealed to us in the songs
of the Rig-veda, we meet with priests who claimed the power of making
sacrifices to the gods in a manner especially acceptable to them, and
who thus rose to great power, influence, and wealth. To this ancient
period of Hindu history we can trace the origin of the Hindu castes,
essentially a result of priestly egotism, and which up to this day has
weighed down the Indian people like a nightmare. The organisation of
the priestly class into an exclusive, privileged body, as well as the
final development of the castes, did not, however, take place until the
time represented by the second period of the ancient Hindu literature;
by the literature, that is to say, of the Yajur-vedas or the Vedas of
the sacrificial formulæ, and the Brâhmanas and Sûtras, both of which
describe the sacrificial ceremonies, the former with, the latter without
theological comments. The contents of these works illustrate the origin
of the Hindu hierarchy and castes; but it is often necessary to read
between the lines. The greatest authority on this rich literature, Prof.
A. Weber, of Berlin, in the tenth volume of the series “Hindu Studies”
which he edits, has published his inquiries concerning this subject in a
very learned treatise, entitled “Collectanea über die Kastenverhältnisse
in der Brâhmana und Sûtra,” of which I have made considerable use in the
following pages.
In these books the Brahmans assert their claims with startling candor. In
several passages—to begin with the most striking feature—they announce
themselves as real gods wandering on earth. “There are two kinds of
gods,” it is said, “the true gods and the learned Brahmans, who recite
the Veda.” “The Brahman represents all gods.” “He is the god of gods.”
This is perhaps the most remarkable instance of priestly arrogance in all
history. Thus it cannot at all surprise us that the Brahmans, as earthly
gods, placed themselves above king and nobility; but it appears rather
strange that the kings and warriors should have allowed to them the first
place in the government. But as a matter of fact, they did do so and were
compelled to do so. From mysterious legends in the great Hindu epic poem
we infer, that bloody wars have been waged for supremacy, in which the
nobility was defeated.
The legends of this epos are thus important additions to the sources
with which we are concerned. This struggle, which the Brahmans in all
likelihood caused to be fought out for them by the great masses of the
people, has been ascribed to the warriors having robbed the priests
of the treasures which the latter had acquired by the performance of
the sacrifices; and this part of the legend is so highly probable
that we cannot treat it as a pure myth, especially if we take into
consideration the circumstances of those times. It was the first attempt
at secularisation in the history of the world, and the results were very
disastrous to those who were then in secular power.
The Brahmans did not establish a social hierarchy or ecclesiastical
ranks, nor did they participate in the government, except that the king
was bound to employ a Brahman as Purohita or house-priest, who occupied
as such the position of prime minister. If, however, they succeeded in
dominating the nobility and the whole people, it was principally on
account of their greater knowledge, of which they boasted, and especially
on account of the sacrificial arts, by the proper exercise of which in
those times, all favors could be obtained from the gods. For a duly
performed sacrifice, which would last weeks, months, nay, years, the
Brahmans charged of course a high fee. A fee of ten thousand oxen was
prescribed for a certain ceremony, a hundred thousand for another one,
and a later teacher of ritualism charged 240,000 for the same service.
And this was not yet the climax of priestly avarice, which—to use an
expression of Professor Weber—indulges in veritable orgies in these
books. After one has gone through the endless description of a ceremony,
one finds at the end the remark that the whole sacrifice has no effect,
unless the proper fee be paid to the priest. And—to use a term of modern
life—lest competition should reduce the prices or spoil the business, a
rule was established, that no one should take a fee which another one had
refused. (Weber, p. 54.)
The sacrificial rituals, so trying and tedious for us, are the only
literary production of these dull centuries before the rising of
philosophical speculation, and the great historical importance they
possess is simply due to the light they throw on the moral depravity of
the Brahmans as a class.
The following fact will fully show to what extent sexual debaucheries
were indulged in. The priest was enjoined, by a special rule, not to
commit adultery with the wife of another during a particularly holy
ceremony. But he who could not practice continence, was allowed to
expiate his sin by an offering of milk to Varuna and Mitra.
Numerous passages in the books on ritualism furnish us interesting
illustrations of the great indulgence which the Brahmans had for each
other’s weaknesses. The officiating priest is taught how to proceed
during the sacrifice, if he wants to wrong the man who employs and pays
him, or how to deviate from the prescribed rules, if he wants to rob
his employer of his seeing, hearing, children, property, or position.
The lack of confidence that resulted is best illustrated by a ceremony,
the introduction of which, at the beginning of the sacrifice, became
gradually necessary. By a solemn oath the officiating minister and the
client bound themselves not to injure each other during the performance
of the holy act. Consequently, the strange notions of right, which the
Brahmans had in those times, will not surprise us. “Murder of any one
but a Brahman is no murder.” “An arbitrator must decide in favor of
the Brahman and not in favor of his opponent, if the latter is not a
Brahman.” Such maxims are laid down in the texts with shameless insolence.
It is plain that the caste system greatly contributed to increase the
power and influence of the priests, because in a country where the people
are divided into classes, the priest always succeeds in inciting at his
wish the one against the other.
After the Brahmans came as second caste the Kshattriyas (literally: the
ruling class, i. e., king, nobility, soldiers); and as third caste the
Vaisyas (the bulk of the people: farmers, merchants, etc.). The conquered
non-Aryan aborigines were foreordained by the gods to serve the Aryan
castes and especially the Brahmans. They were called Súdras (serfs) and
had neither civil nor religious rights. “The Súdra is the servant of
others; he can be cast out or killed.” By this humane maxim were the
Brahmans guided in their conduct towards the aborigines.
With such a state of things, as it appears in the old books, the
priesthood ought to have been well pleased. But the Brahmans were not;
they desired still greater advantages and carried out the caste system
to a most absurd extent. The result is embodied in the famous law-book
of Manu, the exact date of which we do not yet know, but which must be
placed at the beginning of our era. The condition of things of which I
shall now speak, was accordingly developed during the last centuries
before Christ. Though we may suppose that some rules of this code have
remained a mere theory and have never been carried out, there remains
enough to show the social life of those times in a poor light. Köppen,
in the first chapters of his book on Buddhism, has severely but justly
judged the social organisation, as it appears in Manu’s law-book; but
as the age of this code was overrated at his time, he was led to one
erroneous conclusion: he attributes the historical process, of which we
speak, to the period before Buddha, while it really took place after
Buddha: L. von Schröder, in his work “Indian Literature and History,” in
the twenty-ninth lecture, gives us a good view of those times.
Different passages in Manu’s code show us that the claim of the Brahmans
to divinity had not decreased in the course of the centuries. “The
Brahmans are to be venerated at all times, as they are the highest
divinity.” “By his very origin the Brahman is a god, even to the gods.”
The many practical privileges they enjoyed were of still greater value.
They were exempt from taxation under all circumstances, “even if the king
should starve.” For the greatest crimes they could not be executed or
chastised, nor was their property liable to confiscation, while at the
same time the criminal law was very harsh towards the other castes and
especially towards the Súdras. The penalties increased proportionately:
the lower the caste to which the criminal belonged, the higher the
punishment; and the fines also increased in proportion to the rank of the
caste to which the injured man belonged. The money-lender was allowed
to exact (monthly) two per cent. of a Brahman, three of a Kshattriya,
four of a Vaisya, five of a Súdra. All these laws show how the Brahmans
understood the art of advancing their interests. The Súdra was by the
code deprived of all rights. “The Brahman may consider him as a slave and
is therefore entitled to take his property, as the property of the slave
belongs to the master.” “The Súdra shall not acquire wealth, even if he
be in a position to do so, as such conduct gives offense to the Brahman.”
But all these things are harmless when compared with the principles by
which the Brahmans reduced to the most miserable of lives numberless
human creatures who had committed no wrong except that their origin did
not agree with the political scheme of the priests. Formerly it had been
lawful for the members of the three Aryan castes, after having married
a girl of the same caste, to take other wives of a lower caste besides,
and no disgrace attached to their children. The son of a Brahman and a
Vaisya—or even of a Súdra woman—was therefore a Brahman. But this was no
longer the case under the code of Manu.
If the parents belonged to different castes, the children did not follow
either father or mother, but they formed a mixed caste and the law
distinctly regulates their occupations and trades. This theory gave birth
to a great number of mixed castes, who were more or less despised. And
the social standing of many of them grew still worse on account of an
absurd maxim which degraded the Indian people to the level of grass and
plants. Good seed in a bad soil gives of course a poorer return than in
good soil; still the crop is endurable. But weed introduced into good
soil produces weed abundantly. According to this theory of the Brahmans
the children were below the father, if he had married a wife of a higher
caste. The lowest and most execrable creature therefore is the son of
a Súdra and a Brahman woman. The destiny of a Súdra was of course hard
and unhappy, but the misery of the offspring of such a marriage, of the
Chandâla, defies all description. “He shall live far from the abodes of
other men and bear signs by which everybody can recognise and avoid him,
as his contact pollutes. Only in daytime shall he be admitted into the
villages, as then people can avoid him. He shall possess but common
animals like dogs and donkeys, eat out of broken plates, put on the
dresses of the dead, etc. They were compelled to serve as executioners.
To the utmost degree of contempt and misery has the proud Brahman reduced
these poor creatures.” (Schröder, pp. 423-424.)
But the Chandâla was not the last in the Brahmanic scale, which
suppressed all dignity in human nature; his offspring, though he had
only a wife of the Súdra caste, was necessarily still below him. Thus
originated a great number of mixed castes, one more despised than the
other, and despising one another. Most of these outcasts take their names
from the Indian aborigines and are thus placed on the same level with
the most contemptible tribes. Some of the things I have cited about the
mixed castes, may have been merely a theory of the Brahmans; however, the
actual existence of classes of people reduced by the clergy to a sort of
animal life, has been sufficiently verified by foreign travellers.
In modern times the separation of the people has been going on very
rapidly; so much so, that nearly every trade or profession now forms
a caste of its own, having no social intercourse with, nor patriotic
feelings for the other castes. This condition of things is due to the
influence of the Brahmans, for it has grown out of the social order they
have founded.
It is not my task to arraign the Brahmans for the sins they have
committed; but simply to illustrate to my readers, how little they cared
for and had at heart the interests of their people. One will, upon the
whole, feel inclined to denounce the selfishness and immorality of the
Brahmans, but on the other hand will acknowledge with admiration the
intellectual work they have done, and forgive them much for the profound
thoughts with which they have enriched their country and the whole world.
Is it not the wisdom of the Brahmans that has given to the word India a
sound that stirs the hearts of all to whom the struggle for the highest
truth appears as the highest phenomenon in the history of civilisation?
But suppose it can be shown that the greatest of all the wisdom of the
Brahman, the monistic doctrine of the All-in-One, which has had the
greatest influence on the intellectual life of modern times, was not
discovered by them?
Before I enter on this question, of the greatest importance from an
historical point of view, I will give a short sketch of the period of
Indian history in which this doctrine was established.
For centuries the Brahmans had heaped sacrifice on sacrifice and
multiplied symbolical explanations without end. All this distinctly
bore the stamp of priestly sophistry. Suddenly higher thoughts arise.
The learning handed down by tradition and the sacrificial system are,
it is true, not altogether abandoned; the mind, however, is no longer
satisfied with the mysteries of the sacrifices, but aims at higher and
more sublime truth. The age of intellectual darkness is followed by a new
era, the characteristic of which is the ambition to solve the problems of
life and to understand the relation of the individual to the absolute.
All the efforts of the human mind are now bent on solving the question
of the eternal Unity, from which all phenomena have emanated and which
every one perceives within his own self. It is the age of the Upanishads,
those famous books, which, as soon as they were known in Europe, filled
all scholars with wild enthusiasm and admiration. I refer only to the
old Upanishads, that date from the eighth to the sixth century B. C.,
not to the great number of books of the same name, but not of the same
value—there are over 200 of them—which appeared after the Christian era.
The Upanishads reveal the struggle of the mind to reach the highest
truth. Though they indulge occasionally in strange speculations, still
the idea of Brahma, of the universal soul, of the absolute, of the
thing in itself, is the ever-recurring subject of their thoughts, which
culminate in the idea that the Atman, the inner self of man, is naught
but the eternal and endless Brahma. A wonderful pathos animates the
language of the Upanishads and testifies to the sublime feelings in which
the thinkers of those times sought the great mystery of existence. They
look for all kinds of expressions, metaphors and figures, in order to
couch in words what cannot be described by words. We read for instance
in the venerable Brihadâranyaka Upanishad: “That which lives on the
earth, but is different from the earth, that which is the moving power
of the earth, that is your Self, the inner immortal ruler.” The same
is predicated of water, fire, ether, wind, sun, moon, and stars; and
then the chapter ends as follows: “Unseen, he sees; unheard, he hears;
unminded, he minds; unknown, he knows. There is none that sees but he;
there is none that hears but he; there is none that minds but he; there
is none that knows but he. He is thy soul, the inner ruler. Whatever is
different from him, is perishable.”
In the same celebrated Upanishad appears a woman, named Gârgî, and moved
by thirst of knowledge she inquires of the wise Yâjnavalkya: “That which
is beyond the sky and beneath the earth, and between sky and earth, that
which is, was, and shall be, in what and with what is it interwoven (that
is: in what does it live and move)?” Yâjnavalkya, in order to try the
intellectual power of the woman, gives an evasive answer: “In the ether.”
But Gârgî, perceiving that this answer did not contain the final truth,
asks: “In what is the ether woven?” And Yâjnavalkya replied: “O Gârgî,
that is what the Brahman calls the Eternal; it is neither big, nor small,
nor large, nor short, without connection, without contact; by the Eternal
are ruled heaven and earth, sun and moon, days and nights; the power of
the Eternal directs the rivers south or west or to any other point of
the compass. Whoever parts from this world without having understood the
Eternal, is miserable.”
In the Chândogya Upanishad, a book of no less importance, the same wisdom
is taught by a man named Uddâlaka to his son Shvetaketu in the form of
several parables. We see them standing in front of a Nyagrodha tree, that
kind of fig-tree that everywhere sends roots from the branches down to
the ground, thus producing new trunks, until in the course of time _one_
tree resembles a green pillared hall. And in front of such a tree, the
most beautiful symbol of ever-youthful nature, the following conversation
takes place between father and son: “Get me a fruit of this tree.”—“Here
it is.”—“Break it.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in it?”—“I see quite
small kernels.”—“Break one of them.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in
it?”—“Nothing.”—Then the father said: “The fine matter that you cannot
see has produced this big tree, and believe me, my dear son, this same
matter, of which the earth is composed, is the Absolute, the Universal
Soul,—it is you.”
The eternal ground of all existence which every one carries in himself,
Being as it is in itself, and as it is immediately perceived in thinking,
was, accordingly recognised as the sole reality, and all the manifold
changes of the phenomenal world were called Maya, a sham, a delusion, a
mockery of the senses. We see, it is a consistent monism which is taught
in the Upanishads.
I do not intend here either to criticise the Brahman conception of
monism or to contrast it with modern forms of monism. All monisms have
at least one thing in common, viz. they all recognise the paramount
importance of consistency of thought as a basic principle in philosophy.
And to have propounded a monism for the first time is a feat which
cannot be overestimated. What remains of this essay will be devoted to
the investigation of the question, whether this feat is duly or unduly
credited to the Brahmans.
It may first be mentioned, that a few scholars like Weber, Max Müller,
Regnaud, Deussen, and Bhandarkar, pointed out, a long time ago, certain
facts which show that another class of the Hindu nation founded the
monistic doctrine of the old Upanishads. But the attention of the great
public has never been called to this subject, which deserves to be known
by all interested in Indian history.
In the second book of the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, of which I have
already cited two passages, is found the following story, of which also
the fourth book of Kaushîtaki Upanishad gives a slightly different
version.
The proud and learned Brahman Bâlâki Gârgya comes on his journey to
Ajâtashatru, prince of Benares, and says to him: “I will announce you
the Brahma.” The king, highly pleased, promises him a great reward, a
thousand cows. The Brahman begins to expound his wisdom: “The Spirit
(that is the power) in the sun I venerate as the Brahma.” But the king
interrupted him, saying that he knew that already. Then the Brahman
speaks about the Spirit in the moon, in lightning, ether, wind, fire,
water, but the king knows all that. And whatsoever the Gârgya might say,
is not new to the king. The Brahman became silent. But Ajâtashatru asked
him: “Is that all?” and Gârgya answered: “Yes, that is all.” Then the
king said: “Your little knowledge is not the Brahma;” whereupon Gârgya
declared that he should like to be one of the king’s pupils. Ajâtashatru
replied: “It is against nature, that a Brahman should learn from a
warrior and depend on him for the understanding of the Brahma, but I will
show it you nevertheless.” The king took him to a sleeping man and spoke
to the latter; but he did not get up. When the king touched him with his
hand, he arose. The king then asked the Brahman: “While this man was
sleeping where was his mind, and whence did it return now?” Gârgya could
not give an answer. Then the king explained to him, that the mind or the
Self of the sleeping man was wandering around in dream, that all places
were open to him, that he could be a great king or a great Brahman; but
that there was still a higher condition of felicity, that is, absorption
in dreamless sleep, without consciousness. In this condition the Self of
man, not affected by the outside world, reposes in his true essence and
knows no difference between Atman and Brahma.
Another story, reported in the fifth book of Chândogya Upanishad and in
the sixth book of Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, is perhaps of still greater
importance.
The young Brahman Shvetaketu comes to a convention, where the King
Pravâhana Jaivâli asks him: “Has your father instructed you?”—“Yes,
sir.”—“Do you know to what place the dead go?” And three more questions
he put to the young Brahman, who was compelled to admit that he knew
nothing about them. Discouraged, he returned to his father and reproached
him: “Although you have not imparted any knowledge to me, you claim that
you have instructed me. A _simple king_ has asked me three questions and
I could not answer a single one.” The father replied: “You have known me
sufficiently to understand that I taught you all I knew. Come, let us
go to the king and learn from him.” The king received the Brahman with
great honors and requested him to select a present. But Gautama refuses
all earthly gifts, gold, cows, horses, female slaves, and asks the king
to answer the questions he had put to his son. At first the king was
unwilling, but after a while he agreed to it and said, that no one on
earth could give information on those subjects, except a warrior. And the
following words of the king’s are very significant: “Would that neither
you nor your ancestors had trespassed on us, that this truth might never
have set up her residence among Brahmans. But to you, since you are so
inquiring, I will communicate our wisdom.”
Substantially the same story is found at the beginning of the Kaushîtaki
Upanishad, except that the king appears under the name Chitra.
Omitting points of less importance, I shall only give in a brief form
the contents of the eleventh and the following chapters of the fifth
book of the Chândogya Upanishad, where again a man of the warrior caste,
Ashvapati, prince of the Kekaya, is shown in possession of the highest
wisdom. A number of highly learned Brahmans were speculating on the
following problems: “What is our Self? What is the Brahma?” and they
decided to go to Uddâlaka Aruni, who, as they knew, was investigating
the “Omnipresent Self.” But Aruni said to himself: “Now, they will ask
me and I am not able to answer all their questions”; consequently he
requested his visitors to go with him to Ashvapati. The latter receives
them with great honors, invites them to stay with him, promising them
presents as high as their fees for sacrifices. But they replied: “A man
must communicate what he knows. You are just now seeking the ‘Omnipresent
Self’; disclose to us what it is?” The king, said: “I will answer you
to-morrow.” The following day, without having received them among his
pupils, that is, without a ceremonial reception as was usual, he asked
them: “What do you venerate as the Self?” They replied: “Heaven, sun,
wind, ether, water, earth.” The king reminded them that they were all
mistaken in considering the Omnipresent Self as a finite and limited
being; it was the infinite, the infinitely small and the infinitely great.
The weight of these stories is very plain. Whether they refer to real
facts or merely reflect the views of those times in the form of legends,
cannot be decided. However, the question of the historical truth of these
stories has no bearing whatever. The fact that they are to be found in
genuine Brahmanic writings, in books which are considered in India as
the basis of the Brahman caste, speaks a plain language. It shows, that
the thought of claiming the monistic doctrine of the Brahma-Atman as
the inheritance of their caste, did not occur to the authors of the old
Upanishads, or that they dared not claim it; it may be that they did not
yet realise the great importance of the same. Of course in the following
ages this science became the exclusive property of the Brahmans and was
cultivated and developed by them during twenty centuries—but this does
not do away with the fact that it originated among the warrior caste. The
men of this caste recognised at once the hollowness of the sacrificial
system and its absurd symbolical character; and to them is due the credit
of having disclosed a new world of thought and of having accomplished a
revolution in the intellectual life of Ancient India. When we learn that
the Brahmans continued the sacrificial system, even after having adopted
the new creed, and by representing religious ceremonials as the first
step to knowledge, thus combined two wholly heterogeneous elements; we
may justly conclude that things have taken the same course in Ancient
India as in other countries. Progressive ideas are first opposed by the
priesthood, their born enemy, until they have become so powerful that
they cannot be opposed any longer, whereupon the priest adopts them and
tries to harmonise them with his superstitions.
But the ideas mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, the substance of
what is commonly called “Hindu wisdom,” are not all that the warriors
have done for the religion and philosophy of the people. The noble
Gautama of Kapilavastu, the best known of all Hindus, who established
Buddhism about 500 years before Christ, was also a Kshattriya, and
according to the more recent tradition, which alone was formerly known,
the son of a king; but according to the earlier sources, disclosed
by Oldenberg, he was the son of a landed proprietor. Buddha, “the
Enlightened,” under which name he is known all over the world, most
strenuously opposed the sacrificial system and the superstitions of the
Brahmans. The ceremonies and the science of the priesthood seemed to him
a perfect fraud, and the caste system an absurd institution; he taught
that the final beatitude is within the reach of the lowest man, as well
as of the Brahman and the king; that every one, without distinction of
birth, can attain to “salvation” by contempt of the world, self-denial,
and devotion to the welfare of his fellow beings.
Oldenberg’s excellent book on Buddha, the newest standard work on this
subject, makes it unnecessary for me to dwell at length on the doctrine
of the greatest of all Hindus; only in regard to one important point,
which has a direct bearing on the subject under consideration, do I
differ from his opinion. According to the oldest sources, Buddha’s
method of teaching is, to a great extent, beyond the understanding of
the bulk of the people; not a popular, but an abstract philosophical
one. For intrinsic reasons, I believe that the old sources do not give
a correct report of this matter, and we must not forget that centuries
separate them from Buddha. Oldenberg himself raises the point, whether
the dry and tedious ecclesiastical style, in which Buddha’s thoughts are
clothed by those sources, truly reflects the spoken word. He says on
page 181: “Whoever reads the words which the sacred books attribute to
Buddha will doubt that the form in which Buddha taught his precepts is
to be identified with that abstract and sometimes abstruse metaphysical
language. A youthful, invigorating spirit, pervading alike teacher and
disciples, is the true picture of those times, admitting of no unnatural
or artificial features.”
In spite of this, he comes to the conclusion that “the solemn and stern
way of speaking, peculiar to Buddha, has been better expressed by
tradition than by what we would feel tempted to substitute.” I am not of
this opinion. In India a great success could not have been obtained but
by overpowering eloquence and a popular method, intelligible to all, and
proceeding by parables and metaphors.
If Buddha had only appealed to the intellect of his nearest surroundings,
consisting merely of aristocratic elements, if he had not found his way
to the heart of the people, his monastery would very likely have shared
the destiny of the other religious congregations of his age, which have
all disappeared, except one. As the doctrines of these monasteries or
their founders do not substantially differ from each other, and as it
cannot be ascribed to mere chance that Buddha’s doctrine has developed
into a universal religion, having the greatest number of adherents,
there remains but one hypothesis to account for this fact, and that
is the superiority of Buddha’s way of teaching. The erroneousness of
the generally prevailing opinion that Buddha was in his time the only
founder of a new religion, and that he suddenly revolutionised the social
organisation of the Indian people, has been clearly established by recent
investigations. In fact, he was a “primus inter pares,” one of those
numerous ascetics who were striving for and preaching “liberation” from
the eternal transmigration.
Besides Buddha’s, only one congregation has survived: the Jaina, having
numerous members in the western part of India. The principles of the
Jaina are very similar to those of Buddha; so much so that until recently
it was considered merely as a sect of Buddhism, while it is really a
religion of its own, founded by a contemporary or a predecessor of
Buddha, named Vardhamâna Jnâtaputra—in the language of the people,
Vaddhamâna Nâtaputta—in the same part of the country where Buddha rose.
The only difference between the two religions is this: Vardhamâna lays
great stress on castigation; while the more progressive Buddha declares
it useless—nay, pernicious. The important point in regard to the object
of our essay is this: that the founder of Jaina, which occupies a high
place in the history of Hindu culture, was also a member of the Warrior
Caste.
We shall now have to consider another production of the Indian mind,
the very name of which is unknown to most of our readers, although it
offers the most interesting religious problems. I refer to the doctrine
of the Bhâgavatas or Pâncharâtras. These names, of which the former
is the earlier and original one, designate a religious sect in North
India, whose existence in the fourth century B. C. is authentically
proved, but which can be placed with great probability in the time
before Buddha. They professed a common-sense monotheism, independent of
the traditions of the old Brahmans, and venerated God under different
names: Bhagavant, “The Sublime,” whence their name is derived; Nârâyana,
“Son of Man;” Purashottamma, “The Supreme Being”; but generally under
the name Krishna Vâsudeva, “Son of Vâsudeva”. The character of their
worship produced feelings identical with the Christian love and devotion
to God. The Hindu word for this feeling is Chakti, and for him who was
penetrated by the same, Chakta. As the word Chakti cannot be found or has
not been found in the Hindu literature earlier than the era of Christ,
several scholars are inclined to attribute the Chakti to the influence
of Christianity, especially Professor Weber, who deserves the highest
praise for his researches concerning Krishna worship. Weber has proved
in several of his books, especially in a highly interesting treatise
on Krishna’s birth, that numerous Christian notions have entered into
the later Krishna legends (the similarity of the names, Krishna and
Christ, accounts for it): for instance, the birth of Christ among the
shepherds, the story about the stable, and others of the same kind. In
spite of this, I cannot embrace the opinion that the Chakti has been
brought from a foreign country, because its first appearance belongs
to a period in which Christian influences cannot be found. As I cannot
go into details without discussing very difficult points, requiring a
great deal of erudition, I will only say that whoever is familiar with
the old Hindu civilisation will easily understand that the Chakti is of
genuine Hindu origin. Monotheistic notions can be traced to the oldest
periods of Hindu antiquity, and the Hindu mind has always been animated
by a high aspiration towards God; so that it should not surprise us that
this feature of the Hindu character has produced a religion popular and
independent of philosophical speculation, consisting in love and devotion
to God. The founder of this religion was Krishna Vâsudeva, afterwards
raised to divine dignity, or rather identified with the deity; from his
name and from the legends attached to his name, he was a member of the
Warrior Caste. As early as the epoch of the Mahâbhârata, the great Indian
epic poem, the Brahmans appropriated to themselves the name and work of
Krishna, and transformed the venerated hero into the God Vishnu; thus
increasing their strength by adopting a doctrine not of Brahmanic origin.
We have thus found that the profound philosophical monism of the
Upanishads, the highly moral religions of Buddha and Jaina, and last,
not least, the creed of the Bhâgavatas, based on pure devotion to God,
did not originate among the Brahmans.
However favorably we may judge of the achievements of the Brahmans in all
branches of science, and I am far from vilifying their merits, still it
is certain that the greatest intellectual performances of India, nay, all
such in India that have been beneficial to mankind, were accomplished by
men of the Warrior Caste.
RICHARD GARBE.
THE IDEA OF NECESSITY, ITS BASIS AND ITS SCOPE.
The idea of necessity, although a fundamental concept in philosophy
and science, has not as yet been so clearly defined that all thinkers
would agree as to its meaning and significance. Necessity is frequently
identified with compulsion, and thus it is supposed to be incompatible
with freedom of will. It is also identified with fate, as if it were a
destiny that existed above the will of man and the powers of nature,
similar to the Moira of the ancients. It is said to exclude chance in
every possible conception of the term and to cause the evolution of the
world to proceed by a predetermined arrangement, like the mechanism of a
clock.
We cannot endorse Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s objection to the doctrine
of necessity, but we side with him when he denounces the mechanical
philosophy for considering minds as “part of the physical world in such a
sense that the laws of mechanics determine everything that happens.” Mr.
Peirce is right when he rebukes the mechanical philosopher for “entering
consciousness under the head of sundries as a forgotten trifle.” In some
sense minds are parts of the physical, i. e. the natural, world, but they
are not parts of that province of nature which constitutes the special
domain of physics and mechanics. Ideas are not motions and cannot be
explained by mechanical laws.
Having criticised in a former article of ours Mr. Peirce’s position, and
having rejected the indeterminism proposed by him, we shall discuss in
the following pages the basis and scope of the idea of necessity.
The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness, and we
find that the existence of samenesses is a feature of the world in which
we live. The existence of samenesses is a fact of experience, and upon
the presence of this fact depends the possibility of the origin, the
being, and the development of the thinking mind itself.
Necessity, as we understand it, must be carefully distinguished from
the idea of fate. Although we accept without reserve the doctrine of
determinism, we do not mean to deny the important part that chance plays
in the world—not absolute chance, which according to Mr. Peirce is exempt
from law, but that same chance of which the throw of a die is a typical
instance. And bearing in mind that necessity is not a power outside
of nature and above the will of man, but that it resides in them as
the quality of sameness, we abandon the view that identifies necessity
with compulsion; recognising thus, that freedom of the will is not
incompatible with our view of necessitarianism.
I. THE BASIS OF NECESSITY.
The standpoint from which we shall treat this subject is that of monistic
positivism,—the method which accepts no doctrine, theory, or law unless
it be a formulation of facts. Facts are the bottom-rock to which we can
and must dig down. At the same time, wherever facts appear contradictory
to one another, we should not be satisfied, but continue to investigate
until they are systematised so as to form a unitary entirety.
Before we begin our inquiry into the existence or non-existence of
necessity, it is advisable to define the meaning of the term.
The Latin word _necesse_ is most probably a compound of the negative _ne_
and the supine _cessum_ from _cedere_ to yield, to move. “Necessary,”
according to this etymology, would mean that which does not yield but
abides. Thus it is the inevitable; it is that which is or will be.
It is in this sense that the word is still used, or at least ought to be
used, and in this sense we shall also use it.
Every word naturally acquires by a more or less appropriate application
a series of meanings. So “necessary” means also that which is needful,
that which is essential, that which is indispensable and requisite; it
also means that which is done under compulsion. It is understood that
we exclude all the other meanings of necessary except the original one,
which is its properly philosophical meaning.
The idea of necessity is closely allied to the idea of sameness. In order
to understand the former we must be clear concerning the meaning of the
latter.
THE IDEA OF SAMENESS.
There exist a number of synonyms often used indiscriminately; they are:
identity, sameness, equality, congruity, similarity, and likeness. By
“identity” we generally understand a sameness in every respect, absolute
sameness; by “equality”, a sameness that can be expressed in figures.
Equality is always a measurable sameness, and refers to quantity, mass,
size, length, height, age, etc. Likeness and similitude are samenesses
of form or of proportion, albeit not of size. It is often used as a
partial sameness of impressions, not so much as they are in themselves,
but as they appear to the mind. Congruity is a synonym of sameness in the
province of geometry, denoting the coincidence of figures when laid upon
one another.[10]
The logical principle of identity, so-called, it appears to me, ought
to be named the principle of sameness, for it has not reference to the
absolute sameness of a thing with itself.[11] The statement _A_ = _A_
does not mean that this particular thing _A_ is itself and that therefore
the one _A_ is one and the same thing. It is a general statement and
means that all _A_, in so far as they are _A_, are the same. The
statement _A_ = _A_, as I take it, presupposes the existence of a
number of _A’s_; otherwise it would have no sense, and it would not only
be empty, (as we know from Kant that all formal statements are,) but
meaningless and useless. It would be of no avail either in logic or in
science.
In consideration of the fact that the idea of sameness is a fundamental
concept in our scientific, logical, and philosophical reasoning, it is
astonishing that no satisfactory definition of it is to be found. To
define “same” as “one in substance; not other, ... of one nature or
general character, of one kind, degree, or amount,” as is done in the
“Century Dictionary,” is no improvement upon “Webster,” who defines it
as “not different or other; identical. Of like kind, species, sort,
dimensions or the like; not different in character or in the quality
or qualities compared; ... like.” However, dictionaries are not
encyclopædias; and they have perhaps a right to define same as identical,
and identical as same.
Mr. James Ward, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” (XVI, 81, in his
excellent article on “Psychology,”) incidentally complains about
the ambiguity of the word “same”; he proposes a distinction between
“material identity” and “individual identity,” but this does not solve
the difficulty. Flemming’s “Vocabulary of Philosophy” (4th ed. edited by
Calderwood) contains several articles on “identical” and on “identity”
without discussing in any one of them the meaning of “same” or of
“identical.”
What then is the meaning of same?
Let us first consider the etymology of the word. The root of “same”
is found in almost all Indo-European languages; it is preserved in
the first syllable of the Latin “similis” and “simul,” in the second
syllable of the German “Zu_samm_en”; in the Greek “ἅμα” and “ὅμοιος,”
and the Sanskrit “sama,” all of which denote a togetherness. Thus the
etymological meaning seems to signify what is classed in one category.
Accordingly, the present meaning as defined by the dictionaries, as
being that which is “of one nature or not different in character,” has
not changed; at any rate if there is any change, it is slight. Yet it is
desirable to bring out and set in a clear light the purport of the word
and its essence.
What, then, is the economic service and function of the idea of
“sameness” in the household of thought?
“Sameness” is that feature in two things or states of things, in two
processes or modes of action, which brings it to pass that the one may
be replaced by the other without altering for a certain purpose the
state of things or affecting the result of the entire process. Popularly
expressed, sameness is the capability of one thing’s being substituted
for another.
There is no need of discussing or proving the truism, that, properly
speaking, there is no absolute sameness, no identity in the strict sense
of the term. This was the meaning of Heraclitus’s idea of the perpetual
flux of things, expressed in his πάντα ῥεῖ. There are no two moments in
time, no two points in space, no two atoms of matter actually identical,
and we cannot enter into the identical river twice.
Cratylus tried to outdo Heraclitus, by saying that we cannot even enter
once into the identical river, for while entering, not only the river
changes but also we ourselves; and Cratylus is perfectly right.
We have purposely substituted in Heraclitus’s proposition “identical” for
“same,” because this change is needed to bring out the truth of the idea.
Heraclitus and Cratylus cease to be right if we use the word same as
above defined. We enter indeed the same river twice. The river of to-day
is, for a certain purpose, quite the same as the river of yesterday, in
so far namely as the river of to-day and the river of yesterday serve a
certain and the same purpose: for other purposes this same river will
perhaps not be the same. The geographer and historian speak of the Rhine
as that stream of water which since time immemorial has flowed down from
the St. Gotthardt to the North Sea. Accordingly, if we stand on the bank
of the Rhine, it is quite correct to say that this is the same river
that was crossed by Cæsar. Let the purpose of our thoughts be changed,
and we shall no longer be permitted to speak of sameness. Suppose we had
seen the Rhine for the first time in its beautiful emerald coloring, and
had come again after a rainy day to admire its beauty, should we not be
justified in exclaiming: This is not the same river!
Sameness, accordingly, depends upon a special purpose. If in a chemical
combination a metal is wanted, it may be all the same whether we use
iron, zinc, lead, or gold. That is to say, it is all the same for
bringing about a special result; yet it is not all the same in other
respects. The weight and certain other qualities of the metals are
different, and also the cost.
SAMENESS AND MIND.
Sameness depending upon a special purpose, the question arises, Is there
any objective sameness in the world, or is sameness a mere subjective
addition to things? Is sameness something “real” or is it purely mental?
This is the old quarrel between the Nominalists and Realists among
the Schoolmen. It lies at the bottom of the problem of universals
and particulars, and we should say, it is only a special form of the
question, “Are relations objective qualities of existence or are they
products of the mind?” which was discussed in a former number (_The
Monist_, II, 2, pp. 240-42). The idea of sameness represents the most
important relation that exists; and if any relation is real, the relation
of sameness must be real also.
If sameness depends upon a special purpose, it appears that there can be
no sameness without that purpose; and the purpose being purely mental,
the sameness also would seem to be purely mental. But this is not so.
Sameness is an idea, and it is no exception to other ideas. All ideas
are mental symbols formed for a special purpose; but, being symbols of
something, ideas are representative of some reality, or of some feature
of a reality, or of some relation between two or several things. Every
idea stands for something; and this quality of the significance of ideas
is called their meaning or their import.
The question now is, How does the idea of sameness originate in the world
where, as we stated above, there is no absolute sameness, no identity?
Our answer is that sameness, not identity, is a general feature of this
world of reality, which impresses itself upon every mind from the very
beginning of the mind’s origin.
We can go farther in our statement and make it more emphatic: Mind
originates and grows only on the ground of the fact that sameness is a
feature of the world, and is recognised as such by feeling substance.
Two points or two congruent geometrical figures being in different places
are not identical. But they are of such a nature that, so far as regards
the purposes of geometry, one serves the purposes in question just as
well as the other, or one can be replaced by the other; and this quality
is called their sameness.
Now as a matter of fact there are no two concrete things in the world in
which there cannot be found some sameness. Both somehow affect sentiency;
we say they consist of matter. Both can be measured in size, breadth,
and height: we say, they are extended. Both are at any given moment in a
certain relation to other things: we say, they are in space. Both have a
definite form and consist of one or several special structures (i. e.,
so to say, inside-forms). All things can in some way or other be classed
together under one heading. These samenesses of things go along with
differences, and the degree of sameness in the different things varies
greatly. Whether there is any sameness and difference at all in the
world, cannot be decided _a priori_, but is a problem which can be solved
only on the ground of, first, an _a posteriori_ statement of the facts,
second, a systematical arrangement of the facts. If this is accomplished
we can venture into a methodical investigation as to the nature of the
samenesses as well as the differences that obtain in the universe, and
having arranged them in a system, we can apply _a priori_ this system to
facts with which we are not as yet acquainted.
The many samenesses which are experienced are not purely mental
additions; they are not mere subjective imputations transferred upon
objective existence. They are real; i. e. there are in the objective
things actual features which allow of certain substitutions. A ray of
light awakens in some feeling substance the traces left by former rays of
light; and this reawakening is called memory. The perception of sameness
is the beginning of mind, and it involves the perception of difference as
a natural consequence.
Suppose that the stuff of which the world consists were capable of
acquiring feeling, but there were no samenesses whatever; which would
mean that every smallest piece of the world-stuff were a particular
thing by itself and in every respect unlike every other piece, of a
different material or of no material at all, of different size or of
no size at all, and also possessed of a different number of space
dimensions. In such a world all the impacts made upon a sentient being
would be different; not one would be like the other, and all feelings
would present a chaos without uniformities, worse than the most complex
crazy-quilt. Under such circumstances mind would be impossible: it would
neither originate nor could it develop.
On the other hand suppose again that the stuff of which the world
consists were capable of acquiring feeling in some certain formation, and
that there were samenesses in the world and in the events of the world.
Would not mind necessarily originate in such a world? Given feeling
substance in a world of samenesses and differences, these samenesses will
produce analogous samenesses of impression upon the feeling substance,
which will be perceived as samenesses of feeling. The preservation of the
traces left in the feeling substance (supposing this substance to live
on indefinitely) will in the long run result in the formation of special
sense-organs. It will later on, with the aid of word-symbolism, lead to
the formation of universals, for universals are nothing but samenesses
perceived. It will then create with the assistance of abstraction the
realm of scientific thought, representing the uniformities of the events
of the world in exact formulas.
THE EXISTENCE OF SAMENESSES A FACT.
The question whether there are samenesses at all in the world, is in our
opinion settled. It is a fact that there are samenesses. The uniformities
of the world are a matter of indubitable experience—indubitable because
our very existence as thinking beings, as minds, is conditioned by this
fact. We see the mind of every child develop out of his perception of
samenesses. Our scientists teach us that the race-soul, like a great
immortal individual, is the product of the accumulated experience
of samenesses; and all future progress, in science as well as in
civilisation, in mechanical invention as well as in ethics, depends upon
the trustworthiness of the samenesses stated to exist in the objective
world.
The question of the ultimate _raison d’être_ of the samenesses and
differences, is another question; and it would lead us too far here
to discuss it. In several details the problem is not as yet ripe for
solution. A full solution of the problem would be tantamount to the
exposition of a complete knowledge of the world. Suffice it here to
say that we have reasons to think of the world-stuff as being of the
same nature throughout. The chemical elements seem to be different
configurations of one and the same substance. In this way all difference
would have to be explained as a difference of form.
The form of reality possesses sameness and difference in all its parts.
Space in its sameness is by experience found to be tri-dimensional, which
means, it is determinable throughout by three coördinates; while its
differences are due to the position of the points considered. For the
purpose of the geometrician space is uniform, but for the purpose, say
of the architect, it is not uniform. To the geometrician two congruent
triangles, whether they are in the cellar or in the garret, are the same.
However, to the architect the position of two congruent triangles in his
design of a house is by no means the same. Every single point of space
has its special and individual qualities.
The whole business of science is to systematise the samenesses of
experience, and to present them in such convenient formulas that they can
be used for guidance in our actions.
The most comprehensive formulation of the sameness of the universe as
a whole has found its expression in the law of the conservation of
matter and energy. This law rests upon the experience, corroborated by
experiments, that causation is transformation. It states that the total
amount of matter and the total amount of energy remain constant. There is
no creation out of nothing and no conversion of something into nothing.
EINDEUTIG BESTIMMT.
After this sketch of the importance of sameness, (a subject which we have
by no means exhausted,) we return to the idea of necessity. The ideas
of sameness and necessity are closely related. A world of sameness is a
world in which necessity rules, and necessity means regularity and order.
German scientists have a very good expression to denote the formulation
of events in a manner which describes them in their necessary course. If
they have succeeded in finding the sameness in the instances of a certain
class of events, they say that it is _eindeutig bestimmt_, which means,
the sameness is determined in a way that admits of no equivocation; it is
complete, representing solely and purely that feature upon the presence
of which the result depends. Whatever is thus _eindeutig bestimmt_, is
recognised in its necessity. The presence of that feature which makes it
_eindeutig bestimmt_, determines the event to take place; and this being
determined, its inevitableness, the _it will be_ of the process, is all
there is to necessity.
All natural phenomena that can be _eindeutig bestimmt_ are necessary in
their happening. A world which with regard to the total amount of its
matter and energy is the same to-day and yesterday and will be the same
to-morrow, a world whose laws of form possess a sameness throughout, so
that it allows of formulating and applying them in their rigidity to all
facts present, past, and future, a world in which all the changes are
transformations determinable with the assistance of formal laws, can be
relied upon and the course of its events can be computed.
Such _is_ the world in which we live; and taking this ground I say, the
world is a cosmos, it is no chaos; and noticing that being possessed
of sameness is an intrinsic and inalienable feature of the world, I
am inclined to add the world never was and never will be a chaos. And
this, if it be true at all, is true not only in general and as it were
wholesale, but in its minutest details. If there were deficiencies of
this order in the unobservable details, they would not be diminished
by being summed up in large and ever larger amounts; on the contrary,
they would increase; they would grow in proportion. This not being
the case, we have not the slightest reason to doubt that in those
realms of minutest existence into which, from the grossness and the
lack of precision of our organs and instruments of observation, we
cannot penetrate, the same order and regularity obtains as in those
regions which lie open to our investigation. In other words: From this
standpoint, existence is, so to say, permeated by law throughout; every
event is determined and any kind of absolute chance is excluded.
Following Kant’s etymology we understand by _a posteriori_ the sensory
elements, and by _a priori_ the formal elements of our experience. The
queer expression “a priori” is in so far justified as formal truths (such
as geometrical, arithmetical, logical rules) are formulas expressing the
universal samenesses of the form of existence. They contain the laws of
form in a shape that is _eindeutig bestimmt_, so that an experimenter
will know them _a priori_ to be so. _A priori_ means beforehand. An
experimenter knows certain things even before he makes his experiments.
The _a priori_ elements of experience are by no means innate truths; nor
are they the historical beginning of experience. On the contrary. In
their abstract purity they appear as a very late product of man’s mental
evolution.
The _a priori_ systems of thought are not arbitrary constructions; they
are constructions raised out of the recognition of the formal, i. e. the
relational, samenesses that appear in experience. All possibilities of a
certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated in theorems.
As such they can be used as references to assist in the explanation and
determination of new experiences. We know some part of any new experience
with which we are confronted even before we have investigated it. We know
certain laws of its form, and by reference to these known laws we are
enabled to reduce the unknown to the known, to analyse the process and
set forth that feature of it which makes _eindeutig bestimmt_.
II. THE SCOPE OF NECESSITY.
Mr. Peirce objects to necessitarianism, and classes it together with
materialism and the mechanical philosophy, speaking of the latter as
the most logical form of necessitarianism. In consonance with the
dictionary-definitions of these words, he contrasts them to the doctrine
of the freedom of the will and also to miracles—the latter, we must
confess, being a dangerous concession to certain theological conceptions.
The “Century Dictionary” defines “necessitarianism” as
“The theory that the will is subject to the general mechanical
law of cause and effect.”
And “necessitarian” as
“One who maintains the doctrine of philosophical necessity,
in opposition to that of the freedom of the will: opposed to
libertarian.”
The word “determinism” is regarded as a synonym of necessitarianism. Its
first definition in the “Century Dictionary” reads as follows:
“A term invented by Sir William Hamilton to denote the doctrine
of the necessitarian philosophers, who hold that man’s actions
are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character,
and that he has not the power to choose to act in one way so
long as he prefers on the whole to act in another way.”
Hamilton’s definition as here presented is puzzling. If the words
“choose” and “prefer on the whole” are _not_ meant to be tautological,
there is no sense in it; for no determinist denies that a man might “upon
the whole” prefer to act this way, while he has the power to choose,
and for special considerations perhaps does choose, to act in another
way. However, if the words “choose” and “prefer on the whole” are meant
to be tautological, the self-contradictoriness of the statement is too
palpable for a Hamilton. Is there anybody who would maintain that a man
who chooses to act in one way can at the same time, under the very same
circumstances, and he remaining the very same man of the same character
and intentions, choose to act in another way?
While we accept determinism and also necessitarianism in the sense that
all events (the actions of willing beings included) are determined, we
cannot accept either the mechanical philosophy or materialism as the
terms are commonly understood.
We find materialism defined as
“The metaphysical doctrine that matter is the only substance,
and that matter and its motions constitute the universe.”
(“Century Dictionary,” 2d sense.)
The mechanical philosophy is explained _sub voce_ “atomic” as
“[The view that] from the diverse combination and motions of
... atoms all things, including the soul, were supposed to
arise.” _Ibid._
Determinism is simply the negation of absolute chance. It does not
exclude chance in the original sense of the word as an unexpected event,
as something that befalls one without his seeking it or making the
event—chance being derived from ML. _cadentia_, i. e. the falling, as in
a throw of dice.
The “Century Dictionary” defines “chance” in sense 9, as
“Fortuity; especially the absence of a cause necessitating an
event.”
This is absolute chance, the existence of which we deny. The “Century
Dictionary” adds the following little note:
“Absolute chance, the (supposed) spontaneous occurrence of
events undetermined by any general law or by any free volition.
According to Aristotle, events may come about in three ways:
first, by necessity or an external compulsion; second, by
nature or the development of an inward germinal tendency; and
third, by chance, without any determining cause or principle
whatever, by lawless, sporadic originality.”[12]
We understand chance as being, from certain premisses, an incalculable
coincidence, either not intended to be calculated, or, for certain
reasons, from a given standpoint with a limited and definite amount of
knowledge, not capable of calculation. Determinism, as we understand
the term, does not imply as the “Century Dictionary” has it in its
definition of necessitarianism, that “the law of cause and effect” is
“mechanical.” It simply asserts that the law of cause and effect holds
good universally, and that there is no effect that is not definitely
determined, according to the nature of the things in action, by causes
and all their circumstances.
NECESSITY AND CHANCE.
Mr. Peirce says:
“_All_ the diversity and specificalness of events is
attributable to chance—diversification, specificalness, and
irregularity of things, I suppose is chance—and this diversity
cannot be due to laws that are immutable.” (P. 332.)
Our world-view leads us to other conclusions; we say:
Every specificalness or particularity is such by possessing a certain
form and standing in a definite relation (in time as well as space) to
all other things of the universe. Of every concrete thing we can say it
is now and here, or it was then and there. It is or was made up in this
special way, and it stands or it stood in these special relations to its
surroundings. Proportions, relations, forms—these are what account for
the diversification and specificalness of all things in the universe;
they are what explain the irregularities of individual cases and of all
those events which appear as chance to him who, although he may be well
informed about the nature of a thing, does not know the relation of
its complex surroundings, exercising according to law their disturbing
influence upon its actions which otherwise would be uniform.
And since no two spots of space and no two instances of time are the
same, since the relations of every atom are different in every position
and at every moment of its existence, we need not be astonished to find
diversity and specificalness in this world of samenesses.
We do not believe in absolute chance, but we believe in chance.
What is chance?
Chance is any event not especially intended, either not calculated, or,
with a given and limited stock of knowledge, incalculable.
Gunpowder was, according to the legend, invented by chance. Berthold
Schwartz intended to make gold, yet when the mixture was ignited, he
began to understand that it was an explosive. When I say that I met
a friend by chance, I mean that the meeting was unintentional. I had
not foreseen it and perhaps could not foresee it. When we call a throw
of dice pure chance, we mean that the incidents which condition the
turning up of these or those special faces of the dice have not been or
cannot be calculated. We do not mean that the law of cause and effect is
suspended; we mean that we are unable to determine the effect. That which
would make this or that throw _eindeutig bestimmt_ is either not known to
us, or, if it were known, is of such a nature that we cannot produce the
desired effect with any certainty. Matters are so arranged in the game of
dice that the slightest incident changes the result, and these incidents
are either not within our ken or not within the range of our power.
Chance, accordingly, as we understand it, is no exception to necessity;
it does not happen contrary to law, and is in each case the strict result
of a definite cause under definite circumstances.
Absolute chance is something quite different. Absolute chance is that
which is incalculable because of the absence of law. Mr. Peirce says:
“Another argument, or convenient commonplace, is that absolute
chance is _inconceivable_. This word has eight current
significations. The ‘Century Dictionary’ enumerates six. Those
who talk like this will hardly be persuaded to say in what
sense they mean that chance is inconceivable.”
Absolute chance is “inconceivable” as the word is defined by the “Century
Dictionary” in the second sense: It is
“unacceptable to the mind because involving a violation of laws
believed to be well established by positive evidence.”
Absolute chance is not unthinkable in the sense of unimaginable. We can
very well depict a case of absolute chance in our imagination, just as
we can tell and describe in minutest details the fairy tale of Alladin’s
lamp; just as we can in our imagination depict a creation out of nothing.
But he who accepts that the world is in its innermost nature a cosmos,
that its events are strictly and throughout regulated by law, cannot
at the same time think that there are nooks and crevices in which the
law does not operate. Absolute chance actually involves the idea of a
creation out of nothing; and thus it stands in contradiction to the law
of the preservation of matter and energy. Absolute chance which means
that the very same thing under the very same conditions can act in this
or in some other way, that it need not act in exactly the same way,
involves a belief in either the creation of a not existing quality out
of nothing, or the disappearance of existing qualities into nothing.
Mr. Peirce says:
“It seems to me that every throw of sixes with a pair of dice
is a manifest instance of chance.”
Yes, of chance; but not of that chance the existence of which Mr. Peirce
maintains—not of absolute chance. Every throw of dice, every toss of head
or tail, are exactly determined by circumstances. We call it chance only
in so far as we cannot calculate and predetermine the result.
Suppose you take two large silver coins between your thumb and the first
two fingers, one coin parallel to and a little above the other. Suppose
tails are up in both. Drop the lower coin without an effort just as it
would fall, about twenty inches, and you may be sure that, in spite of
yourself, it will turn up head. Then drop the upper one and it will not
turn, but plump right down showing tail. There are certain mechanical
reasons for the one case as well as for the other. As soon as we know the
law and can apply it, the case ceases to be an instance of chance.
Dice, the roulette, and other games of chance are so arranged, that
the determinating circumstances are too numerous and also too complex,
one interfering with and being disturbed by the others, to admit
of any adequate calculation or predetermination. An arrangement of
conditions which in this way eludes the calculation of a definite set of
possibilities, is called by Professor Kries _gleiche Spielräume_ or equal
chances. And the province of equal chances is and will remain the proper
sphere of the calculus of probabilities.
Professor Nitsche objects to Kries’s proposition, saying that absolutely
equal chances are impossible and an equal chance (_ein gleicher
Spielräume_) is nothing but the objectification of a judgment of equal
value.[13] We find no fault with Nitsche’s objection; there are no
absolutely equal chances; and what is called “equal chance” means that
the strength of two or several anticipations is of the same degree; that
our belief and doubt as to the turning up of one, two, three, four, five,
or six spots of a die are equally justified. The objective conditions
which justify such equality of several expectations is what Kries (if
we understand him correctly) calls _gleiche Spielräume_. But _gleiche
Spielräume_ do not imply absolute chance. We might as well expect that
all the six faces of a die should turn up simultaneously in one throw, as
that any one of them should turn up by absolute chance.
While absolute chance cannot be admitted, partly because we are not in
need of it, (since the irregularities of nature can be sufficiently
explained otherwise,) and partly because the idea of absolute chance if
it were needed, is incompatible with our world-conception, we shall,
nevertheless, have to concede to chance, as we understand the term, a
very important rôle in the evolution of life. The formation of worlds and
the history of mankind depend to a great extent upon chances similar to
the throws of dice. There are many possibilities, and now this, now that,
will, according to the circumstances, be realised—of course in each case
with strict necessity.
Let us illustrate this idea by an example.
The formation of about seventy elements out of the original
world-substance, which may be supposed to be homogeneous, does not appear
to depend upon chance. Their universal appearance in all parts of the
universe suggests the hypothesis that their formation is the inevitable
result of a gradual condensation of nebular substances. We find
everywhere, according to the stage of condensation, a gradual appearance,
first of the lighter, then of the heavier elements. There seems to be
no possibility of the formation of other elements than those known to
us (including here the hypothetical elements which are still missing in
the Mendeljeff series and at the same time, at least, not excluding a
further continuance of the series). These elements or none, it appears,
must be formed out of the original substance of our world. Let us here
assume, for argument’s sake, that it were so beyond question, and that we
knew the nature of the world-substance to be such as to condense, if it
condenses at all, into no other but these forms, which we call chemical
elements. This would be a limitation of possibilities. Exactly so the
throws Of dice are limited. With the dice commonly in use we cannot throw
fractions; nor can we throw either zero, or seven, or any other higher
number. We can throw only whole numbers, integrals from one up to six.
But while we thus assume that the formation of the elements is limited
to those actually existing, the proportion in which the elements may be
distributed in the different nebulæ and solar systems, is apparently
very different. Suppose we had a full knowledge of the intrinsic nature
of the world-substance and were standing outside the universe observing
the process of world-formations; we could not from this knowledge alone
predict all that would happen. We should on our assumption be able to
predict _a priori_ that such elements would be formed. But whether the
different elements would be generated in these or in other proportions
appears to depend upon the presence of certain conditions, perhaps the
rapidity of motion, the heat produced by friction, the temperature of
the surrounding cosmic space, any knowledge of which is not included in
our knowledge of the nature of the world-substance. These conditions
may vary, nay, so far as we can judge they actually do vary; and any
apparently slight variation of them, or even one of them, will result in
different effects of great consequence. Without a detailed knowledge of
all these special conditions, simply from a supposed _a priori_ knowledge
of the world-substance, the idiosyncrasy of this or that particular
solar system could not be _a priori_ determined. Here it will be such,
and there, under perhaps slightly different circumstances, it will be
entirely other. Here the centre of gravity may be in one great mass,
there again it may be divided in two, so that the planets circle around
two suns.
From this point of view we have to call these results products of chance.
To a being who not only might be supposed to know the intrinsic nature
of existence, but could have present before his mind every event of the
great interacting cosmos in its entire complexity, this kind of chance
would, of course, also disappear. To him all states of things would
appear throughout as _eindeutig bestimmt_. Yet, although in this way
necessity permeates all events that take place, we do not intend to deny
the irregularity of detail,[14] the specificalness of the particulars,
the diversity of individual incidents and existences. According to our
conception of nature they must remain, and we need not attribute them
to absolute chance. To attribute irregularities to absolute chance (as
Mr. Peirce does) is actually an abandonment of explaining them. The
specificalness and particularity of nature can be said to be due to
chance in so far only as they do not depend upon and are not determinable
by the nature of the things under consideration, but result (with strict
necessity of course) from the ever-changing conformations of surrounding
circumstances.
Thus the fate of a man depends mainly upon his character,—the proverb
says, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune”—but not entirely.
There are sometimes coincidences determining the fates of men, and
through them the fates of whole nations. And these coincidences do not
result from their character.
Let everybody think of his own fate. Part of his life has been what it
was because he is such a man as he is; and we can, within certain limits,
predict the fate of a youth with whose character we are familiar. But how
much of our lives depends upon circumstances which could be foreseen only
by an omniscient being, and which, as we might properly say, if we do not
misunderstand the term, is due to chance!
FREE WILL.
Compulsion is generally considered as a synonym of necessity. But the
usage of the term necessity in the sense of compulsion is, in our
opinion, very inappropriate, because misleading. Necessity and compulsion
should not be confounded; for compulsion excludes free will and
“necessity” does not.
A government compels its citizens to obey certain unpopular laws; the
victorious army compels the enemy to surrender. The obedience of the
citizens and the surrender of the enemy are acts done under compulsion;
they are not acts of free will. But a man of a certain character wills,
under given circumstances and in the absence of compulsion, _necessarily_
in the way in which he does. The determination of a free will is not a
matter of chance but of necessity. Yet the determining factors are not
outside but inside; they are not due to compulsion, not to the pressure
of a foreign power, but to the nature of the willing being himself.
This, then, is the definition of “free”: A being is free if it is
unrestrained, so that it acts according to its own nature. As is its
nature, so it wills; as it wills, so it acts. If we know the character
of a man and the situation in which he is placed, we can predict his
choice as the necessary result of his nature. His decision, although it
is free and not under compulsion, is not an outcome of chance which might
under the same conditions be different, but is the inevitable result of
necessity.
If by free will we had to understand that the decisions of the will
are the result either of chance or of absolute chance, the foremost
duty of the educator would be to make man unfree, to insert certain
dominant ideas into his mind, destined to determine his will. The free
man according to this definition of free will as being due to chance,
would be a person whose actions are more whimsical than the fancies of
lunatics. We reject this conception of the freedom of the will.
In our opinion a will is free if it is unrestrained so that it can act
according to its nature. Our conception of free will does not stand in
contradiction to the doctrine of “determinism” as defined by the “Century
Dictionary” in its second sense:
“In general, the doctrine that whatever is or happens is
entirely determined by antecedent causes.”
THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY.
We distinguish between (1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4)
physiological, and (5) psychical events.
A mechanical phenomenon is a change of place which does not involve a
change of the constitution of the parts moved. E. g., a stone is pushed;
its position is altered, but the stone remains the same.
A physical phenomenon is an event in which the molecular state of the
bodies in action is altered. Water heated becomes steam, frozen it
becomes ice. The three states have different molecular configurations.
Chemical phenomena are such in which the constitution of the atoms is
altered. The characteristic qualities of hydrogen, for example, are
different when combined with different elements or when isolated. Each
combination is a peculiar substance with peculiar qualities and not a
mixture or combination of the qualities of the isolated elements.
Physiological processes are all those changes that take place in the
living irritable substance of plants and animals, such as nutrition,
growth, and propagation. Its characteristic features are (1) hunger or
thirst, i. e. the want of certain materials (food), (2) the reception of
the wanted materials by suction or other means, which in some cases are
a quite mechanical or physical process, not unlike the afflux of oxygen
caused by a burning candle or the suction of water by a sponge, and (3)
the assimilation of food. The materials received are distributed in the
places wanted, thus adding to the building up of the living substance
according to the nature of its structure. This produces as a natural
result (4) the phenomenon of growth with a preservation of form. (5)
Propagation is a special kind of growth; it is the growth of a part that
at some stage of its development becomes an independent individual.
Psychical phenomena are such in which feelings and the meanings of
feelings are the determinant factors.
It is apparent that all these terms, mechanical, physical, chemical,
physiological, and psychical, are mere abstracts. In describing a
mechanical phenomenon, we limit our attention to the mechanical change.
We do not mean to say that the body moved does not possess chemical,
physical, perhaps physiological, or even psychical qualities. The
calculation of the curve of a jump is a mechanical problem, although the
jumping body may be a human being. However, the question why did the man
jump, is a psychical question. The motive of the jump is an idea in that
class of mental activity characterised as purpose. The man had an end in
view. And this idea of an end to be realised is the combined result of
special conditions and of the character of the man.
The different spheres of mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological,
and psychical actions being abstractions, it is obvious that science when
dealing with so-called purely mechanical phenomena, has to do with a
fiction. There are no purely mechanical phenomena. There are features of
reality which are purely mechanical; and these we call motions. But the
world does not consist of motions only. It also possesses other qualities.
The mechanical philosopher assumes that the world consists of matter
and motion only, and so he feels warranted in the hope that every event
that takes place, the actions of man included, can be explained by the
laws of motion. Yet the premiss is wrong, and we may anticipate that the
conclusion also will prove erroneous. And so it is.
The laws of motion are applicable to and will explain all motions; but
they are not applicable to that which is not motion.
It is inconceivable how we can hope to explain a feeling by the laws of
motion; and so the fond hope of explaining the problems of the nature of
the soul by mechanics is preposterous. No objection can be made to the
possibility of explaining the delicate motions in the nervous substance
of the brain by the laws of molar or molecular mechanics. But these
explanations would throw no light upon the causation that takes place
in the mind. The properly psychical phenomena, the properly intelligent
action of thought, could not be explained in this way. For the world of
mentality introduces quite a new factor into the sphere of being.
What is this new factor?
The nature of mental activity consists in the symbolism of feelings.
Feelings, being different under different conditions and the same under
same conditions, become representative of their corresponding causes, and
thus the objects of experience are depicted in feeling symbols.
Representativeness, accordingly, is the nature of mind.
The question, How certain brain-structures operate, is a question of
the mechanics of nervous substance, and further, the question, How
thought-operations take place, is a question, so to say, of logical
mechanics. But the question, Why a certain idea responds to certain
stimuli and not to others, does not admit of a mechanical explanation or
formulation. The answer to this question will be a description of the
nature of the idea; and the nature of the idea is not a motion: it is the
meaning of which the idea is possessed.
The action of a mind depends upon the meaning of certain symbols. A
written or spoken word has a special meaning, and this meaning becomes
the determinant factor of mind action. The meaning of a word is not a
piece of matter, neither is it a motion. It is something _sui generis_.
I do not say that there is any inexplicable mystery connected with it.
On the contrary, wonderful as the fact is, it is not mysterious; it does
not stand in contradiction to any other fact of nature. Symbols stand for
something; they indicate, denote, or signify something. This significance
is called their meaning; and mind is a system of symbols in states of
awareness.
Now, neither states of awareness are mechanical, nor is the meaning of
words anything mechanical. How can we hope for a mechanical explanation
either of the soul or the mind or of any mental action?
Suppose, for instance, a general receives a message containing a few
words. He opens the paper, he reads it, and all on a sudden, his mind is
in a tumult of excitement. What is it that produces the excitement? Is it
any motion? Yes! In a certain sense, it is a motion: it is the reading
of the paper. This is the cause. Yet not the reading as such excites his
consternation. He might read other messages all the day long without any
such an effect. Plainly, the causative element of the cause is not the
reading, not the motions of which the reading consists, not the shape of
the written characters and their combinations in groups, called words. It
is something more subtle even than that. It is the significance of the
writing. It is the meaning of the written characters. It is the purport
that is attached to the word-symbols.
The origin of mind accordingly introduces a factor which has nothing
to do with mechanics; and the simplest psychical reflexes, including
those physiological reflexes which we must suppose to have originated by
conscious adaptation and then been submerged into unconsciousness, cannot
be explained from mechanical or physical laws alone.
SPONTANEITY.
While we thus reject the conception of the mechanical philosophy and also
of materialism, we do not say that there are motions either in the brain
or anywhere else which form exceptions to the laws of mechanics. The
laws of mechanics hold good for all motions. The laws of mechanics are
formal laws: they do not explain why bodies gravitate; but they describe
how they gravitate; and the latter is much more useful to know than the
former. There is (as we conceive it) no deep secret in the problem why
bodies gravitate; they gravitate because they possess a quality which
attracts them to each other with a force directly as their masses and
inversely as the squares of their distances. In a word, gravity is the
intrinsic nature of masses, it is an inalienable part of their existence.
Thus whenever bodies gravitate, we are confronted with an act of
spontaneity.
Attempts have been made to explain gravitation without the assumption
of spontaneity, by the pressure of an atom-surrounding ether. But that
only defers the question; for the spontaneity, in that case, would have
to be placed in the ether. Whatever be the merits of the explanations
of gravitation by a _vis a tergo_, we must recognise the fact that no
motion can take place in the world, no pressure can be exercised, without
there being somewhere some spontaneous something that moves or presses.
Spontaneity is a universal feature of nature.
Mr. Peirce uses the term “spontaneity” in a different sense from ours.
He identifies spontaneity with absolute chance. He means by it the
irregularities that arise without cause, thus producing departures
from law. We call that action spontaneous which is not due to external
influence but springs from the nature of the things in action.
Spontaneous is derived from the Latin _spons_, “will,” which as a noun
was obsolete at the classical period of Roman literature and occurred
only in such forms as _sponte_, “of one’s own will, of one’s own accord.”
If a man acts of his own will, free from and not biassed by the influence
of other men, his action is spontaneous. A free man’s action is not
arbitrary, unless arbitrariness[15] be the character of the man; it is
not an exception to law; it is, if the character of the man is known,
calculable in advance, for every free action is spontaneous: it springs
immediately from the character of the man; it is the direct expression of
his will; it reveals the nature of his very being, thus showing the man
himself, and not something beyond or outside of him.
Taking the word spontaneity in this sense, we say: Masses gravitate
spontaneously; they are self-moving; their motion is due to their
gravity, and gravity is their intrinsic nature.
Exactly as the laws of mechanics explain the “how” of motions but not
why there is motion at all, the “why” depending upon the nature of
each moving body, so the “how” of the brain-motions is explicable by
mechanical laws, but the “why” depends upon the nature of the moving
material. The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as the
atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there is present an additional feature;
there are present states of awareness, and these states of awareness
possess meaning, both of which are items which the chemist cannot find
by chemical analysis. Neither states of awareness nor their meanings
can be weighed on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they
determinable in foot-pounds.
Yet while mechanics is not applicable to mental facts, the realm of
mentality is by no means to be surrendered to indeterminism. Mr. Peirce
describes the domain of mind as the absence of law and the prevalence of
absolute chance, of an indetermined and indeterminable sporting. This is
not so. While the fact must be recognised that the nature of the mind
is not something mechanical, its action is nevertheless determined by
laws—not by mechanical laws, but by psychical and mental laws. These
psychical and mental laws are in one respect of exactly the same nature
as mechanical laws; they describe the samenesses of certain facts of
reality. And the facts of the ideal domain of thought, the facts of
subjectivity, are no less real than the grosser facts of mechanical
motion, which are the facts of objectivity.
The term mechanical is often used in the sense of “lacking life or
spirit” (“Century Dictionary,” p. 3679). This is justifiable in so far
only as when we speak of mechanical phenomena we do not mean psychical
or any other phenomena. It is true that that which makes this or that
idea respond to a certain stimulus is not a mechanical but a mental
quality, but the action itself, in so far as it is a motion, is and
remains mechanical. Thus it happens that the laws of mechanics, far from
being anti-spiritual, are the means by which we learn to understand and
objectively to represent the action of mental phenomena.
In this connection attention may be called to the efforts of modern
logicians to construct thinking machines which will perform the work of
mental operations in a purely mechanical way. You propose the problem by
adjusting certain indicators; then you turn the crank, and the machine
does the rest. The results will come out with unfailing exactness.
The attempt made to construct thinking machines cannot as yet be called
successful. Nevertheless they are not impossibilities. Calculating
machines of various constructions are in practical use and doing
satisfactory work, not only in addition and subtraction but also in
multiplication and division, and even in extracting roots and in raising
numbers to higher powers. Calculations are undoubtedly one kind of
thought, and if calculations can be performed by machines, there is
no theoretical reason why we should not be able to construct logical
machines, which shall perform the operations of deductive and even of
inductive thought with perfect accuracy.
CONCLUSION.
Determinism does not make freedom impossible and natural laws do not
suppress the spontaneity of nature.
Natural laws are not a power forcing a certain mode of action upon
things; they are not an oppression of nature. Natural laws are simply a
description of nature as nature is. There is no “must” in nature in the
sense of compulsion, as if there were two things, (1) a master (i. e. the
law) giving a command, and (2) a slave (i. e. the single facts) obeying
the command. The situation is not dualistic, but monistic. There is an
“is” in nature, and this “is” is constant. There is a certain sameness in
nature. In spite of all changes it remains the same; and thus even the
apparent irregularities preserve throughout an unvarying consistency. The
facts of nature express the character of nature; they are nature herself.
Briefly, the “is” of nature (if we are permitted to personify her) does
not describe that which nature must do, but that which nature wills to
do; it describes how she acts spontaneously, of her own free will, in
conformity with her innermost being and consistently with her permanent
character.
The main difference that obtains between the actions of inanimate
nature so-called and rational beings is not the absence and presence of
spontaneity, (for spontaneity is in both,) but the absence and presence
of mind: and mind is not only the subjectivity of existence; mind is
not merely sentiency, i. e. the awareness of feelings; mind is the
representative symbolism of subjectivity.
There are sufficient reasons to assume that all objective existence,
which appears to us as matter in motion, possesses a subjectivity, the
nature of which depends upon the mode of the interaction of its elements.
This subjectivity appears in organised substance as feeling and develops
naturally into mind.
The essence of nature, accordingly, is not materiality, but spirituality.
Materiality is the character of nature as it affects sentient beings; but
its innermost self, as it were, its subjectivity, its psychical aspect is
revealed in the appearance of the spirit-life of rational beings—of minds.
While we fully recognise the spirituality of nature as nature’s
innermost essence and as an ineradicable feature of reality, we cannot
with Mr. Peirce place mind at the beginning of the world. There is a
great difference between spirituality and mind. One is the source and
condition of the other. One is permanent, the other is transient. One
is the abstract view of a universal quality of the world, eternal and
everlasting, as much indestructible as matter and energy; the other is an
individual formation that originates, grows, and develops; that can be
broken and built again; that dies with the body and rises again in new
generations; that decays, as the foliage of the trees falls in winter,
yet reappears, as the verdure reappears in spring; for the life of nature
is immortal.
Mr. Peirce, regarding determinism as that view which does not recognise
the freedom of will, has an original and in our conception a wrong
view on the one hand of natural laws, which are to him mere habits
acquired by the world, and on the other hand of chance, or arbitrary
sportiveness, (i. e. that which is not determinable by law,) which he
identifies with mind and with the spontaneity of freedom. Mind is to
him the beginning of all. Mind remains mind, according to his view, so
long as it is irregular, producing out of its own undetermined being
sporadic effects without order or consistency. As soon as mind takes to
habits, it grows mechanical; by creating regularity it disappears; and
the result is matter in motion according to mechanical laws. Matter,
accordingly, is said to be “effete mind.” Law in our view is the divinity
of nature; according to Mr. Peirce it is the termination of nature’s
irregularities: it comes to suppress her freedom and to supplant her
mentality by mechanicalism. An element of pure chance, however, survives,
which, appears in the free will of man, in miracles, and in nature’s
irregularities, and this element of pure chance will remain until in the
infinitely distant future, mind becomes crystallised into an absolutely
perfect, rational, and symmetrical system. Such is in brief Mr. Peirce’s
view of the rôle played by mind in the world-process.
Mr. Peirce’s views of chance and law seem to come to the rescue of
certain theological dogmas, which represent the world-order as the
product of a divine mind. We doubt very much whether Mr. Peirce’s
position be tenable even from the standpoint of the scientific
theologian. For the order of the world, as it appears in natural laws,
must be, and is recognised even by the theist, as part and parcel
of God’s eternal being. The scientist who formulates _sub specie
aeternitatis_ certain facts of nature, say the “how” of gravitating
bodies, describes a certain quality of God himself; he describes
something that is immutable, eternal, everlasting; it is not the whole of
God, but it is certainly one feature of Jahveh, of that which is, was,
and will be as it is.
In contradistinction to Mr. Peirce, we recognise, that the regularity
of the whole is preserved in the specificalness of its individual
particulars, that there are samenesses in this world of changes and
diversities, and that if all reality is regarded as being essentially
the same throughout, all the diversities and apparent irregularities can
very well be explained as resulting from peculiar forms, combinations,
and relations. Furthermore, we recognise that natural laws are compatible
with the spontaneity of nature and that the necessity with which a free
man acts according to his character, does not reverse his freedom of will.
Nature is self-acting throughout; nature is free; even inanimate nature
is spontaneous. But a higher freedom rises with the appearance of mind.
And there are degrees of this higher freedom which can be determined
with great exactness, for they correspond to the range of the mentality
of each creature. Mentality develops by the observation of samenesses,
and it reaches rationality by the recognition of natural laws. The
recognition of natural laws is a view of some natural phenomena in their
eternal aspect, and we call them truths. So much is natural law and
freedom interconnected that the recognition of natural laws widens the
range of freedom; and obedience to them raises man out of his dependence
upon his surroundings to a state of dominion over the creation in which
he becomes the master of natural forces.
What a deep significance lies in the saying of the apostle: “The truth
shall make you free!”
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The adjective “like” is an abbreviation of “alike”; and “a-like”
(M.E. _alyke_, A.S. _gelic_, O.H.G. _galih_, M.H.G. _gelich_, M.G.
_gleich_) is a compound of the prefix a with _lic_ body, shape, figure.
[11] I am satisfied that logical identity is intended to mean sameness. I
suppose that the word identity, being Latin and a kind of international
term, appeared to logicians preferable to the Saxon word “sameness” or
the German “Gleichheit.” We need not look for any deeper reason for the
adoption of the term.
[12] Knowing that Mr. Peirce is one of the most prominent contributors to
the _Century Dictionary_, I may be pardoned for surmising that, perhaps
with the exception of the parenthesised word “(supposed)” he is the
author of this passage and very likely of most of the other quotations of
philosophical terms we have adduced from the same source.
[13] _Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung_ by Johannes von
Kries. See also Meinong’s review of the book (in _Gött. gel Anz._,
No. 2, p. 56 et seqq.) and Ad. Nitsche’s article on the subject (in
_Vierteljahrsschrift für wiss. Phil._ of 1892. XVI. 1, p. 26).
[14] By irregularity of detail we understand simply a lack of uniformity,
but not exceptions to law. If irregularity be defined as exception to
law, we should say, There is no irregularity in the world, while at the
same time nothing is uniform: for every particle of the world is in
its time and space relations and otherwise different from every other
particle.
[15] Arbitrary, as used here, means capricious, uncertain, unreasonable.
A man’s action is capricious if he is biassed by the present motive
alone, without considering other motives which he would have under other
circumstances. A deliberate man equalises, as it were, his actions by
forming rules of conduct. An arbitrary man does not recognise rules or
laws, made either by himself or by others.
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE
I.
RECENT EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN GERMANY.
Since Darwin’s death, his theory, which in Germany more than elsewhere
received its development, has but few decisive steps in advance to
point to, even though the circle of its adherents has been enlarged and
though in many respects and in special directions it has been rendered
more complete and placed upon a firmer foundation. It is a gratifying
fact, that most, if not all, of the recent discoveries in zoology,
palæontology, and particularly in developmental history, are easily and
completely reconcilable with the principles originally established; so
that the views which we have reached on this subject have lost more and
more the characters of a purely hypothetical fabric.
But the accurate investigations of developmental history have
unquestionably furnished the most important material in proof of the
theory in question, and the principles established in this department,
in the main the results of the labors of German investigators (E. von
Baer, Fritz Müller, E. Haeckel), have been verified in a truly surprising
manner.
It is true that Darwin himself in no way undervalued the importance
of the results of the studies in question, but how little the facts
known at the time of the enunciation of his theory of natural selection
sufficed, is most clearly proved by the fact that E. von Baer and Louis
Agassiz, who at that time were perhaps the greatest authorities in
embryology, assumed a hostile attitude towards the new Darwinian theory.
Agassiz’s combination of the points of agreement of palæontology and
embryology, his explanation of extinct forms as “prophetic types,” proved
a veritable hindrance to the perception of the truth, and Carl Vogt, who
was his co-worker at that time, appears to have been the last to set
up any opposition to the “fundamental biogenetic principle,” that the
development of the individual repeats in an abbreviated form the history
of his race. Vogt, formerly the champion of advanced views, appears
to-day as the leader of the small band of the opposition.
If we compare the recently published fourth edition of Haeckel’s
_Anthropogeny_, 1891, and the eighth edition of his _History of
Creation_, with the early editions, we cannot help remarking, with
considerable astonishment, despite the enormous increase of fresh
material, the fact that little in the old plans and principles of the
work needs correction. Even the bold generalisations, the inference
as to the identity of form of the original beginnings of all of the
middle or higher classes of animals, the “Gastræa Theory” of Haeckel,
at first so violently opposed, the stress laid upon the equivalence of
the blastoderms in the various orders of animals, nay, even many of
the animal genealogies, really only asserted as a working hypothesis,
have stood the test beyond all expectation; although Du Bois-Reymond
insinuated that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer were more worthy
of credit. To appreciate the complete victory of these ideas one need
but refer to the discourse _On Recapitulation in Embryology_ with which
A. Milnes Marshall opened the meeting of the Biological Section of the
British Natural History Society at Leeds, September, 1890.
The very conspicuous irregularities in the formation of organised bodies,
which formerly were regarded as monstrosities, or as the freaks and
riddles of the formative instinct, the hare-lips, the cleft palates,
cases of microcephaly, etc., or the conspicuous want of symmetry in the
physical structure of the plaice and sole, formerly made use of by Mivart
and Schimper as unassailable counterproofs of Darwin’s doctrines, have
shaped themselves into the most decisive verifications of his theory;
as in fact, generally, a number of the most splendid evidences of the
correctness of the theory have, as the result of exact investigations
in organic evolution, proceeded from the most obstinate of its supposed
difficulties. Thus, for example, as proof that birds are far removed
from the other classes of vertebrates, the circumstance had been cited
that certain parts connected with the visual organs are in them situated
at the side of the brain, instead of on the dorsal surface, as is the
case with the other vertebrates. But a more exact observation has shown
that this variation in formation is a secondary result, since in each
previous period of development these same organs in the young birds
lie, exactly as in the case of the other vertebrates, on the dorsal
surface, and only shortly before leaving the egg do they move downward
to the sides. In many cases where the development of parts preservable
in fossil conditions is under consideration, as for instance portions of
the skeleton, the hard integuments, and the teeth, a direct proof may, by
comparison, be furnished of the truth of the fact of the correspondence
of the embryological formations of living animals with the final and
permanent forms of their extinct representatives, a fact which was indeed
acknowledged by Agassiz and Vogt, but completely misunderstood. We need
only to recall to mind the exact parallelism which Alexander Agassiz and
Neumayer have demonstrated to exist in the case of echinoderms, Huxley,
Marsh, and others in the formation of the wings of birds, the pelvis of
birds, or the hoofs of horses, in order to stamp this view as one that
cannot be refuted.
Nevertheless, those opposed to this view, as Carl Vogt, His, Heufen,
and others, have not abandoned their position as a hopeless one,
and in recent years have relied particularly upon those cases which
Haeckel, and before him, Fritz Müller, characterised as a falsification
(cenogenesis[16]) or a supplementary alteration and abbreviation of the
natural process of development. “Nature is no falsifier,” these opponents
proclaim with emphasis, and everything it does is correct and true, and
“this false heart alone brings untruth and deceit into the true heaven,”
they cry with Wallenstein. People who rely on verbal sophistries merely
betray thereby their want of valid counter-arguments. A _mala fides_
on the part of nature can of course never be the subject of discussion
among reasonable beings, but a deviation in the process of development
of certain varieties from the typical path of the development of the
remaining varieties of the species, is _felt_ as a falsification by
every investigator who has thoroughly studied the regular processes,
for the reason that it has a tendency to _obscure_ the original facts.
Thus, for example, in the embryos of certain vertebrates the æsophagus
is temporarily completely closed, as Balfour has observed in young
sharks, Bles and Marshall in frogs; and this state of affairs may well
be considered as a falsification, since an animate being with a closed
æsophagus is a natural contradiction, which can never have existed and
here happens as a supplementary and temporary process.
As a rule such deviations from the normal course may be classified as
consequences of a prolonged residence of the animal germs in the egg
or in the womb, the result of which is that owing to the presence of
an abundant quantity of nourishing yolk, or through direct connection
with the circulatory system of the mother, they in the early stages of
their development are relieved of the necessity of acquiring nourishment
through their own efforts, and therefore all the contrivances necessary
to that purpose may be dispensed with. For this reason we find the
primitive processes of development, as Professor Sollas has lately shown,
most frequently preserved in marine animals which have never changed nor
abandoned their element in the course of the history of their species,
in the case of which, therefore, no occasion could ever have arisen
for supplementary changes in the process of their development. Much
more frequently do we meet with this change in the case of fresh-water
animals, for often the rapid currents of their elements, for example a
river, will not suffer these to leave the egg in any very helpless larval
condition, and in addition fresh water is subject to other unfavorable
changes, as the drying up of streams. Also the larvæ of carnivorous
animals, which from the very beginning of independent life need more
strength to acquire their means of existence, are so completely developed
in the richly provisioned eggs in which they take their form, that they
emerge therefrom in an almost perfected state of being, as, for example,
young sharks and cephalopods. In this kind of animal life, as well as in
the case of forms which are brought forth alive from the parent, although
they see the light of day much later, comparatively, there takes place
not only a great abbreviation of the first stages of existence in the
entering upon a more direct path of development, but also changes occur
in the form of the original designs because of the limitation of room
due to the presence of yolk in the egg, the reason for which is easy
to perceive. In many other cases the mechanical cause of the change in
development can be directly recognised; for example, in the case of, the
tree-toad of the Antilles (_Hylodes marticinensis_), which, owing to the
absence of pools lasting through the dry season, is obliged of necessity
to remain in the egg during its tadpole stage, that is to say, to skip
this stage, as it were; for which reason the formation of external gills
in its case is entirely omitted.
The explanation of the origin of new organs seemed at first to afford
an insuperable difficulty to the Darwinian theory, since, as Mivart
objected, it was not possible to perceive how natural selection could
be able to effect the formation of new organs unless they executed
corresponding functions from the very beginning. This difficulty,
however, has been completely overcome by the theory of altered
functions (_Functionswechsel_) which was first proposed by Dorhn, and
particularly in recent years by Kleinenberg. According to this theory,
in all these cases we have simply to deal with a gradual change in form
of already existing organs, which, originally being used to perform
one set of functions, are modified so as to perform another. Thus the
later developed organs of mastication and the feelers of insects were
originally organs of locomotion, legs; and these in the still earlier
stages of creeping motion performed appropriate functions as the
crooked appendages of the body-rings. The wings of birds were, in their
progenitors, forelegs; the tongue of air-breathing vertebrates originated
from the fish-bladder, which before that was chiefly an organ of swimming.
The knowledge thus acquired of the natural connection of the processes
of evolution also explains, according to Kleinenberg, why organs which
are at present completely useless, must yet necessarily appear in the
formation of the embryo; for example, the gill-openings in the higher
classes of vertebrates, which have no functions to perform at any stage
of vertebral development, and which furnished Meckel the first intimation
of the fundamental biogenetic law. But as soon as it was explained
that the gill-openings furnished the foundation of the development of
later-appearing organs with actual functions to perform, it was rendered
clear why they should continually recur; namely, because they form the
indispensable links of a chain which extends from the dim past of the
type in question down to the present time.
There is no doubt that profounder researches in evolutionary history will
furnish still more important results: for instance, the more perfect
elucidation of the pedigree of mammals; for in this province even our
domestic animals are not sufficiently investigated. Every new effort in
this direction, for example the recent work of Klever on the evolution
of the teeth of the horse, and other investigations concerning the
formation of special organs, has invariably shown that much in this field
yet remains to be discovered. We have only to recall to mind the recent
investigations relating to the development of the pineal gland, which
in the last decennium have also led to the discovery of a rudimentary
occipital eye, which seems to have actually existed and performed
functions in numerous early representatives of the vertebrates, but
to-day is simply a fact of history, and has given rise to an organ which
Descartes considered as the seat of the soul. We may here also refer to
the recent investigations concerning the earlier developmental stages of
the duckbills, which have completely confirmed what the theory asserted
in advance and required; namely, that they fill the vacancy between the
egg-laying reptiles and the mammalia which bring forth their young alive.
Only a few years ago Carl Vogt vehemently opposed the opinion of
the duckbills being transitional types, and sought to explain their
inferior stage of organisation, which is also evidenced in their low
blood temperature, as the results of a stunting process (degeneration,
so called). They formed a degenerated branch of marsupials, nothing
more. Later, the remarkable yet long anticipated fact was revealed by
Haacke and Caldwell, 1884, that the duckbills are egg-laying mammals,
a character which certainly could not have been acquired through
degeneration, but which simply shows that they are closely related to
extinct reptilian forms. In one other respect, namely, with regard
to their supply of teeth, the process of degeneration must indeed be
admitted. On this point, Poulton and Thomas discovered a few years
ago that in their early stages they really do possess true teeth,
which, however, just as in the case of certain carnivorous cetacea,
later completely disappear, and are replaced by a sort of horny teeth.
This, however, is really not a true degeneration, but rather a special
adaptation, doubtless beneficial to the animal in some way or other;
and with as little reason as we may regard birds as a degenerated
race in comparison with their progenitors, because they have lost
the numerous teeth which these possessed, with just as little reason
can we hold that the duckbills, in their general organisation, have
suffered any retrogression worth mentioning. On the contrary, the
recent investigations of Marsh and Lemoine concerning the mammals of
the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods point more and more distinctly to
the conclusion, that there existed among these mammals a very large
number which possessed the same degree of organisation as the duckbills
of to-day, now represented by only a few species; a supposition which
the adherents of the theory of evolution made twenty-five years ago. I
do not know that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer have been so well
preserved!
In many other directions, however, speculation of late years in Germany
has considerably digressed from the facts of experience and from all
probability; especially with reference to the questions of propagation,
variation, and heredity. Here, first of all, are to be mentioned the
works of Weismann, _Ueber die Continuität des Keimplasmas_ (1885),
_Die Bedeutung der sexuellen Fortpflanzung für die Selectionstheorie_
(1886), _Der Rückschritt in der Natur_ (1886), _Die Bedeutung der
Richtungskörperchen für die Vererbungstheorie_ (1887), _Die Hypothese der
Vererbung von Verletzungen_ (1889), and _Ueber Amphimixis_ (1891).
If we revert to the beginnings of this movement we shall find that it
is intimately connected with the more exact study of the processes of
fecundation as perfected through the researches of Strassburger, the
Hertwigs, and other investigators. In connection with the ideas of
Nägeli concerning the so-called idioplasm, the notion was reached that
the matter determinative of heredity was contained in the nucleoli, and
that by the union of the paternal and maternal nucleoli the sum-total of
the parental hereditary tendencies is transmitted to the offspring. This
view was to a certain degree verified by the experiments of the brothers
Hertwig in removing the nucleoli of the eggs of the sea-urchin; the
result being that eggs containing the nucleoli alone, furnished, through
artificial impregnation, results resembling the female parent, whereas
eggs from which the nucleoli had been removed, furnished germs completely
corresponding to the traits of the male parent.
Other processes of fecundation, to which we shall soon recur, had since
1876 produced the impression in the minds of a number of naturalists that
the germ-material led an independent life in the bodies of organisms,
that it possessed only an internal development, and required from the
body nothing but nourishment in order to multiply itself, and to develop
its internal powers uninfluenced by the various vicissitudes of the
body. In the year 1876 Gustav Jaeger in Germany, and Francis Galton, a
cousin of Darwin, almost at the same time in England, called attention
to the observation made some time previously, that in certain animals,
particularly in insects, the development of the egg into the young
offspring begins with the withdrawal of a small portion of the germ from
the component substance of the embryo, which remains at first unchanged
and only later multiplies. This observation was generalised and accepted.
At the commencement of every sexual multiplication the germ-substance,
after impregnation, is divided into two parts, according to its future
purpose; an ontogenetic or personal part, out of which the body is built
up, and a phylogenetic or germinal part, which at first is stored up
unused in the individual, but later furnishes new germ-cells. This idea
led Weismann to his view of the continuity of the germ-plasm, which forms
an unbroken line of descent from the first beginnings of the species and
which is simply nourished by the organisms in which it has its temporary
abode. From this germ-plasm spring _secondarily_ the cells that go to
make up the body (soma); but from these soma-cells no new _germ_-cells
can originate, and consequently none of its inherent or adscititious
qualities are capable of transmission. The somatic cells make up the
mortal and perishable forms of life, while the germ-cells alone insure
the further existence and immortality of the race.
It is easy to perceive that these views, if they could be maintained,
would completely transform the Darwinian theory. Since, if the somatic
cells, that is, the body-parts of animals and plants, with all their
adaptations to soil and climate, to definite modes of life, etc., are
to be deprived of every power to transmit hereditary characters, then
the so-called Lamarckian theory, which should really bear the name of
Erasmus Darwin, would be deprived of every foundation which it possesses.
Neither the increase in strength of the members of the body, acquired
by use and practice, nor their weakness created by their non-use could
be inherited; and in just as small a degree could changes caused by
external influences, bodily injuries, sickness, entail consequences which
were inheritable. This being the case, then also all those views would
be untenable which seek to explain the important effects of time as the
result of the accumulation and augmentation of the minute impressions of
the external environment. If the variations which are generated by means
of external influences are not capable of transmission, then the direct
adaptation must commence at the beginning in the case of every following
generation; an accumulation is impossible.
We can observe, however, in every particular case, the complete harmony
in which every living being exists with its surroundings and mode of
life; and observe in closely related species the most various adaptations
to the elements in which they live: climate, food, nay, even to the
particular companions with which they associate; with the result that
many plants have shaped the structure of their flowers to conform to
the physical anatomy of the insect which ordinarily effects their
fertilisation, and that animals assume the figure and form of some
associate who is safe from hostile assaults, or even completely adopt
different modes of life where it is necessary to enter a life-partnership
with a strange animal or plant. But, granting that the most widely
extended capability of adaptation is a thing of daily experience, there
still arises the question how we shall explain this quality, which can
only be brought about by slow degrees, without taking into account the
factor of heredity in the transmission of acquired qualities. The theory
of Weismann attempts this, in that it takes for granted an infinite
variability in the germ-formative materials, and guides the new forms and
variations thus begotten into the really true path, that is, into the
most successful paths, through the process of natural selection (that
is, through the survival of the fittest as regards environment and all
other things). According to this doctrine, external circumstances have
no direct influence whatever upon the variation of species, as Erasmus
Darwin, Lamarck, and the founder of the theory of natural selection and
all his followers up to that time supposed, but we have to have recourse
to a pure theory of natural selection, and call to our aid an, even
now, rather obscure phenomenon, occurring in connection with sexual
impregnation, which has been called “the expulsion of the polar bodies,”
an extrusion of minute qualities of germ-plasm from the germ-cells while
in union. By the processes of crossing, which continually recur, a vast
number of the most manifold hereditary tendencies are united in the
germ-material. Then certain of these are ejected, so that others acquire
supremacy; and in this manner the way is opened for the origination of a
vast number of possible combinations. In this way the path is clear to a
theory of perfect mechanical variability, in which the germ-material has
only to transmit the characters which spontaneously arise in it, and yet
affords an investigator endowed with any imagination the possibility of
understanding the origin of the great variety and final purpose of the
world. It is Frohschammer’s “principle of the imagination as the creator
of the world” translated into comprehensible formulæ. The simplicity
thus reached by the elimination of all direct influences from the
external world, has won the adherency of many investigators following in
Darwin’s steps, particularly in England; but whilst Wallace, Galton, Ray
Lankester, and others have expressed their full assent to it, other and
not less eminent authorities, as Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, Fritz Müller,
and Virchow, have emphatically rejected it.
The reasons in favor of this assumption are, as is indeed the whole view
itself, mainly of a theoretical nature; the arguments of the opposition
are divided into philosophical and experiential propositions. The
philosophical opposition is mainly based on the fact that, from the very
beginning, there is assigned to the germ-material, as it unceasingly
continues its existence, an infinite variety of capacities which the
external world cannot affect, and that all progress and advancement takes
place as the result of the _loss_ of the originally endowed powers and
tendencies. On this theory a family of acrobats or race-horses would
not acquire their powers through the gradual augmentation by practice
of their feats of skill and endurance, but because these powers were
originally resident in them, and every factor incompatible with them
was gradually eliminated. On the other hand, these views approach in a
dangerous degree to the theories of predestination and preformation,
the overthrow of which has been justly regarded as one of the greatest
advances of science.
Still more important must be considered the objections of empirical
science, which up to this time was completely convinced of the heredity
of acquired qualities. Popular experience, as well as that of physicians,
universally speaks of inherited disease-germs, and in certain cases,
particularly in mental diseases, physicians are so thoroughly convinced
of their inheritability that the first question put to the relatives of
such sufferers usually is whether the disease has ever appeared in the
parents or family of the patient. This fact is so deeply grounded in the
general belief, that the modern naturalistic school of novelists, the
school of Zola, Ibsen, and their associates, are wont to devote their
main efforts to the problem of inherited evils. Now the inheritability
of certain evil conditions, even though proved, would not by any means
be an absolute disproof of Weismann’s theory; for, inclined as much as
we may be to derive diseases from mistakes and sins against a natural
mode of life, such as colds, drunkenness, dissipation, mental and
bodily over-exertion, we yet cannot deny _a priori_ that blastogenic
diseases, or diseases originating in the germ-plasm, may exist, which
without any doubt would then be transmissible. It also does not lie
beyond the realms of possibility that congenital malformations, such as
hare-lips, supernumerary fingers, and the defects which show a remarkable
disposition to heredity, fall into this category. These blastogenic germs
of disease would then, of course, have to be distinguished from the
somatogenic diseases (or the diseases produced in the body by external
causes), which never could be inherited.
From this point of view the question as to the hereditary consequences of
external injuries has given rise to great efforts to prove experimentally
the truth of this belief, which has existed for centuries. In almost
every part of the globe we meet with the assertion that hornless cattle,
such, for example, as are bred in South America, or the tailless cats of
the Isle of Man, or other domestic animals with similar deficiencies,
are descended from a progenitor which lost its horns or its tail through
disease or other mishap. Since now, recently, similar assertions have
again been put forward to the effect that tailless cats are found
among the descendants of feline progenitors who have been robbed of
their posterior ornaments by an act of violence, and these cases have
been discussed in connection with the pangenesis theory of Darwin,
according to which each part of the body is believed to supply material
contributions to the germ-plasm, Weismann determined to institute
experiments on this point. He started the breeding of white mice whose
tails were regularly cut off, without finding as a result, from among 840
young ones derived from such mutilated progenitors, a single one having
a malformation or missing tail. However, even this experiment cannot
be regarded as an absolute proof, as it at first view might seem, and
the negative result was foreseen by the writer of these lines. It is a
clear conclusion that if in the case of many vertebrates, for example,
salamanders and lizards, as well as in the case of most invertebrates,
missing limbs and tails are renewed in the course of their lifetime, it
would indeed be very remarkable if their renewal should not take place,
at least in the case of the complete rejuvenation of new birth.
Darwin himself had concluded, from his own experience and that of
others, that injuries and similar inflicted acts of violence are the
cause of hereditary consequences only in cases where they bring about
some long-continued and wasting disease, and thus produce some permanent
effect on the bodily constitution. For this reason, especially injuries
to main nerve-tracts in parts near the centres are readily accompanied
by hereditary consequences, because they interfere with the nutrition
of the members supplied by them. Brown-Séquard has observed in a great
number of cases of guinea pigs whose nerve-roots he had severed, that the
offspring of the animals operated upon developed diseases of the eyes,
ears, and other organs which conformed regularly to the character of the
operation, and could therefore be predicted; and also noted malformations
and deficiencies, amounting even to the complete disappearance of the
eye-balls, such as never arise or have been observed in these animals
without violent interference. His positive results regarding the
hereditability of the evil consequences of disturbing operations have
a decided advantage in numbers and scope over the negative results of
Weismann; and it is not clear how the belief in the non-hereditability of
somatic conditions will accommodate itself to them.
But if conditions of the body produced by such sudden interferences
have under certain circumstances entailed hereditary consequences,
how much more should we expect this same result from slowly
effected constitutional changes, which external influences, working
uninterruptedly for hundreds of years, bring about in an organism which
has been transported into a new element, into new surroundings, or into
a different climate. Not at all infrequently does the coming together
and union of two new organisms beget hereditary changes which can be
explained only through the direct influence of the one upon the other.
Thus, for example, in the case of plants in hot countries which are
protected against the assaults of leaf-devouring ants by body-guards
of smaller ants, and also in species of quite different families, as,
for example, in _Cecropia_ of the order _Euphorbiaceæ_, and in some
_Triplaris_ species among the _Polygonaceæ_, we find little chambers,
approachable through small openings in the stems, which serve the
ants protecting the plants as dwelling and breeding places. Are we to
believe now, in regard to this fact, that these plants, so different
in their nature, have produced through voluntary variations the stems
which contain these openings, or are we to believe we have to deal here
with openings acquired through inheritance which originally were bored
in the stems by the ants at the most appropriate points? Surely the
first conclusion, which would uphold Weismann’s theory, has but a very
slight degree of probability in its favor, whilst the latter, which would
overthrow his view, is very highly probable. And such examples could be
cited in great numbers.
It is also to be remembered that the power of variation is not exhibited
solely in sexually created individuals, as it should be according to
Weismann’s theory, but frequently also in non-sexual multiplication,
where no amphimixis (mingling) occurs. It is well known that the majority
of the sporting varieties of our trees, for example, _Fagus sanguinea_,
and the so-called weeping varieties, that is, abnormal varieties with
pendent twigs, forms with split, spotted, or white leaves, are wont first
to appear on single branches of old trees, in which the continuity of
the protoplasm unquestionably existed, but no amphimixis or extrusion of
the polar bodies took place. It is also the generally received opinion
of naturalists that the lowest classes of animal and plant life are
universally multiplied by non-sexual means. And if this is so, it is
not clear how higher forms which sexually propagate can be derived from
them, if the latter have originally to furnish the fundamental conditions
of variation. The adherents of Neo-Darwinism will, accordingly, have to
furnish many additional facts if they wish to invest their theory with
any degree of probability.
CARUS STERNE.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] _Cenogenesis_, from κενός, empty, fruitless (and γένεσις, birth);
not from κοινός, common, the derivatives of which are sometimes written
“c_e_no.”—ED.
II.
FRANCE.
The study of personality, from the point of view of pathological
psychology, has already supplied us with numerous books. M. ALFRED BINET,
in his fine work, _Les Altérations de la Personnalité_, has undertaken to
present systematically to us these alterations in their entirety, while
restricting himself to ascertained results, and avoiding disputed points.
He exhibits to us the “dismemberment of the ego” in diseased states, the
frequent rupture of that “unity of consciousness” which is the principal
attribute of the normal individual.
Clinical observation has established the existence in certain subjects
of successive personalities, and in others that of co-existing
personalities; the experiences of suggestion have at last allowed of
analogous morbid phenomena being provoked, in such a manner that cases
may be varied and rendered still more instructive. The simple movements
provoked in normal persons in states of distraction, of which many very
curious examples may be found in M. Binet’s book, are the recognised
mark of a subconsciousness; but it is often possible, under the same
conditions and with the same processes, to provoke in a hypnotisable
hysteric individual an actual sub-personality, that is to say, to augment
the phenomena which attentive observers have long since remarked in
every-day life.
It cannot be doubted that, on the one hand, it is possible to produce
in an insensible limb a great variety of subconscious actions, and all
sorts of reactions; and when they are recorded by the graphic method, it
is perceived that with the fingers of his insensible hand, the subject
has made movements the form of which varies according to the receiving
apparatus (the dynamograph, drum, pencil, etc.). These movements thus
exhibit the truly psychological marks of adaptation, and seem to reveal
the existence of an intelligence which is other than that of the ego of
the subject, and which acts without his assistance and even unknown to
him.
On the other hand, numerous experiences of very different kinds show
that the subject whose anæsthetic arm, for example, is pricked, can
have an idea of the stimulation, although he does not perceive it. He
does not feel the prickings, but the excitation calls forth the idea of
their number: he counts them as a normal individual would do; “only,
in hysterical individuals, the first part of the process occurs in one
consciousness, and the second in another.”[17]
It can hardly be denied that these different consciousnesses are
distinct; since experience proves that each can have its own perceptions,
its own memory, and even a moral character. However, their relative
value with respect to each other matters little. We are compelled to
consider, with M. Ribot, the ego as a “coördination” of states of
consciousness, admitting of infinitely variable groupings. According to
the old conception of the ego, the personality, with respect to secondary
consciousnesses, was compared to a coachman who had ceased to have
control over his horses. This comparison is now insufficient, since it
may happen that the coachman falls asleep on the box, and that one of
the horses then governs the set, regulating, more or less perfectly, the
pace of the others by its own gait. Spiritualists, however, will never
consent to put the ego in the place of the coachman. “A stone detached
from the complex structure of the personality,” M. Binet now tells us,
“can become the starting point of a new structure, which rises rapidly
by the side of the old. Whereupon a disaggregation of the psychological
elements is produced.” This comparison is certainly more precise and more
in accordance with facts.
Moreover, there remains to be explained how the mental compound which
constitutes the ego has been constructed from its elements. M. Binet
shows, _à propos_ of this question, that the association of ideas is
powerless to explain the genesis of personality; associations alone,
as proved by the experiences of suggestion, are not sufficient to
restore forgotten memories. Neither is memory the sole factor in
personality; since, in certain conditions a person may, while preserving
the consciousness and the memory of certain of his mental states,
nevertheless repudiate these mental states and consider them as foreign
to himself.
This question is still an open one. But there exist certainly some
grounds for our seeking in the division of consciousness the key to
certain psychological facts, like unconscious cerebration. Such a key
would be the action of detached consciousnesses and detached memories,
that afterwards immediately enter the current of general consciousness.
Finally, “it is possible,” as M. Binet says in conclusion, “that
consciousness may be the privilege of certain of our psychic acts; it is
possible also that it exists everywhere in our organism, and it may be
even that it accompanies every manifestation of life.”
* * * * *
In his new work, _Agnosticisme_, M. DE ROBERTY studies with special
care the position of modern doctrines with regard to the unknown, the
great _x_ of philosophic speculations—God, Idea, Matter, Noumenon or
Unknowable. Although perhaps a little hastily written, and somewhat
obscure, his book nevertheless enforces conviction. “Our conception of
the world,” says M. de Roberty, “embraces solely the things that we
_know_ (feel, perceive, imagine, analyse, compare, etc.), and does not
comprise the least jot or tittle of what we _do not know_. _For us_,
therefore, there can be no question of any relations except between
two classes of _known_ elements: that which constitutes the object of
scientific research, and that which is outside of science. The latter
class represents _our_ unknown, which is always _relative and purely
human_.” Here, indeed, we have the true point of view, that which we
shall all reach, though perhaps at first unknown to ourselves; and I
shall be much surprised if the philosophers do not at last decide to wipe
out the formidable _Unknowable_ set up by Spencer as the ultimate entity.
We shall speak no more of the fathomless universe, but of the still
unexplored universe; of the unknown, not of the unknowable.
There is, however, another aspect of the question. Let us suppose the
unknown got rid of; or to be more precise,—and if we regard with M. de
Roberty the psychic centres as special receivers in which the cosmical
energy empties itself, resolving itself into sensation and idea, and
from whence it spreads itself anew as motion,—let us suppose that we
have summed up all the energies received and emitted, and verified the
law which reduces memory to the conservation of energy; let us suppose
in fine that philosophy shall have found in the ego the synthesis of the
non-ego, expressed “in symbolic abbreviations and in signs,” and shall
have realised the “logical monism” which reduces things to their ideas:
would the intellect—and would the sensibility—even then be completely
satisfied? Can we conceive a state in which the curiosity of man as to
all that concerns himself will be at rest, and when he will cease to
be disquieted about the cause of suffering and of life? Kant long ago
propounded this question. But, according to M. de Roberty, the thinker
who is “a prey to the afflux of emotion referred to by Kant,” the man
“given over to the desire for another kind of knowledge than that of
experience,” are, in the category of intellectual emotions, diseased
and “perverted” persons. “The sentiments, so varied in aspect and in
strength, which inspire us,” writes he, “the contemplation of the
unknown, determine the mental illusion which materialises, so to say, our
ignorance and transforms the unknown into the unknowable.”
Would it be inconsistent, however, to preserve the emotion of the unknown
without “materialising” it, without pronouncing any dangerous scientific
_ignorabimus_? M. de Roberty does not accept this situation,—which
was that of Littré. I do not know whether any one will discover the
“vaccine,” as he calls it, “of the pessimist emotion which has produced
agnosticism or latent religiosity.” If this constitutes a mental malady,
I fear much that it will be incurable. As long as there is unhappiness in
life, there will also be unsatisfied curiosity, and for a very long time
to come, inquietude.
* * * * *
The last publication of LOMBROSO and LASCHI, _Le Crime politique et les
Revolutions, par rapport au droit, à l’anthropologie criminelle et à
la science du gouvernement_ (Political Crime and Revolutions, in their
Relation to Law, Criminal Anthropology, and the Science of Government)
of which we here have a French translation, is, I will not say, the
worst written, but the most confused work imaginable. Its arrangement is
clear, but its examples are given without any order whatever. The facts
presented are abundant, but they are taken rather too much at haphazard,
and often too uncritically. The worst is that its very thesis is weak,
badly formulated or elusive in places. What a pity it is that so much
erudition should be expended, and so many valuable data be brought
together without better success in displaying to the best advantage
these riches, and also, let me say, without so many times having had
occasion to appear so clearly in the wrong! M. Lombroso remains unmoved,
unfortunately, in his high sounding and unqualified hypothesis of
“diseased genius.” He continues to develop it and to defend it in this
latest book of his, which is replete with instructive details, and
which is undoubtedly the first considerable attempt at an etiology of
revolutions and of political crime.
The complex doctrine of Lombroso could be sufficiently summed up, if I
am not mistaken, by uniting word to word—by the mathematical sign of
equality—philoneism (or the love of novelties) with the revolutionary
spirit, the revolutionary spirit with genius, genius with insanity,
insanity with criminality, and criminality, finally, with progress. But
what a detestable thing progress would then be! We should have to protect
ourselves against it as we do against a pestilence. The evolution of
societies does not take place without great waste and loss, as we all
know. It should be carefully shown what these losses are. The study of
the conditions of social progress ought to be made in greater detail
than is here found. The terms of the imagined equation, which here
hovers before our eyes, should in fine, if any comparison is to be
effected between them, be subjected to a much more exact quantitative and
qualitative analysis.
For example, let us take genius. Of what kinds of genius does Lombroso
speak? It seems to be sufficient for him that a man has attracted
attention, and made himself talked about, to entitle him to be called
great, while perhaps he is only a blusterer, a braggart, a servile
imitator, a mere _homunculus_. In this way the quantity of geniuses and
talented individuals he has unearthed is something extraordinary. The
result of this is a radical error in his tables of the distribution of
geniuses. The superiority that he attributes, in this respect, to certain
of our southern departments, as compared with the Norman departments,
for example, would have to be reversed if we considered the relative
quality and kind of the genius involved. For the same reason, the
relation established between genius and republican modes of government is
undoubtedly not so precise and simple as is stated. But the worst of it
is that in thus augmenting the number of men of genius, it is found that
we have, in consequence of the above mentioned equation, also increased
the number of the demented and the degenerate!
If, moreover, it is true that the conservative mind, with less genius,
insanity, and criminality, is evidence of the senility of the race, how
can we accept the thesis that genius and the spirit of innovation are
also absolute evidence of a neurasthenic condition? Shall we deny sound
nerves to robust and vigorous youth? This, indeed, is not what Lombroso
wished to assert. Yet the famous thesis always confronts us: _Latet
anguis in herba_. The least sign of degeneracy is enough for him to brand
a man, and not only are all geniuses in his eyes unbalanced, but even
the insane are without any ado baptised geniuses; with the result that
all is heaped together in one great mass—genius, insanity, and spirit of
revolution.
I shall not dwell any longer on these criticisms. They are simply
intended as an admonition to the learned M. Lombroso against the
allurements of a badly founded theory, and against the dangers arising
from a too hasty preparation of his books. Whatever may be its defects,
he has at least brought together in his present book many ideas. I advise
all to read with care what he says about women (and how many will find
him misoneistic on this point!), concerning their great influence in
_rebellions_, which are always barren of results, and their impotence in
_revolutions_, which are always productive of good. In the second part
of his work, namely, in the section entitled _Juridical and Political
Applications_, nearly all he says is to be commended. I agree with the
authors—or I do not wish to forget M. Laschi—as to what they tell us
in relation particularly to pettifogging parlementarianism and public
instruction. Their conclusions are perhaps not connected with the thesis
in any very intimate manner. But this is not of much consequence, as they
possess an independent value of their own.
* * * * *
In a previous communication I referred to the work of Savvas-Pacha on
Musulman jurisprudence. I have now to announce a work entitled _Souvenirs
du Monde musulman_, by M. CH. MISMER, (published by Hachette,) the
fourth and last volume of a valuable series which is greatly deserving
of attention. M. Mismer, who has lived a long time in the East—at
Constantinople, in Crete, and in Egypt—and was acquainted with the
leading personages of the Empire, does not hesitate to return here to
the theory which he set forth more than twenty years ago in his _Soirées
de Constantinople_, his theory, namely, of the social advantages, and
even the superiority, of Islamism over Christianity; subject however to
the special worth of the races which belong to either of these two forms
of religion. This opinion is not lightly uttered, and it will appear
the more striking in view of the present crisis of social and moral
decomposition which is now spreading throughout the western nations.
In the work of M. Mismer will be found some of the great and striking
qualities of the observing and thoughtful mind. In connection with a
special problem of great importance in public instruction, that of
heredity, I shall call to the attention of my readers the following
statement, made with reference to the young men of the “Egyptian Mission”
in France, directed by M. Mismer for ten years. “The capacity of a
pupil,” says he, “was always found to be intimately connected with the
cerebral culture of his ancestors and the faculties constituting the
superiorities of his race.” “It was the same,” adds he, “from the moral
standpoint.” Undoubtedly, if M. Mismer had taken the pains to make a note
of the facts summed up in his statement, and to present the full case of
the numerous pupil’s that he has had under his care, he would have been
able to furnish science with data of the greatest value. Let us at least
receive his lessons as he offers them to us. They are the fruit of the
experience of a “man of action,” and it speaks well for an observation
that it has rendered good service in practice.
LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The hypothesis of the division of consciousness explains,
consequently, much better than that of the motive force of mental images,
the facts of automatic writing (spiritism). [The works of Binet, Roberty,
and Lombroso are published by Alcan.]
CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
COMTE AND TURGOT.
_To the Editor of The Monist_:
Your “note of inquiry” mentioned on p. 611 of the last _Monist_ is
answered in full by Littré in _Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive_,
where Turgot’s name heads the third chapter. He shows that the latter
discovered the law of the three stages, theological, metaphysical, and
positive, by the following quotation from his _Histoire des progrès de
l’esprit humain_.
“While the connection between physical effects was yet unknown, nothing
was more natural than to suppose that they were produced by intelligent
beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else could they have
resembled? Everything that happened without the intervention of man, had
its god, whose worship was soon established by fear or hope, and this
worship was conceived in accordance with the deference accorded powerful
men; for the gods were only more powerful men and more or less perfect
according as they were the product of an age more or less enlightened as
to the true perfections of humanity. When philosophers had recognised
the absurdity of these fables, without however having obtained true
light upon natural history, they imagined an explanation of the causes
of phenomena by abstract expressions, such as essences and faculties:
expressions that nevertheless explained nothing and that were reasoned
about as if they had been beings, new divinities substituted for the old
ones. These analogies were followed out, and faculties were multiplied
to account for each effect. It was only very late, in observing the
mechanical action that bodies have upon one another, that other
hypotheses were drawn from this mechanics, (_de cette mécanique_) which
mathematics could develop and experience verify.”
Littré calls attention to “the great sureness of judgment” that led
Turgot to cite only physical phenomena when he spoke of those that had
ceased to be interpreted either theologically or metaphysically. “When he
wrote this passage, positivity (I use this word, a necessary creation of
M. Comte’s) was only beginning to reach chemical phenomena and had not
yet attained those of biology and sociology.”
But, says Littré, “after reserving the rights of priority for this
eminent thinker, there is nothing to prevent M. Comte from keeping
all the part that he had made himself and that belongs to him. Three
principal points mark Comte’s independence of Turgot. The latter saw
in the conception nothing more than an idea to meditate upon; Comte
saw in it a sociological law; Turgot did not attach to it a sketch
of human development; Comte developed with the aid of this law the
whole historical series; Turgot did not perceive that he held one of
the necessary elements of a philosophy; Comte, in the same flight of
thought, went from history become science to philosophy become positive.
The sociological law, isolated in Turgot, makes part, in Comte, of a
vast whole: there were therefore two independent creations. Either M.
Comte had not read Turgot, or, more probably, he had read him at a time
when this passage, which to-day awakens attention, had no particular
significance.”
The fourth chapter in Littré’s Life of Comte has for heading the names
of Kant and Condorcet. The whole of the former’s remarkable sketch of
general history is given and reference is made to the letter in chap.
viii, where Comte, in 1824, being twenty-six years old, says to M.
d’Eichthal, his former pupil, “I have read and reread with infinite
pleasure Kant’s little treatise; it is prodigious for the epoch, and if
I had known it six or seven years sooner it would have saved me trouble.
I am delighted that you have translated it; it can contribute very
efficaciously to preparing minds for positive philosophy. Its general
conception or at least its method is still metaphysical, but the details
show the positive spirit at every instant. I had always regarded Kant not
only as a very strong head, but as the metaphysician that approaches the
nearest to positive philosophy. But this reading has greatly fortified
and especially given precision to my conviction in that regard. If
Condorcet had had knowledge of this writing, which I do not believe,
very little merit would remain to him, since he can pretend only to that
of the conception, which is almost as firm and, in some respects, even
clearer in Kant. As for me, after this reading I can find in myself, up
to the present time, no other value than that of having systematised and
fixed the conception that had been sketched by Kant unknown to me, which
I owe chiefly to a scientific education; and even the most positive and
distinct step that I have taken after him, seems to me only the discovery
of the law of the passage of human ideas through the three stages,
theological, metaphysical, and scientific; a law that appears to me to
be the foundation of the work whose execution Kant has counselled. I
thank my lack of erudition to-day; for if my work, such as it is now, had
been preceded by a study of Kant’s treatise, it would have lost much of
its value in my eyes. I conceive now, as you said, that, for the German
philosophers that are familiar with this treatise, my work will really
have a great effect only with the second part.” This work was a short
one reprinted in Saint-Simon’s _Catéchisme des industriels_ and called
“A System of Positive Politics.” It had been inserted two years before,
under the title of “A Plan of the Work Necessary for the Reorganisation
of Society,” in a pamphlet of Saint-Simon’s, without Comte’s name, and it
was because the latter insisted, this time, upon an acknowledgment of his
authorship that Saint-Simon broke with him. The “second part,” which was
to produce the great effect upon the German philosophers, never appeared;
or rather, it soon grew to be the _Course of Positive Philosophy_,
begun on the 2d of April, 1826, before Humboldt, Blainville, and other
celebrated listeners.
The term _positive philosophy_ had long been used by Saint-Simon and his
school, Comte among the rest, not in the special sense that the latter
now gave it, but as a “generic name for the whole of science.” The first
use of the words as we now understand them is in a letter from Comte
to M. d’Eichthal, dated Aug. 5, 1824. “I cannot help recalling your
judicious reflection upon the influence that social physics, once formed,
will have upon scientific philosophy. I go even further than you, for
I think that it will be only then that a veritable philosophy of the
sciences can exist. All the philosophical ideas that are there to-day,
although very precious up to that time, appear to me to have nothing
more than a simply provisory (provisoire) character. I shall speak a
little about this relation in the general preface that I announce to you,
where I shall explain that the true title of my work would be _positive
philosophy_, and that if I preferred _politics_, it is because that is
the most urgent philosophical application and the one that is to found
the science, but that later I or you or others will complete this system
of ideas by the encyclopedic re-coinage of all our positive cognitions
(connaissances), which ought really to be conceived as a single mass,
although, for good culture, it is indispensable to preserve and to push
even, in one sense, further than it is, the division of labor, so that
each special savant can always, subsequently, conceive the relation of
his branch and even of his twig to the universal trunk.”
In a letter of about this date Comte refers to his habit of never
rewriting anything. His memory permitted him to look upon a volume as
finished when it had been thought out and before a line had been written.
But even in his letters we notice some of the disadvantages of this
procedure, which, while conducive to unity, sacrifices literary form.
It is true that Comte studied under Saint-Simon; but, according to
Littré, his purely philosophical dependence was very slight, while his
influence upon his master was important. “What forms the distinguishing
characteristic of Saint-Simon at the epoch when he lived, is the social
destination that he assigns without hesitating to the ideas that
preoccupy him. He has, as we have seen, only the most confused notion
of what this philosophy will be; but, no matter what it is to be, he
consecrates it in advance to the reorganisation of society.”
As regards Condorcet, Comte enthusiastically acknowledges his
indebtedness to the “Sketch of an Historical Table of the Progress of the
Human Mind,” and even goes beyond the facts, as he did in his praise of
Kant.
Littré makes a fair division of credit among others as well as those
already named, and concludes as follows: “Turgot had discovered that
human conceptions, at first theological, afterwards become metaphysical
and end by being positive. Kant had known that history is a natural
phenomenon, subjected to a determinate course, and Condorcet, pushed
harder than his predecessors by advancing time,” (he had been condemned
to death) “had attempted to trace a table that should put in evidence
the enchainment of the progresses of civilisation. These are great
things, but they are still only rudiments; for neither Turgot nor his
successors make use of the discovered law to found upon this general
fact evolution; Kant, who perceives clearly the necessity of conceiving
history as regulated by the conditions inherent to humanity, is unable to
base this important notion on anything better than an _à priori_ idea”
(the metaphysical principle that nature does nothing in vain, and that as
human faculties do not reach their development in the individual, who is
ephemeral, they must do so in the species, which is durable) “and thus he
leaves it incapable of fixing the attention of a century whose tendencies
were more and more positive; lastly Condorcet has no other guide than the
negative philosophy of the eighteenth century in a work to which it could
bring only contradiction.”
John Stuart Mill says of Comte that “far from pretending to originality
when he had really no right to do so, he was eager to attach his most
original thoughts to every germ of a similar idea that he met with among
his predecessors.”
Speaking for himself, Littré says of the law of the three stages, “I do
not reject it, I restrain it. As long as we remain in the scientific
order and consider the conception of the world first theological,
then metaphysical, finally positive, the law of the three stages has
its full efficacy in directing the speculations of history.... But in
history all is not comprised in the scientific order. M. Comte, who has
said somewhere that it is necessary to suppose, at the beginning of
humanity, certain notions that were neither theological nor metaphysical,
has indicated the germ, I will not say of my objection, but of my
restriction. In fact this law of the three stages comprehends neither
industrial, nor moral, nor æsthetic development. It has however, the
excellent character of being relative to the speculations in which
evolution by filiation is most manifest and consequently of giving a
positive notion of the march of history.”
Is it true, as stated on p. 565 of _The Monist_ for July, that Stuart
Mill adopted Hume’s “erroneous conception of causality” to the extent
implied in the following passage? “This idea of ‘sequence’ however
was exactly Hume’s mistake, adopted by Mr. Mill, and through Mr. Mill
popularised among English thinkers. If the nature of cause and effect
were really constituted by invariable sequence, then the night might be
called the effect of the day because night is invariably consequent upon
day.”
The only authority at hand on the island from which I write is
Clemenceau’s translation of Mill’s “Auguste Comte and Positivism,” where,
on p. 61, I read as follows, “The succession of day and night is just as
much an invariable succession as the alternate exposition of the earth’s
two opposite sides to the sun. Yet day and night are not the cause of
each other; why? Because their succession, although invariable, according
to our experience, is not so unconditionally: these phenomena succeed
each other only upon the condition that the presence and the absence
of the sun succeed each other; and if this alternation were to cease,
day and night would not follow each other. There are thus two kinds of
uniformities of succession, one without conditions, the other dependent
on the former: laws of causation, and other successions which depend on
these laws.”
In a note Mill refers to his _System of Deductive and Inductive Logic_.
LOUIS BELROSE, JR.
SOME REMARKS UPON PROFESSOR JAMES’S DISCUSSION OF ATTENTION.
In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses
in an interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to
attention, maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned
in all attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory imagination” or
“preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience.
Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates
in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of
the striking.
It is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant,
where we are awaiting _some given impression_, there is a representing,
antedating experience, which may be a preparatory preperception. But with
a wrong imaging of what is to be experienced there is hindrance, as when
in a dark quiet room we are led to expect sensation of light but actually
receive sensation of sound. Very often, indeed, our anticipations make us
unprepared for experience. Further, the experiments adduced by Professor
James from Wundt and Helmholtz are in the single form of expectant
attention, and we must remark that in these experiments the reagent is
also experimenter, and this introduces a new attention, consciousness of
consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind, which complicates an already
complex consciousness. In general we may say that experimentally incited
consciousness is artificial, at least as far as it feels itself as such,
and for certain points like simple attention this tends to vitiate
results. Self-experimentation or experiment on those conscious of it
as such may mislead in certain cases, and must, so far as this element
of consciousness of experiment is not allowed for. In physical science
things always act naturally whether with observation or experiment, but
in psychology observation, other things being equal, is more trustworthy
than experiment.
In all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the
attention does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as
such, but it is merely the will effort concerned in these operations.
Yet as we may expect without effort, and preconceive without volition,
attention is necessarily involved in neither. A perception or a
preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with effort,
but only an unattention when purely involuntary. Professor James’s
use of attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea
of attention, as any consciousness which cognises something. This is
so inbred in thought and language that it is most difficult to avoid
using the term in this sense. Many psychologists like Mr. James and Mr.
Sully frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon but they do
not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition
meaning. Höffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will.
Attention as the exercise of will in building up and maintaining
cognitive activity, is naturally treated under cognition; but it is on
the whole safer and better to discuss attention under will so as to keep
it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which it vitalises.
I have endeavored to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is not
unlikely I may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common confusion,
but trust the instances will be few.
When we have, then, a case of expectant attention we must distinguish
the attention in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognising.
It is, indeed, true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain
without immediate realisation is incentive to ideating. In listening
in the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination many sounds,
and we form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear. Sense-adjustments
call up a train of sensations in ideal form. But it is obvious that low
intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet really
attend. The very first cognitions and all early cognitions by their very
newness and difficulty were attentions long before ideation was evolved.
With low organisms, as cognitive power extends only to the present in
time and space, immediacy of reaction is imperatively demanded, and
every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately directive of motor
apparatus so that suitable motion is at once accomplished. The cognition,
though dim and evanescent factor, is yet powerfully energised, and so a
true attention. Always with lowest sentiencies, and often with higher,
pain is suddenly realised without anticipation, followed quickly by
attention as strong effort to cognise the nature and quality of the
pain-giver and so to effectually get rid of pain-giver and pain.
Preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late
attentions it is by no means necessary. It is said that we see only
what we look for, but it must be answered that seeing commonly happens
without any looking for. The kindergarten child, Professor James to the
contrary notwithstanding, is not confined in his seeing to merely those
things which he has been told to see and whose names have been given
him. A child continually asks, What is that? and is quick to discern
the absolutely new and strange. He accomplishes a wide variety of
attentions without ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate
presentations.
To be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is
made possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his own
pre-experience and the experience of his ancestors, but this does not
signify ideation. Every cognising is conditioned by the past, but this
does not call for a reawakening and projecting in ideal form at every
instance of cognitive effort, before any real cognition is reached.
In fact, many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely
intensifyings of some present cognition, of some cognitive psychosis
which has simply come or happened. Take the instance of attention
to marginal retinal images, this certainly does not always imply
preperception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see, though
in the cases mentioned by Professor James it may. For example, I was
writing the above seated with my profile to the window when I became
suddenly aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of
a moving object to my right. This perception of bare undefined object was
spontaneous, a pure given; I exercised no will in attaining it, and so
the state of cognition was not an attention. However, by attending, by
intensifying the cognition by will effort, I perceive that the indefinite
object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain height,
clothed in a certain way, etc. I do not trace the least ideation in the
whole process, the slight attending as act of will did not imply any
anterior or posterior idea or representation. The reason for the will
act was the intrinsic interest of movement, and this intrinsic interest
arises in the fact that moving objects have had for all life a special
pleasure-pain significance, the moving object is the most dangerous, and
so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a special stimulant
of attention. This habit of attentiveness to things in motion survives
and continues for cases where it is of no use and even of harm; thus,
in the present instance, it diverts me from my work. It is obvious
that attention often occurs in the same way for other senses without
preliminary idea.
On the whole we must conclude that attention is a much abused term, and
it is to be hoped that psychologists will for the future keep to the
definite and best use of the term; namely, to denote cognitive effort in
all its degrees and modes.
HIRAM M. STANLEY.
IS MONISM ARBITRARY?
In Vol. II, No. 3, of _The Monist_, a very kind criticism appeared from
the pen of Mr. Francis C. Russell of the doctrine of a double-faced unity
of mind and matter. It was said that this doctrine is very far from
inducing that final satisfaction which we rightly expect of a competent
theory, and the critic propounded as a possible explanation of mental
phenomena the postulate of a conservation of spirit. He calls spirit the
elementary basis of consciousness considered as a quality. Spirit would
be the subjectivity of nature, the elements of feeling, or as Professor
Morgan calls it metakinesis; and consciousness would originate in the
same way as electricity, i. e., by rending spirit asunder into positive
and negative spirit so as to produce a tension. This would account for
the appearance and disappearance of consciousness in that spiritual
“dynamo” which is called the nervous system.
This proposition seems to be highly acceptable because it stands upon the
principle of a conservation of substance and attempts to represent the
phenomenon of consciousness as due to a transformation. But does it for
that reason remove the difficulties of the doctrine of a double-faced
unity of nature, which, as Mr. Russell says, “is open to the charge of
being arbitrary and brings no access of insight”? Is not perhaps the term
double-faced unity (which is none of my invention, and which I have been
careful to avoid) a misleading and unsatisfactory term? Why should nature
be double-faced? Why are feeling and motion the only two attributes of
natural phenomena? Is this not arbitrary? Could nature not be just as
well a treble or quadruple-faced unity. Nature might possess, as Spinoza
actually declares, infinite attributes of which these two only, viz.
extension and thought, i. e. motion and feeling, happen to be known to us.
It is this apparent arbitrariness which bars our insight and deprives us
of the satisfaction that ought to attend the real solution of a problem.
But let us avoid the term double-faced unity; let us speak of the
subjectivity and the objectivity of nature, and the clouds will disappear.
The doctrine of a double-faced unity has been criticised as dualism,
and the proposition that nature consists of two radically different
attributes—exactly of two, not more and not less—must most decidedly
appear as dualism. But is it dualistic to say that every subject appears
to its objects not as a subject but as an object among other objects?
Certainly not.
The relativity of the terms subject and object affords us the key to
a comprehension of the situation. This world of ours is a world of
relations. The phenomena of nature exhibit an unceasing activity; they
consist of constant changes, and every change, every motion, has a whence
and a whither. Every transformation is a series of events among which any
prior one is called cause and any subsequent one effect.
If we regard feeling and motion as two attributes of nature, we are
actually on the brink of dualism, and we shall understand how Spinoza,
in order to escape from dualism and arrive at a monistic view, assumed
without any plausible argument the existence of an infinite number of
attributes. This assumption however is of no avail, for the problem would
arise: How is it that we know only two of all these infinite attributes?
Why do we not know any other? and why are we unable to form even a dim
notion of any other? If they exist why do they exhibit no effects upon
us? Perhaps because we ourselves and this world of ours consist only
of two! And if they exhibit no effects upon us and upon our world, can
they be said to exist at all? Might we not, in that case, consider them
as non-existent and count the two known attributes alone as actual
realities? Thus the dualism would remain; and Spinoza’s monism is only
apparent.
The same objection cannot be made if we remain conscious of the fact that
feelings are as much abstracts as motions. Subjectivity and objectivity
are correlative terms. There is as little a duality in the idea, that
subjects presuppose objects as that effects presuppose causes. There
are not causes in the world which are nothing but causes, nor are there
effects which are nothing but effects. Take for instance an historical
event. Was Cæsar’s death a cause or an effect? Plainly, this depends upon
the view we take. As the sequence of the wounds which Cæsar received
from his assassins it was an effect; as the beginning of the civil war
consequent thereupon it was a cause. If I look at you, you are the object
and I am the subject. If you look at me, it is the reverse. Thus the
relation of a certain thing to its surroundings makes of it a subject,
while the surroundings are its objects.
Subject and object being correlatives, we can very well understand why
there are no “subjects in themselves”; every subject is at the same time
an object in the objective world. We can further understand, why every
subjectivity except our own withdraws itself from direct observation.
We can observe the movements of organisms like ourselves and judge by
way of analogy that they feel pain or enjoy pleasure. We see their
motions which betray certain feelings, but we can never see the feelings
themselves; and even supposing that we could enter into the brain of a
man and that the whole mechanism of brain-action were laid open to our
inspection in its minutest details, we should see motions, combinations
and separations, integrations and disintegrations, we should see the
oxydation of the gray substance, which would appear as a great turmoil
and excitement, but we should see (as Leibnitz says) no thoughts, no
perceptions, no feelings. That it cannot be otherwise is obvious when
we consider that our objects will always present to us the character of
objectivity.
But suppose We were an atom of oxygen and entered into the process of
brain-action as an active factor, our subjectivity would soon become
absorbed and welded into a higher unity with the subjectivity of the
other atoms. We should then, as a part of that brain’s consciousness,
feel these feelings, perceptions, and thoughts; we should, then, _be_ the
subject which we could not see and which we were searching for in vain in
the world of objectivity.
This conception of the correlation of subjectivity and objectivity
does not only convincingly explain the unity of feeling and motion, it
does not only establish a satisfactory monism, it throws light also on
some other of the questions that puzzle us. How is it that we do not
feel our brain-motions to be brain-motions? We feel our feelings only;
and when feeling our feelings we do not so much feel _that_ we feel as
_what_ we feel. In other words, we feel the contents of our feelings; we
feel their import, their meaning; we are aware of their significance;
our consciousness is conscious of the object, the presence of which is
indicated by this special feeling. Our attention is concentrated upon the
messages conveyed by and contained in the different feelings.
These messages of certain feelings are the interpretations given either
to certain sense-impressions or they are the thought-symbols representing
some abstracts, representing certain features of sense-impressions.
How little we feel our brain-motions when we think, can be learned
from the fact that some nations place the seat of thinking in the
heart, others in the stomach or even the bowels, while even so great a
naturalist as Aristotle regarded the brain as cold and insensible; he
made the observation that man is in possession of the relatively largest
brain, but he understood its function so little that he thought it served
to cool the warmth rising from the heart.
It is strange that every subjective feeling so long as it remains within
itself can neither be localised nor determined. We know nothing whatever
of the brain-motion that thinks a certain idea. We can fairly assume
that every idea is in its objective existence a peculiar kind of brain
motion taking place in a particular part of the brain, but we are not
conscious of the brain-motion as a special and localised motion. We are
quite unable to tell the difference that we must suppose to exist between
the forms of the brain-structures or combinations of brain-structures and
their motions when we think say for instances of virtue and of vice. We
are conscious only of the idea and not of their objective correlates.
Whatever we know of our body, we know only through sensation; i. e.,
by the same means by which we know of other things. Our body is to us,
and is represented with the assistance of the senses, as an object in
the objective world. As such it is localised and all its relations and
activities are determined. Whatever subjective feeling we have concerning
any state of ourselves, remains indistinct until with the help of the
senses it is made an object to our observation. Who has not as yet made
the experience that he was unable to localise a toothache. The pain
itself gives no information either as to its nature and cause or as to
the seat of the suffering. The pain itself is purely subjective. All the
objective facts have to be localised with the assistance of the senses.
The suspected regions must be made the object of experiments and if any
irritation of a certain spot increases the ache, it will be assumed to be
the seat of the pain. And even then how often is a patient mistaken not
only almost always as to the nature but often also as to the seat of the
pain.
These facts appear strange, but they cease to be strange, when we
consider that the nature of subjectivity is feeling. Subjectivity can as
little become directly conscious of its own objectivity as an eye can
look at itself. However, an eye can look at its image in the mirror. So
the complex of subjective existence, which is through the interaction of
an organism united in what we call a soul, can and does turn the channels
of its own senses back upon itself and thus forms an opinion concerning
its own objectivity. Man’s knowledge of his own objective existence is
not due to any internal and direct perception of self, but solely to the
same experience through which he receives information concerning the rest
of the world.
P. C.
A REPLY TO A CRITIC.
WITH A DISCUSSION OF NECESSARY TRUTHS.
_To the Editor of The Monist_:
I hope it is not a breach of etiquette to ask you to forward to your
reviewer the following remarks in reply to his criticism of my work (_The
Foundations of Geometry_, reviewed in Vol. II, No. 1, of _The Monist_).
If he is good enough to review my second book also, I think they will
clear up some misunderstandings.
Your reviewer commences with some general remarks, against which I have
nothing to say. He then proceeds to consider my “requirements for a
logical definition.” Here he seems to find a difficulty—which may be
due to my not having expressed myself clearly. If so I hope he will
read what I say on the same subject in my _Essay on Reasoning_, which
I cannot believe he will find “indefinite” or not well “issuable.” But
indeed I cannot see where his difficulty comes in with my old statement
of the case. I state perfectly clearly that requirements (3) and (4) are
not _logically_ necessary for a definition, but are only required if
that definition is intended to give a _particular meaning_ to the word.
He tries to reduce my argument _ad absurdum_ by giving a definition
of “troft.” But so far from being absurd his definition is perfectly
good. According to it “troft” would include in its denotation all
our percepts and concepts. When however he goes on to say “... These
significant names must be so used that the intellectual sensibility shall
be excited to perceive that which is intended to be defined,” I differ
from him entirely. This is only required for a _description_, not for a
_definition_ (see _Essay on Reasoning_, p. 53).
Your reviewer’s only solid objection to my “requirements” seems to be
that the fourth includes all the rest. This is only true if the term
proposed for definition has an import which has already been determined;
but even in such a case it is better to consider the requirements
separately, as I have given them. For the force of objections under the
different headings varies enormously. An objection under heading (1),
if established, would be fatal to any definition whatever. One under
heading (2) so far from being fatal would only be a suggestion for the
improvement of the definition. Objections under either of the headings
(3) and (4) would only be to the effect that the term as defined meant
something different from what it was desired that it should mean. It
is however convenient to consider (3) and (4) separately as it would
generally be possible to decide (3) at once, whereas if a doubt were
raised under heading (4) it might lead to a prolonged discussion before
it could be laid. I do not however pretend that the “requirements” are
laid down in my _Foundations of Geometry_ in the best possible form.
Indeed I have altered the form in my second essay. There is moreover
one requirement for a logical definition which is not included in my
heading (1) in the _Foundations of Geometry_, though it is included in
(4). This defect is remedied in the _Essay on Reasoning_ (p. 55). It is
curious that your reviewer should have missed this point, as it is the
very one on which he attacks my definition of “direction.” It is that
the assertions in a definition must not be _independent_ of the meaning
of the term defined. If they were, the assertion would be equally true
(or false) whatever meaning the term might have. The _import_ of the
term would therefore be unlimited. In the case of explicit definitions a
similar error is called _circulus in definiendo_.
When your reviewer goes on to attack my definition of “direction”
why does he change his front all at once, and disregard all the
considerations he has just been discussing? Why does he not apply
my, or his own, requirements for a definition to the case in point?
The criticism he actually does put forward will not bear a moment’s
investigation. If my definition is “circular,” the assertion must be
equally true whatever meaning is ascribed to the term. Well, then, let
us try the effect of giving to it the meaning we ordinarily ascribe
to “cheese.” Is it equally true that “a cheese may be conceived to be
indicated by naming two points, as the cheese from one to the other”?
Clearly not. But not only does this one assertion out of my definition
exclude the import of “cheese” from the meaning of “direction,” but, more
particularly, it distinguishes between the “three distinct but closely
associated notions” which your reviewer quite rightly says “become
confused in thought and expression unless the most solicitous care is
taken to distinguish them.” This is exactly the care which I _have_
taken, by framing my definition.
I need not say much about the rest of the criticism. Your reviewer’s
remarks on my definition of “angle” are simply due to the fact that he
has not read the definition carefully, and probably has not read the note
on the top of page 36 at all. It may make it clearer to him if I point
out that if “we imagine a northeast-southwest line cutting an east-west
line,” we imagine _four_ different directions and therefore (4⋅3)/(1⋅2)
= 6 angles. Two of these are the straight angles between the opposite
directions of each of the two lines. The other four are what Euclid calls
“the angles between the lines.” As an angle, according to my definition,
has no local habitation in space, it is, _prima facie_, meaningless to
talk of the “right hand upper angle.” But if this is only an abbreviation
for “the angle between the directions upwards and to the right,” then
“the right hand upper angle” means the same as it would in Euclid.
With the remarks about the nature of the challenge I have thrown down I
heartily agree. May I however suggest that I have a right to expect that
criticism should be, not only “competent and candid,” but careful? It
is a difficult subject, and _I_ at least am not always able to express
myself in such a way that my meaning cannot be misunderstood by any one.
I think if your reviewer looks at what I have said again, with the aid
of what I say further in my _Essay on Reasoning_, he will see that his
criticisms have really originated in misunderstandings, and perhaps he
will alter his judgment that I have “come short of the high result to
which I aspired.”[18]
But my chief object in writing to you to-day is to bring specially to
your notice my ideas on the nature of so-called “necessary truths.”
I am not quite clear how far you will find my views harmonise with
your own. To a great extent I am inclined to think they are simply a
further analysis of the views you express in _The Monist_ and in your
_Fundamental Problems_. I will briefly sketch my own ideas and you can
then judge whether they are yours also or not.
In my _Essay on Reasoning_ I classify assertions as Truisms (assertions
whose truth depends solely on the definitions of their terms) and Real
Assertions, which convey some real subjective or objective information.
I show that the validity of all purely formal knowledge depends on the
fact that it is deduced from definitions alone, which are laid down
_arbitrarily_ and that the supposed peculiar certainty of the theorems
of pure mathematics is merely due to the fact that they are all truisms.
Thus, I think it a misnomer to call such theorems “necessary” truths. It
would be nearer the mark to call them “arbitrary” truths.
There is no _necessity_ whatever about the theorem “twice two is four.”
“Two” is defined as 1 + 1; “twice,” as the operation of adding a thing to
itself. It follows from this that “twice two” is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; and this,
by _definition_, is “four.” If “four” were defined as 1 + 1 + 1, (and
there is no “necessary” reason why it should not be,) then “twice two”
would _not_ be “four.” The assertion “twice two is four” conveys no real
information whatever—at best it could only tell us what one of its terms
meant if they had not all been previously defined.
I cannot insist too strongly on the importance of a proper understanding
and use of logical definition. If you desire to know whether a given
assertion is true or false, _a priori_ or _a posteriori_, the first step
in the investigation MUST be to find out how its terms were defined.
If it turns out that the truth (or falsehood) of the assertion can
be formally deduced from these definitions, then the assertion is a
truism (or contradiction in terms): in either case it can give no real
information, and even if true cannot be a “necessary” truth. Only if the
definitions of the terms are both independent and consistent is it open
to discussion how we might come to a knowledge of the fact it expresses.
I may briefly indicate here how I think the problem ought to be
attacked. “Objective facts” can only be established by induction. I do
not mean by that term necessarily the process described by Mill, but
some similar process, based ultimately on _inductio per enumerationem
simplicem_. Now no such process can ever lead to a necessary truth. The
most fundamental and certain induction which can be made, that which
induces us to believe in the objectivity of our environment, does not
lead to a “necessary truth”; and much less can any other induction based
upon this one do so. “Objective facts” then may be established with
greater or less probability, but can never be _necessarily_ true. But
all inductions are based on our perceptions, that is ultimately on our
subjective sensations. And a man can, nay, must be, absolutely certain
of the reality of his own sensations though he cannot be certain of the
interpretations he puts upon them. If I have a toothache I cannot be
absolutely certain that I have a tooth, but, at least while the pain
lasts, I am _absolutely_ certain that I have an ache. And so of any
subjective sensation.
I can similarly be absolutely certain that I entertain a given concept,
while that concept is before my mind; though of course it is possible
that if I assert the possession of that concept I may do so in language
which may be misunderstood by the person I am addressing. If then a
man has certain concepts which he can call up at will, the reality of
those concepts, _qua_ concepts, is to him a _necessary truth_. He may
lay down such necessary truths as axioms, and by their aid he may give
real subjective import to a symbolic argument, and so obtain new and
complicated assertions which are also to him necessary truths. This is
what I do in my subjective theory of geometry. That theory might be
regarded as purely symbolic—the axioms might have been left out, and
all its conclusions looked upon as mere truisms. The conclusions of
geometry of four or more independent directions can perhaps _only_ be
regarded as truisms. But by the aid of the axioms, geometry of two and
three independent directions can be given real subjective import, and its
conclusions therefore regarded as necessary truths, as long as they are
only taken subjectively. They may further be applied objectively by the
aid of objective facts established by induction, but in this case their
validity is no greater than that of the primary facts, the counterparts
of the subjective axioms, which are employed to give the theory objective
import.
I confess I have not studied Kant sufficiently to say that his views
differ, materially from mine, though I always thought they did until I
read your interpretations of them. Perhaps I misunderstood the sense
in which Kant used the term _a priori_. The term has been used in so
many different senses that I prefer myself to drop it altogether. If it
merely refers to priority in time there can be no practical doubt that,
whether in the case of the human race or of an individual thinker, a
large amount of sense-experience must have preceded even so simple an
_a priori_ judgment as “twice two is four.” If the term merely refers
to priority in logical validity it seems to me better to say that “such
and such assertions are not dependent upon experience.” But Kant says
of the assertion “7 + 5 = 12” that it is not only “_a priori_” but
“synthetic”. By the latter term he means that its truth was _not_ deduced
from definitions alone, and that the assertion therefore conveys real
information. In this I believe he was wrong, and though he afterwards
declares that “all knowledge _a priori_ is empty and cannot give
information about things,” unless the true nature of _a priori_ knowledge
is made more clear, people will inevitably continue to believe the
contrary—and to believe moreover that Kant taught so.
Any language which seems to imply that there is some dread necessity
about mathematical truths—that they could not be otherwise if they
would—is very misleading. Of course it is necessarily true that _if_ you
have seven objects and add five more to them you will have in all twelve
objects. But the whole objective difficulty is begged by the supposition.
“Much virtue in if!”
As I understand it the essence of the “laws” of pure mathematics is that
they are verbal, that is they are only abbreviated expressions of the
results of certain verbal processes. If the processes are repeated and
the results similarly expressed, the results must always be the same.
Our reason cannot “inform us about the form of existence” unless it is
first given, as the _data_ or facts which correspond to the definitions
of our symbolic arguments. It is only because our reasoning faculties
are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at all—that it is
not evident to us at once that the conclusions of the most intricate
mathematical calculations are given to us along with the _data_. Given
the data, then in all possible worlds the conclusions must indeed follow,
but only because they really are already _in_ the data which were given.
It may be that you will not only agree with all I have said, but have
already said much of it yourself. But there are some passages in your
_Fundamental Problems_ which seem to imply otherwise. I think the great
objection I have to urge against Kant, and also perhaps against you, is
that you do not distinguish as clearly as I could wish between symbolic
argument and real, though subjective, knowledge. And the only way to
distinguish between them is by inquiring into the definitions of the
terms.
For example, on p. 165 of _Fundamental Problems_ you say that to
four-dimensional beings Kepler’s third law “would most probably appear as
‘the cubes of their times of revolution being proportional to their mean
distances to the fourth power.’”
Now what sort of assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be? Originally
it was a purely empirical law obtained by pure induction. If the
four-dimensional people obtained their law the same way why should
the result appear different to them? Or do you conceive the law to be
deduced from Newton’s theory of gravitation? But even so the law of the
inverse square was obtained empirically. If you think that law can be
explained (as the analogous law for the distribution of light can) by the
supposition that the integral of the force over all points at a given
distance from the origin is constant, still this supposition is purely
gratuitous unless established by induction from experience. If you grant
any one of these suppositions you can by symbolic argument obtain the law
corresponding to Kepler’s for a four-dimensional space. But I may mention
that in no case does the result you anticipate come out. On the first
two suppositions the law would be unaltered. On the last supposition the
law of gravity would be changed to the inverse cube; but after that the
solution of the problem has nothing to do with four dimensions—it is
a two-dimensional problem only. The result is that in general planets
could not move in closed orbits at all. They might conceivably revolve in
circles, but such a condition would be unstable, and if it obtained their
periodic times would vary as the squares of their distances.
Again you say (p. 74) “the doctrine of the ‘conservation of matter
and energy,’ although it has been discovered with the assistance of
experience, can be proved in its full scope by pure reason alone.”
I should very much like to see your proof (which I cannot find in
_Fundamental Problems_). How do you define the terms of the doctrine?
Do you deduce the proof from these definitions—that is do you make it a
truism? Or do you base it upon subjective axioms as I do my geometry? Or
if you base it on objective facts, how do you prove those facts by pure
reason alone? And if it is purely a subjective proof, how, can you say
the doctrine is proved “in its full scope”? Surely objective applications
come within its scope?
It would not be fair in me to ask you to publish my reply to your
reviewer’s criticisms, though if that reply is justified the criticism
must have done the prospects of my book some injury, seeing from what
a quarter it comes. But I hope you will see your way to publishing the
latter part of this letter in _The Monist_, together with your reply to
it, if you think it worthy of such a distinction.
I have just come across, in this month’s _Nineteenth Century_, another
remarkable instance of reasoning which seems to be rendered entirely
nugatory by the want of proper definitions. It is asserted that
conceptual thought is impossible without language. At first sight this
would certainly appear to be a real assertion. It follows from it that
since dogs have no language they have no “conceptual thought.” But it
may be plainly shown that dogs do entertain “general notions,” which
in ordinary English would be included under the head of “conceptual
thought.” The apparent contradiction is however explained when it appears
that the author distinguishes general notions as “concepts” or “recepts,”
according as they _are_ or _are not named_. This being his definition of
“conceptual thought” as opposed to other thought, it appears that the
assertion is only a truism after all, and conveys no real information
whatever. To discuss it further is then mere waste of time. The author of
the assertion doubtless _wished_ it to convey some information, but he
did not attend to his definitions and so failed to attain his object.
EDWARD T. DIXON.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The reviewer of Mr. Dixon’s book has read these remarks on his
criticism (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 126) and has given them what
seems to him full consideration. He confesses that he misunderstood
what Mr. Dixon meant by “a direction.” (See the article “Logic as
Relation-Lore” to be published in a subsequent number.) In regard to the
requirements for a logical definition he must still abide by his former
opinion. The need of a definition arises either from the inaccuracy in
the application of a term or from a supposed lack of knowledge as to its
signification. Hence to use the term itself in its own definition is to
import into the definition the same vagueness or ignorance which it is
the very office of a definition to correct. When Mr. Dixon says that it
is requisite for a logical definition that the defining assertions “must
not be _independent_ of the meaning of the term defined,” what is that
but to say that the same must be _dependent_ upon that meaning? which,
unless the reviewer again misunderstands the author, is to say that we
must understand the meaning of the term before we can understand the
definition.
ρσλ.
MATHEMATICS A DESCRIPTION OF OPERATIONS WITH PURE FORMS.
IN REPLY TO MR. EDWARD DIXON.
It is true, as Mr. Dixon says, that “Any language which seems to imply
that there is some dread necessity about mathematical truths is very
misleading.” But to say, as Mr. Dixon does in another passage, that
the truisms of mathematics are arbitrary truths, is more misleading
still. The theorems of the formal sciences are not “assertions whose
truth depends solely on the definition of their terms.” They are “real
assertions which convey some real subjective or objective information.”
Mr. Dixon objects to Kant’s assertion that 7 + 5 = 12 is not only _a
priori_ but also synthetic. He declares, in contradistinction to Kant,
that it is deduced from definitions alone; that therefore it is empty,
and cannot give any information about things. This latter proposition,
which is a phrase of Kant’s, appears in this context as an inconsistency
of Kant’s. And it would be an inconsistency, if it had to be understood
in the sense in which Mr. Dixon quotes it. We construe Kant’s phrase that
“the _a priori_ is empty, and cannot give information about things,” in
a different way. We think that Kant intends to say that the _a priori_
imparts real information concerning relations and forms; but that it does
not impart real information concerning substances or the materiality
of things. It is apparent that the assertion 7 + 5 = 12 cannot be
derived from the definitions of 7 or 5. Similarly, the ideas of higher
mathematics are not deduced from the few definitions of elementary
mathematics that tell what points, lines, parallels, etc., are. Of what,
then, are these complex theorems of mathematics, products? They are not
derived from sense-experience, nor from the definitions of their ultimate
elements.
Is their origin mysterious? Here Kant leaves us in the lurch; he simply
declares that formal truth is _a priori_ and transcendental; and those of
his disciples who call themselves, with preference, transcendentalists,
have ample occasion to introduce in this _lacuna_ of Kantian thought, all
the mysticism they please.
The problem of the origin of the truths of formal sciences is not
so difficult as it is sometimes represented. The theorems of higher
mathematics are the products of certain _operations_ performed with
the elementary forms described in the definition with which the
mathematician starts. These operations are not arbitrary; they are not
merely verbal processes; they are realities of highest importance. Not
material realities, but realities, nevertheless. They are functions,
and mathematics deals with the products of functions. It is true that
we might call twice two by any other name than four; we might call
it _vier_, or _quatre_, but the operation 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 would remain
the same, by whatever name we call its result. Mathematical truths,
accordingly, are not empty in the sense that they are meaningless; for
they are significant in the highest degree. They give real information,
not about things, but about certain relations that obtain among things.
They describe certain operations in which formal relations are traced.
And they describe them exhaustively, so that the result is, as the
Germans call it, _eindeutig bestimmt_, and the result will, under all
circumstances, be the same. Twice two _will always be_ the same as 1 + 1
+ 1 + 1. This “it will always be,” is called necessary. There is nothing
dreadful about it, nor is there any mystery connected with it. It is not
an awful fate that decrees it, but it is the nature of sameness, that the
same is and will be the same, so long as it remains the same.
It is often overlooked that every number in arithmetic is the result
of an operation which is symbolised by a certain figure. Numbers are
not concrete things; and as soon as we forget that they are products
of a function, we are liable to lapse into mistakes. This happens most
frequently with the numbers “zero” and “infinite.” The latter of these
two symbols is often looked upon as a concrete thing; and because the
infinite, with actual reality, is, in its completeness, inconceivable, it
has made, of every one who stumbled over this stone of offence, a mystic,
and many a radical, fearless thinker bows down to worship before the idea
of infinitude-function as it would be if it were a real thing.
Says Mr. Dixon, “Our reason cannot inform us about the form of existence,
unless it is first given.” This is very true. The form is given, and
formal systems such as the numerical system and the lines and figures of
mathematics are mental constructions built of the stones quarried out of
the relational given in experience.
Form being given, we can reason about the form of existence in general.
We can have ready in our minds systems of pure forms to apply to all the
various cases of our experience. And this will help us in unravelling
the problems of reality, and in extending our knowledge in those fields
with which we are little acquainted. Far be it from us to consider the
definitions, the operations, and the results of the formal sciences
as purely verbal; if they were, mathematics would lose all the great
importance which it undeniably possesses, and become mere verbiage.
I confess that I do not understand Mr. Dixon when he says: “It is only
because our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments
are necessary at all.” In my opinion all mental activity is symbolic.
Every idea is a symbol that signifies something. It is not because our
reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary
at all, but symbolism is the nature of our mind, and symbols are the
elements with which our reasoning faculties have to deal. In this sense,
every argument is symbolic. If it symbolises sense-experience, it
represents our knowledge of what may be called the materiality of things.
If it symbolises operations with pure forms, it represents the purely
formal relations of mathematics logic, algebra, etc.
The doctrine of the conservation of matter and energy in reality means
nothing more or less than that there is no increase or decrease in the
world at large. Nothing originates out of, and nothing disappears into,
nothing. It means that twice 1 + 1 is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, neither more nor
less; or, in other words, it means that all events are transformations.
New things originate, but their newness consists in their forms. In this
sense the law of the conservation of matter and energy would have to
be called, from Mr. Dixon’s standpoint, other differences neglected, a
truism. It is not a truism, in the sense of being arbitrary, but in the
sense of being a purely formal truth, as are all mathematical theorems.
Mr. Dixon refers to a passage in _Fundamental Problems_, in which I say
that “To four-dimensional beings, Kepler’s third law would most probably
appear as the cubes of the times of revolutions of the planets being
proportional to their mean distances to the fourth power.” His questions,
“What sort of an assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be?” and “Why
should the result appear different to them?” show that Mr. Dixon has
overlooked the condition on which this proposition was made. The first
sentence of this paragraph begins with the words, “If space inhered, as
Kant maintains, in the thinking subject only, spatial relations and laws
would appear different to four-dimensional beings.” Space relations are
not subjective, in my opinion, but objective. Therefore, since space
relations do not inhere in the thinking subject only, because they are a
feature of the objective world, and inhere in the thinking subject in so
far as it is at the same time an object in the objective world, Kepler’s
law would appear to four-dimensional beings, if they could exist at all,
just the same as it does to us three-dimensional beings.
P. C.
BOOK REVIEWS.
SOCIAL STATICS. Abridged and Revised; together with THE MAN VERSUS THE
STATE. By _Herbert Spencer_. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892.
JUSTICE. Being Part IV of the Principles of Ethics. By _Herbert Spencer_.
New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1891.
Among Mr. Spencer’s most important books are those entitled _Justice_ and
_Social Statics_. The latter, which first appeared in 1850, has just been
republished in about one-half of the original size, some parts having
been transferred to the book on _Justice_, and others omitted altogether.
“One difference,” as he says, “is that what there was in my first book of
supernaturalistic interpretation has disappeared, and the interpretation
has become exclusively naturalistic—that is, evolutionary.” Another
change is that a demonstration of the injustice of socialism is
substituted for his former arguments, plainly repudiated in _Justice_,
against private ownership of land. Equally important is the omission of
the chapter asserting “The Right to Ignore the State.”
The demand for Woman Suffrage has also been withdrawn from the new
edition of _Social Statics_, though it retains the original protest
against “the reign of man over woman,” and asserts an “equality of
rights in the married state.” Here again, Spencer’s final position must
be sought in his _Justice_ where it is urged that women cannot justly
have equal powers with men unless they have equal responsibilities. They
cannot serve their country as men do; and if they take an equal share
in the government, “their position is not one of equality but one of
supremacy.” Even in time of peace, they are, he thinks, too impulsive
to vote judiciously, too sympathetic to oppose “fostering the worse at
the expense of the better,” and too fond of “a worship of power under
all its forms” to protect individual liberty against the encroachment of
authority. This objection seems particularly strong, because there is
still great danger of the growth of state despotism at the expense of
personal freedom, even in republics. Many recent instances are given by
Spencer in “The Man versus the State,” now reprinted in the same volume
with _Social Statics_; and it is urged in _Justice_, that even in the
United States “universal suffrage does not prevent an enormous majority
of consumers from being heavily taxed by a protective tariff for the
benefit of a small minority of manufacturers and artisans.”
Our voters are much too ready to follow hasty impulses and unscrupulous
leaders; and both faults are most common among the most ignorant. How
strongly education encourages independence was acknowledged by those
slave-holders who said, “Our negroes shall not learn to read, for that
makes them run away.” Public schools have found their worst enemies among
Popes and Czars, and their best friends in the statesmen most honored by
republics. There is no other institution for whose advantages Americans
are practically unanimous. The necessity of popular education at the
public cost is acknowledged by Huxley, Mill, and other advanced thinkers
so generally, that Spencer’s exceptionally hostile opinion ought not to
be taken as a self-evident truth.
Mr. Spencer’s examination of this subject does not appear to have been
so thorough as the occasion demands. In denying that education prevents
crime, he relies mainly on Joseph Fletcher, who, as stated in both
editions of _Social Statics_, “has entered more elaborately into this
question than perhaps any other writer of the day,” and who admits that
there is a “superficial evidence against instruction.” Spencer takes
no notice of Fletcher’s having succeeded completely in breaking down
this superficial evidence. In elaborate papers, published in the tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth volumes of _The Journal of the London Statistical
Society_, and illustrated by many tables and maps, Fletcher shows that
the proportion to the population, in various parts of England, of people
unable to sign their names, corresponded everywhere to the proportion
of illegitimate births as well as of commitments for crime. Separating
these latter into classes according to degree of guilt, he proves that
the worst crimes are most common where there is the most ignorance.
Thus he is enabled to say, “The conclusion is therefore irresistible
that education is essential to the security of modern society.” That
this testimony of Spencer’s principal witness is really the truth can
be further proved by the statistics in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
showing that between 1841 and 1876, while the percentage of illiterates
to population in England and Wales was reduced one-half, that of
criminals was reduced to one-third of what it was originally. (Vol. VIII,
pp. 221 and 249-251.)
Spencer also refers to the fact that schools have sometimes been carried
on in the interest of despotism; but most kinds of food are easily
adulterated; and education is valuable, notwithstanding, as food for
liberty. This last consideration disposes completely of his comparison of
state-churches with state-schools; and the fact, mentioned in the revised
but not in the original edition of _Social Statics_, that opinions differ
about the best methods of education, is really an additional instance of
the encouragement given by our system of public schools to independence
of thought.
Spencer’s chief objection to this system is that it does not fit his
theory that “the liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of
all, is the rule in conformity with which society must be organised,”
(p. 45). Such a “law of right social relationships,” (p. 55) would, he
admits, require us to repeal our laws against indecency, abolish our
Boards of Health, and close our poorhouses, postoffices, banks, and
lighthouses, except in so far as these institutions, like our streets and
roads, might be cared for by benevolent individuals. He does not tell us
how a government, thus limited to managing the police, army, and navy,
could keep up a fire-department, nor how new streets, roads, railways,
or canals could be opened, in case the owners of land put their prices
too high for the projectors; but the most unfortunate application of his
theory would be to close our public schools.
There is no danger of this, however; and the principal evil likely to
result from his pushing his theory so far, is that he prevents people
from seeing its real value, as indicating the direction in which our
race has advanced and must make all further progress. We shall keep on
diminishing the power of the state over the man, as well as that of
the man over the child, but neither authority will ever be abolished
entirely. We shall dispense, sooner or later, with some of the public
institutions which Spencer condemns; but our common schools will, I
think, last as long as government itself. The abolitionists helped the
slave to freedom by pointing out the North Star; but they did not advise
him to quit solid earth. This mistake, although we grant that Spencer
shows us our North Star, is sometimes made in _Social Statics_.
Timely help, too, is given by him, in a thoroughly practical way, to
those reformers who are passing out from under the cloud with a silver
lining into a Cleveland summer and a fair prospect of a Harrison fall.
Among the words best worth putting into actions at once, are these: “The
right of exchange is as sacred as any other right, and exists as much
between members of different nations as between members of the same
nation. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries.” ... “Hence,
in putting a veto upon the commercial intercourse of two nations, or in
putting obstacles in the way of that intercourse, a government trenches
upon men’s liberties of action, and by so doing directly reverses its
function. To secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his
faculties, compatible with the like freedom of all others, we find to be
the state’s duty. Now trade prohibitions and trade restrictions not only
do not secure this freedom, but they take it away. So that in enforcing
them the state is transformed from a maintainer of rights into a violator
of rights.” ... “Whether it kills, or robs, or enslaves, or shackles
by trade regulations, its guilt is alike in kind, and differs only in
degree.” (_Social Statics_, ed. of 1850, pp. 326, 327; ed. of 1892, p.
137).
F. M. H.
AN ESSAY ON REASONING. By _Edward T. Dixon_. Cambridge (Eng): Deighton,
Bell, & Co. 1891. Pp. 88.
Some years ago the author of this essay made public certain views of his,
on “Geometry of Four Dimensions.” He was surprised to find that though
his arguments were received with incredulity they were not refuted.
This result appeared to him to be due to the fact that he was not
understood, that his views on geometry of even two and three dimensions
being different from those commonly entertained, he had failed of being
understood, because he had not begun his explanation at the beginning.
He therefore set to work to analyse those views and ultimately published
a book on the subject. This book, _The Foundations of Geometry_, was
reviewed by us in _The Monist_ of October, 1891. But now again the author
regards himself as not understood. He rested the positions and arguments
of his book upon certain views of logic and especially of definition,
which depart from the orthodox views, and he misjudged the fullness of
explanation that would therefore become needful. Hence this little essay.
The proper approach to the views of the author is through his doctrine of
definition. Usually definition is regarded as finding its main motive and
utility in the convenience of social converse. The meaning of any term is
regarded as resting not in the choice of him who utters it, but in the
suppositions of those who are addressed. It is true that a license is
accorded to any one upon a sufficient occasion to give a special intent
to some word, but only upon condition that that intent shall be made
sufficiently express, in other words well understood by those addressed.
Hence definition is usually taken to mean the recital or the precision of
the meaning of a term by means of language naturally apt for that end.
There is no good sense in pretending to effect either one of these ends
by language that lacks natural ability on that behalf.
Now Mr. Dixon holds, if we understand him, that conventional usage is
of very subordinate consequence in this matter, that it pertains to
the prerogative of an author to throw upon those whom he addresses the
task of gathering his meanings as best they can; that even when he
professes to explain his meanings he need not seek and employ any plain,
direct speech, but may supply his instruction indirectly: may ask his
audience to solve a problem, or to rightly guess what certain hints
mean; may require them to extract the meaning in question out of a set
of assertions that involve the same in a collateral way only. This he
calls “implicit definition.” It is analogous, he tells us, to an unsolved
equation or set of equations in algebra. So far as we are aware no one
can claim priority of the author in respect to this expedient. He seems
to regard it as of great importance, and proposes by its aid to overcome
the difficulties that environ the fundamentals of geometry.
We think that the author is led to put undue confidence in his implicit
definition, by his peculiar views upon propositions. He holds that all
propositions can, without loss or gain in the meanings as originally
stated, be reduced to statements of strict identity. This done,
propositions can, as he thinks, be operated upon after the fashion usual
with equations. But we submit that between a logical proposition and an
algebraic equation there is a difference that is in general irreducible.
For example take this proposition, Every parent loves children. To alter
this to, Every parent is identical with some [or every] person that loves
children, as is, we think, the prescription of Mr. Dixon, will not
serve; for by reading our identity in the reverse order we have: Some [or
every] person that loves children is identical with every parent.
Mr. Dixon’s views in respect to terms and to the doctrine of denotation
and connotation depart as widely from the suppositions usually held,
as do his views regarding propositions and definition. To follow out
the consequences of his proposed innovations in any adequate fulness is
forbidden to us by lack of space. We feel sure that further reflection
will lead him to much modification of his doctrines.
ρσλ.
OUTLINES OF A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. By _Hermann Lotze_. Edited by _E.
C. Conybeare_, M.A. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, & Co. New York: Macmillan
& Co. 1892. Pp. 176.
This book is an excellent translation of one of the most important works
of a prominent philosopher, who made an unusually strong impression
upon the minds of his contemporaries. Almost every line of this clean,
accurate, and charming translation betrays the translator’s devotion to
the subject, for he has taken the utmost care to bring out the ideas
of the author in the same brilliant style for which Professor Lotze is
justly famous.
The translator says in the preface: “I have completed and venture to
publish the following translation of Hermann Lotze’s _Lectures upon the
Philosophy of Religion_ in the same hope in which it was undertaken by
my late wife, that it may be of use to some who cannot read the German
original, and yet desire a concise statement of the form in which one
of the clearest-minded of our later thinkers put to himself those great
questions—as to the origin and destiny of the spirit of man, as to life
in general, and the meaning of the material universe—which occupy us
all at some time or another, many of us as soon as we have won food and
shelter for our bodies.”
We do not share Mr. Conybeare’s and his deceased wife’s enthusiasm for
the author. Although we are not blind to the great deserts of Professor
Lotze, his amiable personality, the depth of his religious and emotional
nature, the breadth of his scholarly erudition, and the brilliancy of his
ingenious, not to say poetical, presentation of philosophical subjects,
we cannot conceive that his work is come to abide. On the contrary, we
consider his philosophy as antiquated in many respects. He considers
problems that originate from a mere confusion of ideas, as being
insolvable in their nature, and attempts the solution of other problems
with inadequate methods. His thoughts still remind us of the ontological
spirit of past philosophies, and his principles are not in agreement with
positivism and the methods of scientific research.
As an instance, we quote the following passage: “We must ever set aside
any attempt to describe in positive terms, or to construct in thought,
the process by which this absolute being came to be not only one, and
that unconditionally, but at the same time a many of things which
condition one another reciprocally.”
Lotze still believes in an “absolute unity” as something prior to the
world of reality, and he declares that “We cannot Know or Explain how
this Absolute Unity is also Many” (Sec. XXI); and even if an unconscious
being could be a Many-in-One, yet it could not, according to Lotze,
generate consciousness (Sec. XXV). We do not believe that this problem
is insolvable, and do not, as does Lotze, feel constrained to fall back
on idealism. In fact, our position is so different from Lotze’s that in
spite of the full recognition of his genius, we feel as much severed from
him as if he belonged to ages long gone by.
Mr. Conybeare’s translation is most certainly an invaluable work and is
indispensable for any English student of Lotze’s philosophy.
κρς.
ON THE PERCEPTION OF SMALL DIFFERENCES, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE
EXTENT, FORCE, AND TIME OF MOVEMENT. By _George Stuart Fullerton_ and
_James McKeen Cattell_. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1892. Pp. 159.
This volume of the Philosophical Series of Publications of the University
of Pennsylvania gives an account of a large number of experiments
made for the purpose of testing the perception of small differences
of movement, of weight, and of light. The most noticeable conclusion
arrived at by the authors, is that they cannot accept any of the received
explanations of Weber’s law. They found from their experiments, by the
method of estimated amount of difference, that “we tend to estimate
the intensity of sensation as directly proportional to the intensity
of the stimulus; consequently, in so far as any deduction concerning
quantitative relations in sensation can be made from such estimation,
the sensation increases as the stimulus and not as its logarithm,”
thus invalidating Fechner’s law. The authors believe also that Weber’s
law does not hold for the perception of movement, as they find that
the error of observation usually increases “as the stimulus is taken
greater but more slowly,” and that it is proportional to the square
root of the stimulus. Accordingly, they substitute for Weber’s law the
following: “The error of observation tends to increase as the square
root of the magnitude, the increase being subject to variation, whose
amount and cause must be determined for each special case.” It is proper
to add, that Professor Fullerton gives only a qualified assent to these
conclusions, on the grounds that mathematicians are not agreed as to the
soundness of the theory upon which the law is based, and that the errors
in question may not be independent errors. He considers, however, the
results obtained by the authors “as sufficiently in accord with the laws
to justify them in holding it tentatively, and subject to criticism.”
As Fechner’s law rests on that of Weber, and on assumptions which appear
to be incorrect, it also fails, and it follows that the psycho-physical,
physiological, and psychological theories put forward to account for
the supposed logarithmic relation between mental and physical processes
are superfluous. From these conclusions we may judge of the importance
of the experiments made by Professors Fullerton and Cattell, whose work
requires to be carefully studied by all those interested in the special
questions to which it relates.
Ω.
PSYCHOLOGIE DU PEINTRE. By _Lucien Arréat_. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892. Pp.
LIX, 264. Price, 5 fr.
The author of this interesting work informs us that it does not aim
at being a natural history of society, nor is it even a study in
professional psychology. This is hardly correct, however, as such a
study must be based on that of individuals, and a writer of M. Arréat’s
reputation cannot treat of a large group of individuals without throwing
light on the psychology of the whole class to which they belong. He
very aptly likens artists as a whole to a large family, the artist in
design to a genus of this family, and painters to a species. This has
its varieties, and it is by the study of these that the author seeks to
arrive at a knowledge of the psychology of the painter.
Believing that there exists a relation between the temperament and the
qualities of the mind and that this is influenced by heredity, he devotes
the first part of the work to questions of physiology and heredity. The
second part deals with the painter’s vocation, his æsthetic sentiments,
his professional memory, and, as the evolution of art is connected with
the progress of visual analysis, with his sense of sight. Then comes
an examination of the general mental qualities of the painter, his
intellectual character, his various phases of memory and aptitudes, and
the influences which affect his work. The fourth part of the book treats
of the painter’s character, his egoistic and sympathetic traits, his
will, and his moral and social traits. And finally reference is made
to questions of pathology, particularly defects of vision, and to “the
miseries of genius.”
On all these subjects M. Arréat has many acute remarks supported by
numerous facts, often derived from painters themselves, who thus, says
the author, will be found “living and speaking on each page, just as
they are, and making themselves known by their works, sympathetic or
disagreeable, indifferent or superior, but always interesting.” It is
noticeable, in connection with the important subject of heredity, that
in a list of about three hundred painters almost two-thirds are sons of
painters or of workers in art, and M. Arréat thinks that if more complete
information were obtainable the proportion would be increased.
In the chapter on the miseries of genius, the author takes exception to
the view expressed by M. Lombroso that the creative inspiration of genius
is, at least in some cases, the equivalent of epileptic convulsion.
That genius may lead to insanity is true; and M. Arréat admits that
remarkable aptitudes have often appeared in a family at the beginning of
its degeneracy. But he adds that painters are for the most part healthy,
and they show hardly any more singularity than other men may have. He
concludes his work with the following words: “Genius makes use of, as
we have sufficiently shown, faculties which are common to nearly all
men, if they are unequally strong and variously distributed with each.
Genius, moreover, in the most elevated sense that it can be understood,
is an exception among artists themselves, and even in genius, the meeting
together of several happy gifts is exceptional. But it is willingly
attributed to all those, whatever may be their art, whose works are able
to touch the human cords that vibrate the most profoundly. Painters
appear to us to compose a well-marked type among such. The reader
has seen the characters of it brought together and discussed in this
volume: he will preserve its living image after having closed the book.”
This in itself furnishes a sufficient recommendation for the perusal
of M. Arréat’s work, which apart from its psychological value, is a
perfect mine of gracefully written information about painters and their
peculiarities.
Ω.
PHYSIOLOGIE DE L’ART. By _Georges Hirth_. Traduit de l’Allemand et
précédé d’une Introduction par _Lucien Arréat_. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892.
Pp. 247.
We have now occasion to review a work on a subject much akin to the
preceding—a work which has been translated from the German by the same
author, M. Lucien Arréat, and supplied by him with a very interesting
introduction. This Introduction is in reality a résumé by M. Arréat of
a series of studies by M. Hirth on physiological optics. These studies
are of great importance and are classed by the French editor under the
three heads of Form, Illumination, and Movement. The first of these
comprises the subjects of monocular and binocular vision, the depth and
the bilateral enlargement of the visual field, perspective and identical
points. Under the head of illumination the effect of the “double bath of
light” through the two eyes, the “luminous equation,” and the problems
connected with optical measurement are considered.
We have not space to exhibit fully the author’s ideas on these topics,
but we can state what are regarded by M. Arréat as the two principle
propositions which give to them their life and unity. One of these
propositions is, that the first function of our dioptric apparatus
consists in furnishing to our central visual organ, which M. Hirth terms
the _internal eye_, material which the latter has to interpret. The other
is that it is necessary to get rid of mathematical concepts, which are
much too rigid to be applied to the delicate problems of vision, and to
fall back on visual sensation such as it is. These propositions imply,
moreover, the admission of an electro chemical process, “without which
the properties of the eye and the marvels of vision remain inexplicable.”
This last conclusion has a bearing on the nature of memory, or the
recollection of the impressions received by the nerves and brain after
the original excitation has disappeared. Thus, M. Hirth suggests that
when we know the physiological procedure in the impregnation of cerebral
molecules, or in their electric charging, memory will be found to be only
the prolongation of the duration of consecutive images.
The inquiries of M. Hirth throw great light on the difference between
monocular and binocular vision, for information as to which and other
details of his optical theory we must refer our readers to M. Arréat’s
Introduction. This concludes with a consideration of the perception of
light-movement, the reproduction of which is said to require a special
exercise of attention, direct or indirect. Here we have the third degree
of attention, according to the views of M. Hirth, who regards it as
artistic apperception, having its end in itself and capable of being
reproduced through co-ordination of the movements perceived.
A considerable portion of the second and principal part of this work is
occupied with the psychology of attention and of the related subject
memory. The latter is defined by M. Hirth as “a sum of states of
perception gradually accumulated by the various organs of sense,” and it
is thus not a special faculty of the mind. The mental condition which
results from the action of memory is what is known as _disposition_. This
disposition is transmitted from one generation to another, and becomes
innate as the memory of the species. But it is intimately connected
with the nervous system, and with the brain regarded as the electric
storehouse of memories. It is in accordance with these ideas that the
author explains the transmission of hereditary qualities, the problem
which is at present engaging so much attention. The innate organisation
is a conservation of nervous quality or temperaments associated with the
anatomical disposition of the nervous system, and a certain condition
of electrical tension among the cerebral molecules. The transmission of
ancestral qualities depends, however, on the vigor and good condition of
the germ, and as the organisation received from our earliest ancestors
is the most persistent, the primitive “disposition” will subsist even
without exercise whilst nutrition and circulation assure the continuance
of molecular growth.
It is with the visual memory that the author is chiefly concerned, and he
affirms that the optical phenomena referred to in the Introduction compel
us to admit the existence in the brain of a central organ, which he terms
the internal eye. In order to determine the position of this organ, which
is the real seat of visual perception, to the exclusion of the retina,
whose function has been overestimated, M. Hirth considers the anatomical
and physiological aspects of the question, and he accepts the conclusion
arrived at by H. Munk in his _Functions de l’écorce cerebrale_, that
perception is the function of a particular portion of the cerebral
cortex. There thus exist two visual centres or “internal eyes,” one
in each convexity of the occipital lobes, as shown in Plate V. of the
present work. Munk’s researches would seem to prove, moreover, that not
only is there a general localisation of visual memories, but that each
memory is fixed in a precise and determined place. The centres of memory
and the centres of perception, which M. Hirth supposes to be simply a
phase of memory, are the same. Moreover attention is connected with
perception, but it is an imperfect state of memory. Attention requires
the expenditure of force, while perfect memory acts spontaneously; and it
is only in this form, “exempt from fatigue, that it becomes the passive
servant of our instincts and sensations, of our voluntary acts, of our
labor.” Memory when perfect is automatic, and according to the theory
of M. Hirth, who does not accept M. Ribot’s monoideistic theory, it is
accompanied with automatic attention, which is the result of a gradual
transformation of “energetic” attention, and attains in a normal adult
an incredible development both in quantity and quality. This _latent_
attention is required by the existence of latent memory, which is
properly spoken of by M. Hirth as an organic attribute of the highest
moment, seeing that it forms the basis of all individual acquirements.
It would seem to answer, however, to what is often spoken of as the
subconsciousness.
We can understand how this doctrine of latent memory and latent attention
can have an important bearing on the question of the origin of the
artistic sense, especially as each brain centre may be supposed to have
its own memory, and each fundamental memory its special temperament.
The activity of such centres is due in great measure, as pointed out by
M. Ribot, to nutrition and blood-circulation but M. Hirth adds a third
factor, electrical tension. According to his theory, cerebral activity
rests ultimately on electricity, the invisible currents of which,
maintaining the whole system in a state of tension, are “the inferior
currents of the latent memory,” the brain centres being electrical
accumulators. This idea, which the author applies also to the explanation
of colored visual memories, is open to strong critical objections. In
relation to the particular subject of art, the author shows that the
hereditary transmission of talent depends on the active maintenance
of the special temperament of certain fundamental memories and their
associations, and talent itself therefore depends on the existence of
such a temperament. We here come in contact with M. Lombroso’s theory
of the physiological degeneracy of genius, which M. Hirth opposes with
much force, and we think on the whole with success. This discussion
occupies the last chapter of a work that, as our readers will be able to
judge from the glance given here at some of its leading topics, has a
scientific value quite apart from the special subject of art which it is
intended to illustrate, and which it goes far towards establishing on a
physiological basis.
Ω.
LES ALTÉRATIONS DE LA PERSONNALITÉ. By _Alfred Binet_. Paris: Félix Alcan
1892. Pp. 323. Price, 6 fr.
In the present work, the accomplished director of the laboratory of
physiological psychology at the Sorbonne has brought together and
systematised all the most reliable phenomena bearing on one of the most
curious subjects of inquiry now engaging attention. Notwithstanding the
disagreement between different experimenters as to particular facts,
all have arrived at the conclusion that, under special conditions, the
normal unity of consciousness may be broken, and that then there is
the production of several distinct consciousnesses “each of which can
have its perceptions, its memory, and even its moral character.” No
one is better fitted than M. Binet to perform the eclectic work he has
undertaken of discussing the recent researches on the alteration of
personality, without regard to the special views of particular schools.
The subject is considered by him under the three heads of Successive
Personalities, Coexisting Personalities, and The Alterations of
Personality in the Experiences of Suggestion. The two first parts deal
chiefly with phenomena presented by somnambulic and hysteric subjects.
In the third part M. Binet applies the fact of the duplication of
personality to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritism, the term he
very properly gives to so-called spiritualism. He regards the supposed
spirit agent as the subconscious personality of the medium acting under
the influence of suggestion, a view which undoubtedly meets most of the
actual facts of spiritism.
Notwithstanding the divisibility of the ego, there can be no doubt of
the unity of the personality under normal conditions. The question is
as to the nature of this unity, and the author follows M. Ribot in
affirming that it consists in the coördination of the elements which
compose it. He repudiates the idea that memory is the sole foundation of
consciousness, as not only may one memory embrace different states, but
the same individual may have several memories, several consciousnesses,
and several personalities. For the opinion of M. Binet on other points
we must refer our readers to the work itself, which forms an important
addition to the International Scientific Library.
Ω.
L’HOMME DANS LA NATURE. By _Paul Topinard_. With 101 Illustrations in the
text. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1891. Pp. 350. Price, 6 fr.
The present is the third work in which Dr. Paul Topinard, the well-known
pupil and successor of M. Broca, the founder of French Anthropology,
has given to the public his general ideas in relation to the science
of which he has made so profound a study. In 1876 he published his
_Anthropologie_, which reflected in great measure the teaching of his
master, Broca. Ten years later, in 1886, appeared his larger and more
important work, _Eléments d’anthropologie générale_, which treated of
the history and methods of anthropology, with various other subjects.
Now Dr. Topinard gives us his matured ideas on “Man in Nature,” by which
is meant physical nature, the object of the present work being to show
the place that man occupies physically among animals, and his probable
origin or descent. It is not surprising that a writer who was the pupil
of Professor de Quatrefages as well as of Professor Broca should declare
himself a supporter of the principle of unity of composition, formulated
by M. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, from which flows that of evolution,
that is the natural derivation of beings from one another. As to the
means by which this is brought about, the author reserves his opinion
until the publication of a further work which he has in preparation.
Dr. Topinard devotes the second chapter of the present work to a
consideration of the position to be accorded to anthropology in relation
to the other sciences. He declares it to be a pure, concrete science,
essentially anatomical and observatory, and thus distinguishes it from
ethnography, which has to do with peoples under all their aspects.
Both alike are branches of the science of man in its broadest sense.
If anything can be added to the author’s explanation, it is that
anthropology has to do with mankind as a series of _individuals_, while
ethnography is concerned with the _groups_ into which such individuals
are collected. This is not inconsistent with Dr. Topinard’s definition
of anthropology as the science “which studies human races, the human
species, and the place of man in the classification of animals.” For
all the facts on which it is based are derived from the observation
of individuals, and when races are compared with each other, they are
compared as ideal individuals, formed by a generalisation of certain
prevailing qualities, just as mankind by a similar process becomes an
ideal individual, a scientific Adam, who is compared with other animals.
There is an apparent difficulty in relation to psychology which Dr.
Topinard claims entirely for anthropology, but it disappears when we
see how closely he associates psychology with physiology. He says, and
we quite agree with him, that “characters of a psychological nature,
reduced to their most simple expression, whether attributed to human
races, or to the general human type, belong to ordinary physiological
characters; the corresponding anatomical part takes its place by the side
of other physical characters; the theory and explanation of intellectual
operations, of feelings and volitions, belong to the special physiology
of man and to the application of the ideas of general physiology.”
While accepting as correct the division of anthropology, in its
restricted sense into general and special, as proposed by Broca and
Bertillon, the author thinks it does not conform to the plan which
should be adopted if it is desired to proceed, by the method of analysis
and synthesis, from the known to the unknown. The plan adopted by Dr.
Topinard is, by analogy with the procedures of general zoölogy, to
begin by recalling the general notions applicable to his subject as to
the distribution of animals by groups of varying values, the choice
of characters on which they repose, and the differences between the
race, the species, the family, and the order, these last forming the
pivoting point of his views as to the place of man in classification.
Then commences the study of characteristics, the mode of ascertaining
them, of putting them to use and of appreciating their value, accompanied
by examples, drawn from special anthropology, proper to illustrate the
methods employed. Finally, a parallel is drawn between man and animals,
that a conclusion may be arrived at as to the place of man in the series
of beings, and his probable genealogy.
All these points are carefully considered by the author, who has framed
a canon of the medium adult man of the European type, a figure based
on which forms the frontispiece to the work. The proportions of this
figure are derived from a comparison of all the most authentic published
measurements, and the canon framed from them conforms closely to that
recognised in artists’ studios, except that in the latter the arm is too
short and the neck too long.
The most generally interesting subjects discussed by the author are
those connected with the relationship of man to other animals, and
particularly the structure of the brain. Dr. Topinard makes a careful
comparison of the cerebral convolutions of various animals and man,
with numerous illustrations, and he arrives at the conclusion that none
of the characters said to distinguish man from the anthropoid apes are
absolute; all are reducible to a question of degree of evolution, the
superior degree being sometimes found among the anthropoids, and the
inferior degree with man. The cerebral type of the anthropoids is a human
type not completely developed, or the cerebral type of man is a developed
simian type. Man thus undoubtedly belongs to the order of the Primates.
After considering the form and volume of the simian and human brains,
the author remarks that “man alone has a frontal lobe developed in all
its parts, and filling up a large, concave, and deep frontal shell which
externally gives place to the forehead, one of the characteristics of
man.”
Connected with the form and volume of the brain is the transformation
of the animal skull into the human skull, and the relation of this
transformation to the facial characteristics of man. These points,
and also various questions connected with the bipedal or quadrupedal
attitude, and with the attitude and function of prehension, are treated
in detail, as are certain other distinctive simian and human characters.
A chapter is devoted to a consideration of the important subject of
retrogressive anomalies and rudimentary organs. In his concluding chapter
Dr. Topinard points out the place of man in animal classification, and
refers to the questions of his single or multiple origin, his genealogy
and his future. In connection with the subject of classification, the
author dwells on the fact that man is not the only relatively perfect
animal, and yet that none of the mammalia, which we admire for their
beauty or for their usefulness, equal the monkeys in the possession of a
brain approaching the human type. The brain, the hand, and the attitude
are the three characteristics which especially connect man with the
monkey, and particularly with the anthropoids, and the question has long
been agitated whether in these particulars the last named is allied more
closely to man or to the other monkeys. Dr. Topinard affirms that in
all these particulars the anthropoids should be classed with the other
monkeys, and therefore that man stands alone.
As to the descent of man, the French anthropologist would seem to agree
with M. Vogt that the type from which man has developed was also the
source of the monkey and anthropoid types, and that it first appeared
at the commencement of the Miocene period, when the earliest monkeys
succeeded to the Lemurian of the preceding Eocene epoch. Dr. Topinard
remarks that this conclusion is agreeable to that of the eminent American
palæontologist, Professor Cope, who makes man descend directly from the
Lemurian without passing through the monkeys and the anthropoids, basing
his opinion chiefly on dentition. The question of the descent of man is
connected with that of the singleness or multiplicity of his origin,
and on this point the author does not express a decided opinion. He
says that all existing types of humanity could be reduced to three, the
Europo-Semitic, the Asiatico-American, and the Negro; if not to two, the
White and the Negro. He adds that, nevertheless, “in losing oneself in
the depths of time, we can conceive the Negro, born the first, giving
birth successively to the Australoid with frizzled hair, to one of the
forms of the Brown stock with straight or wavy hair, and finally to the
white European.” Probably his actual opinion is to be gathered from his
final statement when comparing the order of the Primates to a tree, that
the Lemurians are its roots giving birth to several stems, of which one
is that of the monkey, from which branched the anthropoids, and another,
whose point of contact with the first is unknown, gives the actual human
branch, which runs parallel to that of the anthropoids without being
connected with it, and goes beyond it.
As to the future of the human race, Dr. Topinard affirms that the volume
of the brain will notably increase, that dolichocephaly will give place
to a universal brachycephaly, and that the cellules of the brain will
be perfected in quality. As the human brain is being thus perfected,
the animals nearest to the human type will disappear, and then man will
really think himself the centre round which the universe gravitates, the
sovereign for whom nature has been created. But even then the anatomist
will bring him to himself by uttering the words of Broca, “Memento te
animalium esse.” This work, which forms volume seventy-three of the
International Scientific Library, is sure to be widely read, and it will
be indispensable to the student of anthropology, who will find in it all
the information he requires on the methods of the science.
Ω.
DIE URHEIMATH DER INDOGERMANEN UND DAS EUROPÄISCHE ZAHLSYSTEM. By
_Johannes Schmidt_. Berlin, 1890. Pp. 56.
This essay is an important contribution to the problem of the place of
origin of the Indo-Germanic languages. The author is confident that
while nothing certain was known before, he has established at least one
fact which will give us a clue to the solution of the problem. This fact
is the interference of the duodecimal system with the decimal system.
The former is of Babylonian origin, but its effects are noticeable upon
almost all the Aryan tongues. The duodecimal system is not original with
the Goths or with any of the Teutons, which can be proved by the fact
that 60 or a _Schock_ was a round number, but not twelve, the etymology
of twelve (_twa-lif_) being two above a _lif_, which latter means a
certain set. Thus when the Gothic hundred as a rule meant 120, when for a
long time they distinguished between great hundreds (i. e. 120) and small
hundreds (i. e. 100), this was due to foreign influence. For if twelve
had been the basis of their number system, a _lif_ would have meant
twelve and the numerical arrangement would have progressed not in 10 × 12
but consistently in 12 × 12 or 144. Everything points to the supposition
that the Babylonian _sossos_ is still preserved in the German _Schock_
(60). Accordingly, says Schmidt, the Europeans must have been exposed to
a strong influence of the sexagesimal system; they must have been nearer
to the centre of Babylonian civilisation than are the valleys of the
Indus and the Eastern Iran. Professor Schmidt considers Penka as refuted
and also all those who regard Europe as the home of Indo-Germans.
We have to add that the eminent philologist when, discussing the problem
of the cradle of the Indo-Germanic languages does not touch upon the
other problem of the home of the Aryans, the latter being mainly an
anthropological question. Schmidt says (p. 13): “I do not intend to enter
into the problematic domain of anthropology. The original race-characters
of the Indo-Germanic nations, their causes and the home in which they
were moulded, also the physical conditions and mixtures of the races
which speak our languages, undoubtedly can be treated with success
only by the representatives of physical anthropology. But exactly so
the problem of the cradle of the original Indo-Germanic speech and the
evolution of its several languages, as they are known in history, can be
solved only by philologists.”
This is very true. Perhaps we shall approach the subject with better
success if we learn to distinguish between the anthropological problem
of the origin of the Aryan race and the philological one of the origin
of the Aryan languages. A European origin of the one might not exclude
an Asiatic origin of the other, and it still remains possible, that
European Aryans when migrating south and east developed through their
intercourse with semitic and other races the beginning of a civilisation
which powerfully affected all the Aryans, since there is ample evidence
that even in olden times a lively commerce took place between them.
When Prussian amber is found in Pelasgian graves, why should not the
sexagesimal system of the wealthy nations of the south have spread over
northern countries?
κρς.
LEHRBUCH DER HISTORISCH-KRITISCHEN EINLEITUNG IN DAS NEUE TESTAMENT. By
_Heinrich Julius Holtzmann_. Dritte verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage.
Freiburg, i. B.: J. C. B. Mohr. 1892. Pp. 508. Price, 9 M.
It has been said that the scientific purpose of an academical text-book
should be to educate the student to scientific independence, and its
practical purpose to make it available for the adherents of all parties
and denominations; and these two purposes are the surer attained the
less the author represents his own conception as that which alone can be
justified. This is the principle according to which Professor Holtzmann’s
_Lehrbuch_ has been written. That he has fully attained his aim, will
not be doubted by those who know his previous and painstaking labors, in
which he proves himself as a theologian fully imbued with the spirit of
science and scientific critique.
The first edition of this work appeared in 1885, the second in 1886, and
the present and third edition can make the just claim of being carefully
revised and perfected in every respect, so that it is to be regarded as
a comprehensive, concise, and clear review of the critical materials of
the New Testament. There is no doubt that the work as it now stands will
remain the best book for reference of its kind.
Professor Holtzmann in a brief introduction of seventeen pages sketches
the history and literature of New Testament criticism. The book is
divided into two parts, the first treating the subject in a general way,
the second entering into its several details. In the first part the
author presents us with a history of the text and of its traditions,
explaining the causes of the alterations that were introduced either
unintentionally or by mistake; he reviews the critical apparatus for
text-revision and also the history of the printed and revised editions
up to the present attempt at emendation. Then a history of the canon
is given, from the oldest Christian literature down to the radical
criticisms of the present time. In the second and special part we find
a careful compilation of all the criticisms concerning the single books
and epistles of the New Testament. The first chapter treats of St.
Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, Romans,
to Philemon, the Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, the pastoral
epistles; further, the epistle to the Hebrews, which is non-Paulinian,
the two epistles of St. Peter, the epistle of St. Jude, and that of St.
James. The second chapter introduces us into the historical books of the
synoptic gospels and the Acts, where, in a brief review of fifty-seven
pages, we find the same data presented which are more fully explained in
another publication of our author, reviewed in _The Monist_, Vol II, No.
2.
A new period in the development of Christian literature begins with
all those writings which go under the name of St. John. A discussion
of these books is contained in the third chapter, which treats of the
apocalypse, the fourth gospel, and St. John’s epistles. Not the least
interest attaches to the fourth chapter, the subject of which is the
vast domain of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, the number of
which has, of late, been greatly increased by several new discoveries.
The subject divides itself naturally into apocryphal gospels (Chap. II),
apocryphical stories about the lives and deeds of the apostles (Chap.
III), apocryphical epistles (Chap. IV), and apocryphical apocalypses
(Chap. V).
κρς.
SAMMLUNG VON POPULÄR-WISSENSCHAFTLICHEN VORTRÄGEN ÜBER DEN BAU UND DIE
LEISTUNGEN DES GEHIRNS. By Professor _Theodor Meynert_. Vienna and
Leipsic: Wilhelm Braumüller. 1892. Pp. 253.
This latest publication of Professor Meynert’s was mentioned in the last
number of _The Monist_ by Mr. Christian Ufer, in the department “Literary
Correspondence.” Since its appearance Professor Meynert has died. His
name has stood foremost for a great number of years in the ranks of
psychiatrical investigators, and his contributions to the science to
which he was devoted, have, perhaps more than those of any other, tended
to its permanent advancement. The activity of his life has extended
over a great number of years, and his labors have not only been applied
to the theoretical interests of his science alone, but have also been
directed—and this is the most important part of every scientist’s work—to
bringing the results of his investigations into connection with the great
body of knowledge at large, and especially to putting in popular form,
and bringing within the reach of the general reader, the facts of the
science which he contributed so much to establish.
The present lectures date from the year 1868. They owe their origin to
the identification in later years of the interests of medicine with
the interests which every human being has at heart, of resolving the
mysteries of mental operations generally. Their main subject is the
description and investigation of the structure of the cerebral organs;
and the elucidation in the light of such description of the psychical
operations of the brain. The fundamental facts of this province are
not difficult. The main thing required is to free ourselves from the
impediments which artificial thought on this subject has at all times
imported into the consideration of intellectual facts. Our knowledge
in this domain is founded on observation and introspection; not upon
dialectics. Phenomena, simply, are presented to observation, and not
the ultimate essences of forces. So, too, the apparatus of observation
and introspection give only their own phenomena. Their contents are
the animated external world as it affects conscious beings, and
involves, besides intuition, the facts of memory. Unpersonal inherited
memories, which take the form of instinct, are not forthcoming. The
present lectures do not pretend to give instruction in the anatomy of
the brain _per se_, but simply in so far as it is necessary to the
understanding of the brain’s mechanism. All things viewed, all things
intuited are contents of consciousness, which in its limitations to the
sense-impressions of the individual being, we term the ego, or _I_. In
so far as the external world is the intuited contents of consciousness,
the extent of the latter is increased, the ego, the _I_, expands into
the secondary ego, or _I_. In this doctrine of a secondary ego the
problems which grow out of the behavior of individuals towards the
external world are resolved in the single explanation that the ego of
each particular group of things seeks to preserve itself by internal
and external motions. The ego is simply in the possession of itself
in every extension which it acquires; if such extension consists of a
common possession, its desire and tendency to preserve such is simply
explained by the fact that such possession is the ego itself. Amongst the
intuited objects of the ego are to be classed also as component parts of
the secondary ego of every individual, the other living individualities
of the world. From the point of view of this fact, the ego appears
in its social rôle. The present lectures consequently extend to the
consideration of the interactions of brains in society, to culture and
civilisation, and seek to establish the phenomena of these domains as
facts of physical knowledge. The method of physical inquiry is that of
comparison by the alteration of the attendant circumstances in which
the psychical mechanism acts. Physiology bases it on experiment. Nature
also supplies experiments with the results that also embrace phenomena
of culture. In the directions indicated here, the diseases of the mind
afford a comparative means for the investigation of the phenomena
of consciousness, a doctrine of natural cerebral experiments, and a
foundation for a knowledge of the phenomena of mind.
μκρκ.
PERIODICALS.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 5.
UEBER EIN OPTISCHES PARADOXON. By _Franz Brentano_.
“FLATTERNDE HERZEN.” By _Adolf Szili_.
UEBER BEGRÜNDUNG EINER BLINDENPSYCHOLOGIE VON EINEM BLINDEN. By
_Friedrich Hitschmann_.
BEMERKUNGEN ÜBER DIE VON LIPPS UND CORNELIUS BESPROCHENE
NACHBILDERSCHEINUNG. By _Otto Schwarz_.
CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 6.
BEITRÄGE ZUR DIOPTRIK DES AUGES. By _M. Tscherning_.
OPTISCHE STREITFRAGEN. By _Th. Lipps_.
CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 1 and 2.
UEBER DIE SCHÄTZUNG KLEINER ZEITGRÖSSEN. By _E Schumann_.
ZUM BEGRIFF DER LOKALZEICHEN. By _C. Stumpf_.
ZUR KENNTNISS DES SUCCESSIVEN KONTRASTES. By _Richard Hilbert_.
LITTERATURBERICHT.
The first article is on an optical paradox. Let two equal parallel lines
be drawn, as in the cut below; then let two small straight lines be drawn
from the extremities of these in such a way that in the first they form
acute angles with the line and in the second, obtuse angles. The first,
it will be seen, appears shorter than the second. What is the explanation
of this phenomenon?
[Illustration: Cut 1.]
[Illustration: Cut 2.]
[Illustration: Cut 3.]
[Illustration: Cut 4.]
[Illustration: Cut 5.]
The author’s answer is, that this phenomenon is a consequence of the
well-known fact that we overestimate small angles, and underestimate
large ones. The presence of the lines has nothing to do with the optical
illusion, as the inserted cut, in which the lines are omitted, shows.
(Cut 2.) The optical illusion is also not present when the lines are
rectangularly attached, as is Cut 3. These facts prove that angular
_inclination_ is the decisive factor. The following cuts show this, the
first in a more and the second in a less marked degree. (Cuts 4, 5.)
The simplest case in which the explanatory factor of this phenomenon
is involved, is that of the estimation of the distance of an isolated
point from the extremities of a short straight line. The estimation of
this distance is dependent upon our estimation of the angle made by
lines drawn from the point to the extremities of a short line. If this
estimation is false, it produces by an exact trigonometrical law, an
error in the estimation of the corresponding distance. This explains all.
In our first figure the factor of illusion is eight times presented:
hence its marked character.
The second article consists of a rather long series of experiments on the
so-called “flatternde Herzen” by Adolph Szili.
The third article is on the foundations of a psychology of the blind,
by a blind man, Friedrich Hitschmann, of Vienna. This article contains
a number of interesting facts concerning the sensory, intellectual, and
emotional life of blind people, and affords a great many valuable hints
for the development of the special psychology which the author has in
view.
The first article of No. 6 of the _Zeitschrift_ is a very exhaustive
one, some sixty pages in length, filled with special and technical
investigations concerning the dioptrics of the eye. When light passes
from one refracting medium into another it is partially reflected at the
dividing surface, and transmits by reflection the objects from which it
has proceeded. This is also the case with the human eye, which is itself
a lens. The refracted pictures are the only pictures of importance to
the possessor of the eye; but just as in the construction of optical
instruments, the reflected or “lost” images are of supreme importance to
the optician in the determination of the properties of his productions,
so these same pictures in the human eye are of supreme importance to
the physiologist and the psychologist. This is the subject of Dr.
Tscherning’s researches.
In the second article Dr. Th. Lipps discusses some mooted questions of
optics. The first part of the article is a reply to Schwarz’s criticism
in the preceding number of the _Zeitschrift_. The second part is a
review of Franz Brentano’s explanation of the optical paradox, discussed
in the second paragraph of this notice. Lipps declares, that, though
there is some truth in Brentano’s explanation, it is nevertheless an
error to believe that acute angles, _as such_, are overestimated, and
obtuse angles, as such, are underestimated. On the contrary, every time
such errors in estimation occur, there exist particular reasons for it,
the character of which renders the attempt impossible to derive the
estimation of distance directly from the estimation of angles. Lipps
supports his position by actual facts. His chief and most philosophical
remark is, that it is a perilous and improper thing to do to explain
isolated optical illusions by isolated and independent hypotheses;
optical illusions are not exceptions: they constitute a class of
phenomena in themselves, and they should be considered in their natural
and logical connection. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.).
μκρκ.
VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Vol. XVI. No. 3.
UEBER REAL- UND BEZIEHUNGS-URTHEILE. By _J. v. Kries_.
WAS IST LOGIK? By _A. Voigt_.
ZUR PSYCHOLOGIE DER LANDSCHAFT. By _R. Wlassak_.
DES NIC. TETENS STELLUNG IN DER GESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE. By
_M. Dessoir_.
The articles of this magazine are usually very rigorous and learned; and
the contents of the present number are in keeping with its reputation.
Prof. J. v. Kries discusses in an essay, evoked by the recent articles
of Riehl, the subject of “real and relational judgments”; his object
is to establish a classification, and display the logical connection,
of judgments generally. Real judgments are predications concerning
reality or actual facts; relational judgments predicate simple relations
of concepts, etc. The first requisite of a scientific exactness of
thought, says Kries, is the distinction and determination in any given
case of judgments which are real and judgments which are relational. In
the second article, which is long and exhaustive, Dr. Voigt endeavors
to determine the characters and functions of the different kinds of
logic. In view of the great prominence into which algebraical logic
of late years has come, this article is one of considerable interest.
Voigt defines the pretensions and powers of the two opposing systems
of philosophical and algebraical logic, and attempts to set forth the
justification of each. Voigt, as opposed to Husserl, cordially recommends
the study of algebraical logic to philosophers, that both disciplines may
profit by the intercourse. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
μκρκ.
PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE. Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 5 to 8.
CONTENTS: Nos. 5 and 6.
DIE WIRKLICHKEIT ALS PHÄNOMEN DES GEISTES. (Concluded.) By _A.
Rosinski_.
WESEN UND BEDEUTUNG DER IMPERSONALIEN. By _R. F. Kaindl_.
ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUM PROBLEM DER AESTHETIK. By _E. Kühnemann_.
CONTENTS: Nos. 7 and 8.
UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG.
Psychologische Studie. By _M Offner_.
ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUM PROBLEM DER AESTHETIK. (Concluded) By
_E. Kühnemann_.
WERKE ZUR PHILOSOPHIE DER GESCHICHTE UND DES SOCIALEN LEBENS
(Second Article: _G. de Greef, Introduction à la sociologie_).
By _F. Tönnies_.
RECENSIONEN.
LITTERATURBERICHT.
A. Rosinski’s contribution is a metaphysical essay on reality viewed as a
phenomenon of the mind. The results of his discussion are these: that the
world of experience, with all its laws and phenomena, and all we assume
to exist _per se_, is referable wholly to ourselves; that the primal
source and cause of all reality is not a something which lies absolutely
outside us, but is simply our own self, or ego. In what sense reality is
reality, the author proposes to discuss in future articles.
Dr. Raimund Friedrich Kaindl discusses, in the second article, the
character and meaning of the impersonal verbs. The discussion is made
both from the psychologico-logical point of view, and from the point of
view of comparative philology.
The _Philosophische Monatshefte_ contain, in each issue, a very
exhaustive bibliography of all the works which have appeared during
the month in the provinces connected with philosophy. This department
is conducted by Dr. Ascherson, the librarian of the Berlin University
library, and forms a very important and valuable feature of this
magazine. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)
μκρκ.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 100. Nos. 1
and 2.
This well-known magazine, formerly edited by Dr. J. D. Fichte and Dr.
Ulrici, is now presided over by Dr. Richard Falckenberg, of Erlangen.
It has reached its hundredth volume, and with the present two numbers
begins a new series. Its reviews and lists of newly published works
are comparatively complete. Its articles, though generally tinged
with scholasticism and chiefly treating of philosophico-historical
subjects, deal, nevertheless, with some modern and living questions; for
example, Dr. Max Schasler’s discussion of the proceedings on the recent
Prussian school law; Dr. Eugene Dreher’s consideration of the law of
the conservation of force; and Dr. Nikolaus von Seeland’s discussion
of the deficiencies of the current theory of force. The other articles
are contributed by A. Wreschner, G. Frege, J. Zahlfleisch, and Robert
Schellwien. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)
μκρκ.
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. August, 1892. Vol. IV. No. 4.
CONTENTS:
THE EXTENT OF THE CORTEX IN MAN, AS DEDUCED FROM THE STUDY OF
LAURA BRIDGMAN’S BRAIN. By _Henry H. Donaldson_.
SOME INFLUENCES WHICH AFFECT THE RAPIDITY OF VOLUNTARY
MOVEMENTS. By _F. B. Dresslar_.
EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH UPON THE PHENOMENA OF ATTENTION. By
_James R. Angell_ and _Arthur H. Pierce_.
SOME EFFECTS OF CONTRAST. By _A. Kirschmann_.
REPORT ON AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS. By
_Benjamin Ives Gilman_.
PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE. (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University.)
MIND. New Series. No. 3. July, 1892.
CONTENTS:
LOTZE’S ANTITHESIS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND THINGS. (I.) By _A.
Eastwood_.
THE FESTAL ORIGIN OF HUMAN SPEECH. By _J. Donovan_.
THE LOGICAL CALCULUS. (III.) By _W. E. Johnson_.
THE FIELD OF ÆESTHETICS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. (I.) By _H.
R. Marshall_.
DISCUSSIONS: The Influence of Muscular States on Consciousness.
By _Edmund B. Delabarre_; Dr. Münsterberg and his Critics. By
_E. B. Titchener_. The Definition of Desire. By _Henry Rutgers
Marshall_. Feeling, Belief, and Judgment. By _J. Mark Baldwin_.
CRITICAL NOTICES. (London: Williams & Norgate.)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. July, 1892. Vol. II. No. 4.
CONTENTS:
NATURAL SELECTION IN MORALS. By _S. Alexander_.
WHAT SHOULD BE THE ATTITUDE OF THE PULPIT TO THE LABOR PROBLEM?
By _W. L. Sheldon_.
ETHICS OF THE JEWISH QUESTION. By _Charles Zeublin_.
MACHIAVELLI’S PRINCE. By _W. R. Thayer_.
ON THE FOUNDING OF A NEW RELIGION. By _B. Carneri_.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE IDEA OF OBLIGATION. By _Frank Chapman Sharp_.
REVIEWS.
Prof. S. Alexander, in his lecture delivered before the Ethical Societies
of Cambridge and London, here reproduced, points out that the growth
and change of moral and social ideals are the result of a process of
mental conflict. Professor Sheldon thinks only a partial solution of the
labor problem is possible until the second coming of men somewhat of
the type of St. Francis of Assisi, “who will sacrifice their personal
opportunities, abandon their station in the world, and go down to
apply their gifts and acquirements to the cause of the lower stratum
of society.” The religious as well as economic opposition to Judaism,
according to Mr. Charles Zeublin, is caused by the exclusiveness of
the Jew, and his ultimate welfare and that of his neighbors requires a
humanitarian treatment within and without Judaism. Mr. William R. Thayer
shows that Machiavelli merely described things as they were in his time,
and deduced the laws which actually controlled the public deeds of
rulers; and that it is now “the duty of all men to sweep away the old
falsehood that rulers and governments are absolved from paying heed to
those ethical principles to which every individual is bound.” According
to Mr. B. Carneri, the living at peace with oneself and one’s fellow-men
is possible only without religion, “because there is no morality without
contentment, and it is the highest degree of discontent to strive for
something beyond this world.” Mr. Frank Chapman Sharp concludes that when
the element of _the good_ is taken out of the conception of obligation,
this degenerates into mere submission to an arbitrary imperative; the
foundation for the distinction between right and wrong must be sought in
something that appeals to us as good, and its ultimate criterion can be
given only by our chosen ideal. (Philadelphia: _International Journal of
Ethics_, 118 S. Twelfth Street.)
Ω.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. July, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.
INHIBITION AND FREEDOM OF THE WILL. By _Dr. James H. Hyslop_.
A CLASSIFICATION OF CASES OF ASSOCIATION. By _Mary W. Calkins_.
THE ORIGIN OF PLEASURE AND PAIN. By _Dr. Herbert Nichols_.
ON PRIMITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. By _Hiram M. Stanley_.
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
The confusion incident to the old controversy about freedom is due, says
Dr. James H. Hyslop, to a failure to distinguish between the _proof_
of freedom and the _conditions_ of it, that is, “the circumstances
that are necessary to it, or the characteristics that constitute it.”
Freedom consists in “self-initiative and independence of external
causes, whether there be any choice between alternatives or not,” and
inhibition and deliberation bring about both of these circumstances.
Miss Mary W. Calkins rejects the ordinary division into association by
contiguity and association by similarity, and gives detailed summaries
of the fundamental characteristics of consciousness on which association
depends and of the characteristics of association proper; the ultimate
fact of association, whether it be psychical or physical or both, we do
not understand. Dr. Herbert Nichols, in the first part of his article on
the “Origin of Pleasure and Pain,” considers the phenomena of pleasure
and pain associated with the action of the senses, and concludes that
there is no “tangible evidence indicating that pleasures and pains
are inseparable attributes of other senses or polar complements of
each other,” and that separate sensations of pain and of pleasure are
probable. Mr. Hiram M. Stanley regards pure pain as primitive mind,
and pleasure as the polar opposite to it, although they are neither
absolutely essential one to the other, pleasure being traced to “an
intermediary feeling between pain as produced by excess, and pain from
lack as differentiated form.” Consciousness is fundamentally pain and
pleasure as serving the organism in the struggle for existence. (Boston,
New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)
Ω.
THE NEW WORLD.
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.
THE SOCIAL PLAINT. By _E. Benjamin Andrews_.
RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION. By _Minot J. Savage_.
THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE STORY OF SODOM. By _T. K. Cheyne_.
THE FOUNDATION OF BUDDHISM. By _Maurice Bloomfield_.
IMAGINATION IN RELIGION. By _Francis Tiffany_.
THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY. By _S. D. McConnell_.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. By _Josiah Royce_.
HOW I CAME INTO CHRISTIANITY. By _Nobuta Kishimoto_.
NEW FORMS OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. By _Mrs. Humphry Ward_.
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.
THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. By _Otto Pfleiderer_.
ECCLESIASTICAL IMPEDIMENTA. By _J. Macbride Sterrett_.
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. By _Orello Cone_.
THOMAS PAINE. By _John W. Chadwick_.
SOCIAL BETTERMENT. By _Nicholas P. Gilman_.
THE RÔLE OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS IN MODERN RELIGIOUS
EDUCATION. By _Jean Réville_.
A POET OF HIS CENTURY. By _E. Cavazza_.
DIVINE LOVE AND INTELLIGENCE. By _James C. Parsons_.
BOOK REVIEWS.
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Company.)
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
CONTENTS: June, 1892. No. 198.
EXISTENCE ET DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. I. Existence de la
Volonté. By _A. Fouillée_.
SUR QUELQUES IDÉES DU BARON D’HOLBACH. By _A. Lalande_.
ESSAI SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PROUDHON. By _G. Sorel_.
TRAVAUX DU LABORATOIRE DE PSYCHOLOGIE PHYSIOLOGIQUE.
CONTENTS: July, 1892. No. 199.
L’INCONNAISSABLE DANS LA PHILOSOPHIE MODERNE. By _G.
Fonsegrive_.
LA MUSIQUE D’APRÈS HERBERT SPENCER. By _J. Combarieu_.
ESSAI SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PROUDHON (concluded). By _G. Sorel_.
CONTENTS: August, 1892. No. 200.
ÉTUDE CRITIQUE SUR LE MYSTICISME MODERNE. By _Rosenbach_.
LE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. By _A. Fouillée_.
LA BEAUTÉ ORGANIQUE: ÉTUDE D’ANALYSE ESTHÉTIQUE. By _A.
Naville_.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
According to M. Fouillée, the principle which tends to dominate
psychology and physiology is the ubiquity of will and of feeling, and
consequently of consciousness. Psychology will end by recognising the
continuity and the transformation of modes of psychical energy, as
physics recognises the continuity and the transformation of modes of
physical energy, and philosophy will see in physical energy the external
expression of will.
M. Fonsegrive maintains that the rejection of metaphysics as science,
which marks the modern theory of the unknowable, is the consequence of
Kant’s _a priori_ theory as to the origin of our knowledge. The laws of
the mind have no real existence prior to experience, and universal and
necessary notions can be discovered only by mental analysis. In this
manner the existence, and even the essence, of metaphysical beings may
be known, but only of such as experience puts in communication with
ourselves. Thus we know God as the necessary first cause, although our
notion of God is one of negation, of experimental notions.
After showing that Spencer’s theory of music had numerous antecedents,
and that its conclusions are unacceptable on various grounds, M.
Combarieu affirms that the secret of the musical art is the identity of
the musical idea with the imitation or expression of the real world. All
music contains a double verity; it is the meeting place of the senses
and of the rational world confounded in a unity which is the work of
art, as man is the combination of a soul and a body confounded in the
real unity of life. Spencer is an excessive simplifier, and does not
see the complexity of certain questions, which he seeks to resolve by
undervaluing them. But he has thrown light on one of the aspects of the
musical problem.
In this final essay on the philosophy of Proudhon, M. Sorel considers the
theory of justice by the light of the notion of free will. He differs
somewhat from Proudhon, and affirms that “the just man is the upright
man such as our ideal conception of antiquity represents him to us,
but transformed by our consciousness as refined by the influence of
Christianity.” In dealing with the real organisation of societies it is
necessary to distinguish between matters of justice and those of right,
which includes that of force, of which war is an application. After
showing the connection of the economic _contradictions_ of Proudhon with
the state of war, and the value of education for the realisation of
equilibrium in the state. M. Sorel affirms that education ought to be
based on manual labor, for the explanation of which science should be
taught; and that instruction should endure throughout life, so that men
can elevate themselves and that an equilibrium may be obtained between
knowledge and industrial needs. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
Ω.
APPENDIX.
PLATES BELONGING TO THE ARTICLE “THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.”
KEY TO THE PLATES.
col. ven.—ventral column.
lob. dors.—dorsal lobe.
lob. ven.—ventral lobe.
lob. v. inf.—inferior or lower ventral lobule.
lob. cr.—crural lobule.
con. dors. sup—superior (or upper) dorsal connective filaments.
con. dors. moy.—medial dorsal connective filaments.
con. dors. inf.—inferior (or lower) dorsal connective filaments.
con. v.—ventral connective filaments.
n. cr.—crural nerve.
n. al.—alary nerve.
lob. al.—alary lobule.
rac. sup—upper (or superior) root.
rac. moy.—medial root.
rac. inf.—lower (or inferior) root.
fa. as.—ascending fasciculus.
[Illustration: PLATE I.
_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Horizontal
sections.)]
[Illustration: PLATE II.
_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Horizontal
sections.)]
[Illustration: PLATE III.
_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Longitudinal
sections.)]
[Illustration: PLATE IV.
_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Transversal
sections.)]
VOL. III. JANUARY, 1893. NO. 2.
THE MONIST.
THE DOCTRINE OF AUTA.
In the “Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society” (Vol. VI,
Part IX, p. 475, 1890), Dr. Johnstone Stoney, F. R. S., published an
interesting and carefully-reasoned paper “On the Relation between Natural
Science and Ontology.” The same author had previously (1885), in a Friday
evening discourse at the Royal Institution of London, discussed the
problem, “How Thought Presents Itself Among the Phenomena of Nature.”
Dr. Stoney’s communications have not (I venture to think) received the
consideration to which they are entitled alike on the score of their
logical consistency, if his premisses and assumptions be granted, and by
reason of the author’s scientific eminence as a physicist. I therefore
propose, first, to endeavor to set forth his monistic _Doctrine of
Auta_; and secondly, to offer some criticisms thereon. Unfortunately Dr.
Stoney’s pages bristle with new technical terms, which, though no doubt
they have been serviceable to him in the attainment of precision of
thought, make his paper hard reading. Some of these I shall introduce;
others which seem less essential to the argument I shall omit. It would
be scarcely fair on the reader’s teeth or on the author’s store to
transfer all these hard nuts from Dublin to Chicago.
No philosophical discussion of a problem involving perception can be
regarded as complete without the introduction of an orange. Dr. Stoney,
indeed, substitutes a fire; but this, though it shows philosophical
independence, cannot for a moment be sanctioned by any good Berkeleyan.
An orange then, as such, is a phenomenal object formed, in a way we need
not now consider, by the synthesis of perceptions. These perceptions,
themselves synthetic, Dr. Stoney calls “tekmeria,” since they are signs
within my mind that events are happening in a part of the universe
that is distinct from my mind. The phenomenal object is supposed by
men untrained in inquiries relating to the mind to have a non-egoistic
existence—that is, an existence independent of the percipient mind. But
this supposition is found on careful scrutiny to be an error. It is a
product of mental synthesis, and is therefore termed by Dr. Stoney a
“syntheton.” It is also termed a “protheton” in contradistinction to an
“antitheton,” which we shall come to shortly.
Now if the phenomenal orange is a “syntheton”—that is, a product of
perceptual synthesis—it clearly cannot be regarded as the _cause_ of the
perceptions, through and by means of which it is constructed in mental
synthesis. Here popular thought and ordinary language are apt to mislead
us. For ordinary language is throughout built upon the popular belief
that the objects of the phenomenal world are non-egoistic or independent
_existences_, and, moreover, that they are the cause of the perceptions
which come into existence when we exercise our senses. This is, however,
“to put the car before the horse.” It is to imagine that a structure
built up out of the effects of a thing can be the cause of those effects.
The phenomenal orange is built up of perceptions instead of being the
cause of them. Their cause is therefore to be sought elsewhere than in
the phenomenal world of objects. The orange, _qua_ orange, is therefore
a “syntheton,” and cannot as such be the cause of the perceptions or
“tekmeria,” which go to its synthesis.
Let us now look at these perceptions or “tekmeria” from another point of
view. They are states of consciousness: they are _thoughts_, if we use
this word in its widest extension to embrace everything of which I or my
fellow-men or the lower animals are conscious. But my own thoughts are,
so long as they last, things that exist. They may be representative of
something outside me, but they _are_ also _real existences_. While they
last they constitute a part of the universe of existing things. They are,
in Dr. Stoney’s terminology, _auta_ (τά ὄντα αὐτά), the very things
themselves. An _auto_ (we shall throughout _italicise_ all that belongs
to this autic order of existence) is a _thing which really exists_, and
in no wise depends on the way we, human minds, may happen to regard it.
Our impressions or beliefs about it may be correct or may be erroneous;
but the term _auto_ means the _thing itself_.
Perceptions, then, inasmuch as they are thoughts, are _auta_. They
belong, moreover, to that class of real existences which, since they are
woven into the tissue of _minds_ (my mind and the minds of my fellow-men
and of the lower animals) are termed _egoistic auta_. They do not remain,
however, persistent and unchanged; for perceptions come and go and are
modified as they pass like waves over the surface of consciousness. What
causes this coming and going, and these changes in the _egoistic auta_ we
call perceptions? Not, as we have already seen, the world of phenomenal
objects! What then, but other _auta_, which, since they produce effects
upon men’s minds through their senses, may be termed _sense-compelling
auta_? The phenomenal orange is thus a “syntheton” produced through a
synthesis of the effects wrought upon my _mind_ by an autic existence,
called by Mr. Stoney the _onto-orange_. The phenomenal orange is, as we
have seen, a “protheton”; the _onto-orange_ is its _antitheton_ in the
universe of real existences.
We are now beginning to open up Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s conception of the
relation of the autic _universe_ to phenomenal Nature. Nature is the
totality of phenomenal objects; but corresponding with each phenomenal
object or “protheton” there is an _onto-object_ or _antitheton_; and the
totality of _antitheta_ constitute the _universe_. _Minds_, mine and
those of other beings, constitute the egoistic part of the universe; the
rest of the universe is constituted by _sense-compelling auta_.
We may liken the _sense-compelling universe_ to a great machine in
motion, and the _tekmeria_ or perceptions which it produces within our
minds to shadows cast by it. The laws of the movements of the machine
are the real laws of the universe—laws of nature are but the laws of
the changes which the shadows in consequence undergo. It is these
shadow laws alone which natural science can reach: the real laws of
the _universe_ of which these are shadows are beyond its grasp. In
Nature the reflective eye of science sees not only phenomenal objects,
but the relations which they bear to each other. But such relations are
themselves phenomenal; they are protheta of which the _onto-relations_ of
the real _universe_ are the _antitheta_. Every space-relation, therefore,
in Nature—for instance, that my foot is at present three yards from the
fender—has a real autic relation in the sense-compelling _universe_,
which is its _antitheton_; an _onto-relation_ between the _onto-foot_
and _onto-fender_, meaning by these terms the _auta_ which send men the
tekmeria which, when synthesised, furnish these two phenomenal objects.
The space-relations of Nature are but the shadows cast by the _autic
relations_ within the _minds_ of men, and perhaps some other animals.
But among these shadows there can be no efficient causation. When a
change takes place in the sense-compelling _universe_, the mighty
machine will cast one shadow before the change and another after. The
second shadow will accordingly succeed the first in orderly sequence,
but the relation between the shadows is not the relation of cause and
effect. Accordingly, in the laws of Nature which have been discovered
by scientific investigation, we find abundant instances of unfailingly
concomitant events and of uniformities of sequence, but not one single
instance of cause and effect. There is nothing competent to cause one
body to exclude another from the space it occupies. A statement of
the fact is one of the laws of Nature. If a stone be allowed to drop
in the vicinity of the earth, its downward speed is accelerated by a
perfectly definite law. This law is one of the Uniformities of Nature
which scientific inquiry has brought to light. But within the domain of
Physics there is no cause of acceleration. The facts as to what occurs in
Nature can be observed; the circumstances under which they occur can be
investigated; similar cases can be compared; and the laws to which the
simultaneous or successive events conform may be brought to light. But
here our knowledge ends. Physical science has said its utmost.
Now all this is changed when we turn to the only field of observation
accessible to us in which we are dealing directly with _auta_. The
_thoughts_ of which _I_ consist, the thoughts which are my _mind_, are
_auta_; a very small group of _auta_, no doubt, in the mighty _Universe_,
but still an actual sample, though a very special and one-sided sample
of what _auta_ really are. Now in the operations that go on in my mind I
do find instances, some few instances, of causes producing effects. The
familiar case of a geometrical demonstration producing in a man’s mind
a belief in the truth of the conclusion is a case in point. Here the
understanding of the proof is the efficient cause of the belief in the
conclusion which accompanies that understanding. A wish to accomplish
something, and a knowledge of how to go about it, both of which are
_thoughts_ in the _mind_, are a part of the efficient cause of subsequent
events, unless counteracted by other causes. A few other examples can be
obtained from the same small field of observation; and this is all that
man, in his isolated position, has any right to expect; for the bulk of
his thoughts are due, at least in large part, to autic causes which lie
outside his mind, and it is there also that those of his thoughts that
are known to be causes, usually exhibit their effects. When perceptions
arise in my mind, the effect indeed is within my mind, but the cause is
beyond it; and when I move my muscles the cause is within my mind, but it
is outside the mind that it operates. The instances are indeed few where
the causes and the effects are both within my tiny group of _auta_, and
it is only in these cases that I can have the process of causes producing
effects under my inspection.
But since cases can be cited, however few, they suffice to establish the
fact that the relation of cause and effect, in its full sense, does exist
in some instances in the autic _universe_; whereas it has nowhere any
place within the domain of physical science. The relation of cause and
effect among other _auta_ cannot from the nature of the case be proved.
But from its occurrence in that small part of the _universe_ which
we do know, we may fairly assume its occurrence in all parts of that
_universe_. Such an assumption is at any rate justifiable by scientific
method.
We must now pass to another point. The scientific analysis of Nature
by the physicist has led to an hypothesis which may be regarded as the
utmost simplification of which the shadows cast within the human mind by
the sense-compelling autic _universe_ are susceptible. This Dr. Stoney
calls the Diacrinomenal Hypothesis; according to which Nature is made
up of objects each of which consists of almost inconceivably minute and
swift motions. The phenomenal orange is a group of molecular motions; and
if I bowl it across the table the visible molar motion is a secondary
motion of that group of primary molecular motions which constitutes the
phenomenal object as such. And not only is the phenomenal object a group
of minute and swift motions, but all the steps between that object and
our brain, all that takes place in the air or æther, in our organs of
sense and nerves, can also be represented in terms of motion. And finally
a change consisting of motions takes place in the brain itself, whereupon
we become conscious of thought. That change which would be appreciated
as motions by a bystander who could search into our brains while we are
thinking, we should experience to be _thought_. Thus we find that in
certain cases the _autic existence_ that corresponds with motion, namely
in the motions of our own brain molecules, is _thought_. And the most
probable hypothesis as to the true relation of phenomenal Nature and the
autic _universe_ is that what we have found to be true in some cases is
always true, and that in every case it is _thought_ (or rather a change
in the causal relation in which thought stands to thought) which is the
_antitheton_ of motion; so that the totality of all actual existences,
the _universe_, is in fact identical with the totality of existing
_thought_. Of course all this _thought_, with the exception of that tiny
group that is my _mind_, is as much outside my consciousness as are the
thoughts of my fellow-men and of the lower animals.
Under this view the _minds_ of men and of other animals are specialised
specks, as it were, of a vast ocean of _thought_, to which they bear a
like inconspicuous proportion to that borne by the few brain motions of
which they are the _antitheta_, to the totality of motions throughout
Nature. Under this view the laws of the _universe_ are the laws of
_thought_. This is a very different thing, be it noted, from saying that
they are the laws of human thought. The laws of human thought bear to
them the same small proportion which the laws of the action of the wheels
of a watch upon one another bear to the entire science of dynamics. The
science of dynamics could never be evolved from a study of these laws.
But perhaps it may not be hopeless for man to attain some sound knowledge
of the laws of cosmic _thought_, inasmuch as we have some few instances
of the way _thought_ acts upon _thought_ open to our investigation in
our own minds, and since this is supplemented by our knowledge of the
physical laws of nature, which are a shadow, a probably complete shadow,
of all the laws of causation which operate throughout the _universe_,
throughout the all-embracing _Mind_ of the great _Autos_.
Such is Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s conception of the relation of Natural
Science to Ontology. I have presented it partly in his own words, partly
in mine. It has been my conscientious endeavor to put it in as strong and
favorable a light as possible, and not in any way to weaken the strength
of its logical consistency. The main thesis may now be briefly summarised
in the following propositions:
The phenomenal object is a syntheton or product of mental
synthesis.
Its efficient cause is a _real existence_ or _antitheton_.
Nature is the totality of phenomenal syntheta.
The _universe_ is the totality of autic _antitheta_.
There is no causation in Nature; but the Uniformities of Nature
are the shadows of the causal Laws of the Universe.
_Thought_ has no place in Nature: it is part of the autic
_universe_.
The syntheton of which _thought_ is the _antitheton_ is the
motion of brain molecules.
It is a probable hypothesis that the _antitheta_ of which the
motions of Diacrinomenal Nature are the syntheta, are _thought_.
This is the monistic hypothesis, that there is but one kind
of existing thing, viz. _thought_; in contradistinction to
the dualistic hypothesis that there are two kinds of existing
things, _thought_ and _motion_.
I now pass from the attitude of expositor to the attitude of critic. And
first I will attack a quite outstanding position, namely Dr. Stoney’s
assumption that Clifford’s hypothesis which he supports and extends is
_the_ monistic hypothesis, and by implication that it is the _only_
monistic hypothesis. In opposition to this I venture to affirm that there
are several forms or phases of monism. I have not space to discuss the
matter; and must content myself with a bare enumeration of some of the
logically possible forms of Dualism and of Monism.
1) DUALISM.
_A._ _Synthetic Dualism_: according to which there are two
entities, the mind and the body; and these
_a_) either work side by side, without interaction, in
pre-established harmony (_philosophic dualism_),
_b_) or interact the one on the other (_empirical
dualism_).
_B._ _Analytic Dualism_: according to which there are two
elements as the result of analysis; _motion_ (with or
without a material basis) and _consciousness_; the two
elements being related in such a way that consciousness is
inseparably associated with certain complex modes of motion.
2) MONISM.
_A._ _Synthetic monism_: according to which there is but
one entity. And this entity may be:
_a_) The body, of which consciousness is a product
(_materialistic or physical monism_);
_b_) The mind, of which the body in common with the
world of phenomena is a fiction (_idealistic monism_);
_c_) The conscious organism, exhibiting certain
transformations of energy which are felt as psychical
states (_scientific monism_).
_B._ _Analytic monism_: according to which analysis
discloses but one element; and this may be
_a_) _motion_, of which (or of one phase of which)
consciousness is merely the psychical aspect (_analytic
materialism_);
_b_) _consciousness_, of which motion is merely the
phenomenal aspect (_analytic psychism_);
_c_) _x_ (_the unknowable_) of which motion is the
physical aspect and consciousness the psychical aspect
(_monistic agnosticism_).
Such are some of the forms or phases of monism as compared with those of
dualism. It will be seen that Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s speculations fall
under the head of what I have termed analytic psychism, according to
which the sole ultimate reality disclosed by analysis is consciousness
or thought. So far I have only reminded my readers that this, though
one form of monism, is not the only form. To which Dr. Stoney may very
possibly reply that it matters not to him whether there are five or
fifty-and-five monistic heresies besides the true creed of which he is
the prophet. He is only concerned with the establishment of the true
monistic faith. And as herein I should very heartily agree with him, I
will pass on without delay to criticise an assumption that lies close to
the heart and centre of his hypothesis.
On the first page of Dr. Stoney’s essay we read: “Let us, for
convenience, call these real existences _auta_—the very things
themselves. An _auto_ is a thing that really exists, and in no wise
depends on the way we, human minds, may happen to regard it.” And on
the second page we read: “My own thoughts are, at all events, things
that exist: they at least are _auta_ so long as they last. They are,
accordingly, while they last, a part of the _universe of existing
things_.” No proof is offered of this latter assumption that my thought,
human thought, is part of the universe of _auta_. I venture to call this
assumption in question. I demand proof of its validity. Nay, I am ready
to go further and roundly assert that my thoughts are not _auta_, and
furnish no evidence whatever as to the nature of such _auta_. I am quite
aware that I may seem to be giving the lie to a direct deliverance of
consciousness; and that it will be said that it is obviously impossible
to deny the existence of thought without at the same time exercising
that, the existence of which is denied—a dictum which contains a very
pretty play upon two different uses of the word “existence.”
I go back to the orange, without which as a philosopher I am lost. I hold
it in my hand, look steadfastly at it, and drink in with my nostrils
its fragrant aroma. What says consciousness? That the phenomenal object
I call an orange exists. It says nothing about independent existence,
nothing about _auta_. The direct deliverance of consciousness is that
an object-in-consciousness exists. If a “plain man” says that the
orange has a real existence, as such, independent of consciousness, he
is going beyond the direct deliverance. And if a philosopher says that
consciousness has a real existence, as such, independent of the object,
he too is going beyond the direct deliverance. And if, as would seem
to be the case, Dr. Stoney relies on the deliverance of consciousness
for the justification of his statement that “perceptions, while they
last, are _auta_, real existences,” I submit that he is relying on a
misinterpretation of the deliverance of consciousness.
The existence of the object-in-consciousness is the datum from which
plain man and philosopher alike must start. On this foundation we must
base all our reasonings and speculations. Physical science directs its
attention to the “object” side of the given relation. And it reaches
its “diacrinomenal” result that the orange may for physical purposes
be represented as a group of swift and rapid molecular motions. But
can physics at any stage of its analysis shake itself free from the
“consciousness” side of the relation? Assuredly not. All that it can do
is to represent the object-in-consciousness we call an orange in terms
of other objects-in-consciousness we term molecular motions. Psychology
directs its attention to the “consciousness” side of the given relation.
It analyses the object-in-consciousness into percepts, sensations, and
so forth. But can psychology at any stage of its analysis shake itself
free from the “object” side of the relation? Assuredly not. All that it
can do is to represent the consciousness-of-the-object we call an orange,
in terms of the objects-in-consciousness we term sensations, relations
between sensations, and so forth.
The relation of the consciousness-of-an-object to the
object-in-consciousness may be made clear by the analogy, which is
something more than an analogy of vision and the visual field. For
clear and distinct vision, a well-illuminated object of vision, and a
healthy organ of vision are necessary as coöperating factors. So, too,
for distinct consciousness a definite object-in-consciousness and a
well-defined consciousness-of-the-object are necessary as coöperating
factors. More than this. Unless there be some object of vision, however
vague, and some organ of vision, however dim, no vision at all is
possible. The coöperation of the two factors is essential. So, too,
unless there be some object-in-consciousness, however vague, and some
consciousness-of-the-object, however dim, no consciousness at all, in
anything like the human sense of the word “consciousness,” is possible.
Here, again, the coöperation of the two factors is essential. _And
neither factor is ever given in experience without the other._
Writing as I am, for readers of _The Monist_, I need hardly turn aside to
explain what I mean by an object-in-consciousness. And yet perhaps a few
words on the subject may not be out of place, and may prevent possible
misunderstanding. An object-in-consciousness is not necessarily a
tangible, visible object, like an orange. The yellowness, the sweetness,
the weight, the bare existence of the orange, may each in turn be an
object in consciousness. For the physicist the tangible orange may be
represented in terms of swift, infinitesimal motions; and these, not less
than the phenomenal orange, are objects in consciousness. A conception of
consciousness itself, an imperfect conception, but the best we can frame,
may be an object of consciousness, just as a reflected image of the eye
may be to the eye an object of vision.
It is generally believed by modern psychologists that all
objects-in-consciousness are derivable by processes of abstraction,
generalisation, and so forth, from the primitive datum of a perceptual
object. And it must be remembered that it is only in abstraction
that we distinguish between the object-in-consciousness and the
consciousness-of-the-object. The two terms of this, for us, inevitable
relation are given in inseparable coördination. But in abstract thought
we can distinguish the inseparable terms; distinguish in thought, that
is to say, what is inseparable in actual experience. To continue the
analogy of vision, we can make the one term focal, while the other term
remains marginal in the field of view. And we can neglect, for the
purposes of our thought and reason, the marginal term. But we cannot
get rid of it. We may deal, as in physics, with motion, neglecting the
consciousness in and through which it is appreciated; but we cannot
get rid of this consciousness. Or we can deal, as in psychology,
with the consciousness, neglecting the object-in-consciousness; but
we cannot get rid of this object. The object-out-of-consciousness and
the consciousness-without-an-object, are alike unknown—or, if the
reader prefers it, unknowable, which he may write with as many capital
letters as seemeth to him good. The common-sense realist believes in
the existence of objects-out-of-consciousness. The analytical psychist
believes in the existence of consciousness-without-an-object. Both are,
if the views here advocated be sound, attributing independent existence
to that which, so far as human knowledge is concerned, has only dependent
or relative existence.
It is unfortunate that the terms “real” and “reality” should
ever have been applied to the independent existence of so-called
things-in-themselves. I think such terms as Dr. Stoney’s “autic” and
“autic existence” would be far preferable. For the word “real” has a
meaning and force which is quite definite. The orange that I hold in my
hand and see with my eyes is as real as real can be. And if a philosopher
steps in and says, “My dear sir, _that_ is not real! The real reality
is, according to some, mind-stuff or consciousness; according to others,
motion of—well I don’t quite know what, so let us simply call it motion;
and according to others this real reality is unknowable”—I say if a
philosopher steps in and talks like this, one is reminded of Lamb’s
remark on Coleridge. Coleridge had been maundering on, as was his wont,
on “subject” and “object” and all the rest of his second-hand German
metaphysics, when Lamb broke in, with his forcible stammer, in a stage
whisper: “N-n-n-never mind C-c-c-coleridge; it’s only his f-f-f-fun.”
I repeat that the orange I hold in my hand and see with my eyes
is as real as real can be; and that we have here the standard and
criterion of reality not only for plain men but for philosophers.
In the perceptual object we have reality given in its clearest,
fullest, and most forcible form. Every step in the analysis of the
perceptual object-in-consciousness; every step in the analysis of the
consciousness-of-the-object takes us so far further from reality at its
best. The orange as an object-in-consciousness is far more real to me
than either the swift infinitesimal motions of the physicist, or the
“syntheton” of related and integrated sensations of the psychologist.
And when we reach the autic existence which is supposed to underlie both
motion and consciousness, we seem to get just as far as it is possible
for the human mind to get from the real orange with which we started.
And yet it is to this autic existence that metaphysicians apply the term
“real” in a different sense. For so far I have used the word “real” for
that which is given in experience. But metaphysically the word “real”
is used to indicate independence of experience. I repeat that for this
independent existence some such word as Dr. Stoney’s “autic” would be far
better and less misleading. It would emphasise the distinction between
_real_, that is to say given in direct experience, and _autic_, that is
to say independent of experience.
Accepting at any rate for our present purpose this distinction, we
have as coördinate realities the object-in-consciousness and the
consciousness-of-the-object. And these two are only different aspects of
the one great reality, the reality of experience. Of these two aspects
neither is more real than the other. The object-in-consciousness is every
bit as real as the consciousness-of-the-object; the orange as real as our
perception thereof. Both are intensely and vitally real; but—here I am in
opposition to Dr. Stoney—_neither is autic_. I can find no warranty for
such autic existence in direct experience or the so-called deliverance of
consciousness. Nor am I aware of any process of reasoning by which it can
be demonstrated.
But, it may be said, is it not in accordance with scientific method to
make an assumption and then see how far such assumption is justified by
the results it enables us to reach? Assuredly such procedure is allowable
and often fruitful. It is not on such grounds, however, that Dr. Stoney,
if I rightly understand him, bases his doctrine of the psychical nature
of _auta_. Let us, nevertheless, pay a moment’s attention to this
assumption and the correlative assumption of analytic materialism.
Consciousness and matter-in-motion (or bare motion perhaps) are the
ultimate elements reached by the psychologist on the one hand and the
physicist on the other. Neither, if he knows his business, pretends by
this analysis to have reached autic existence. But it is open to each
to make an assumption. The materialist says: I assume that motion is
the true autic existence, of which, under appropriate conditions, human
consciousness is merely a psychical aspect. The psychist says: I assume
that consciousness is the true autic existence, of which motion is
merely the phenomenal aspect. I confess that if I were forced to choose
one of these two, (which fortunately I am not,) I should elect to throw
in my lot with the materialists. For if justification by results is
to be the criterion, I hold that the results the materialists have to
show far outweigh any results which the analytic psychists can produce.
But the fact of the matter is that in neither case do the results flow
from the autic assumption. All the results are equally valid for the
student who holds fast to the relativity of object-in-consciousness
to consciousness-of-the-object. Since therefore the assumption is
valueless so far as practical results are concerned, and since it is
somewhat repugnant to sound reason to assume that either term of a given
relationship is the same out of relationship as it is in relation to its
fellow, I contend, as against both materialist and psychist, that it
fails to make good its claim to acceptance.
What shall we say then of _auta_ or _things in themselves_? Simply that
we do not know anything about them—that they are outside the pale of
human knowledge. If we even say they exist we are using the word “exist”
in an autic and unreal sense. It is phenomenal Nature which constitutes
the real Universe; of its autic _shadow_, supposing that there be such a
_shadow_, we know nothing. Need we then stay to criticise this unknown
_shadow_?
Even if we take Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s hypothesis as it stands we
find a marked distinction between the sense-compelling _auta_ and the
egoistic _auta_, or between the sense-compelling aspect of _auta_
and the egoistic or perceptive aspect. How is this distinction to be
explained and accounted for? I can see no answer to this question save
that the distinction is a matter of experience. Why not, then, trust
experience fully? Why go beyond it at all? Why not say that both the
sense-compelling aspect and the perceptive aspect are part of the
relation which is given in experience? If Dr. Stoney could only see his
way to this concession and could be led to adopt scientific monism, which
is based on relativity, he would still secure all that is valuable in
his hypothesis, and at the same time get rid of the difficulties which as
it stands encumber it. But it would no longer be a doctrine of _auta_.
For scientific monism is not a doctrine of _auta_ but a doctrine of
phenomena—phenomena regarded not only in their physical but also in their
psychological aspect. Unifying these two diverse aspects, it contends
that the conscious organism is one and indivisible; that it is a product
of evolution; that in its physical or material aspect this evolution has
given rise to the body and brain; that in its psychical or immaterial
aspect it has given rise to the mind and human consciousness; that these
two aspects, though distinguishable in analytic thought, are inseparable
in phenomenal existence; that just as the complex modes of energy of
the human brain have been evolved from the simpler modes of energy that
are found throughout organic and inorganic nature, so too the complex
modes of consciousness of the human mind have been evolved from the
simpler modes of infra-consciousness[19] that are associated with merely
organic and inorganic modes of energy. The last clause is admittedly
hypothetical. But it is submitted that the hypothesis is one that is
founded on strictly scientific and in no sense metaphysical or autic
analysis.
C. LLOYD MORGAN.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] See _Mental Evolution_ in _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 2 (Jan. 1892),
p. 161.
EVOLUTIONARY LOVE.
AT FIRST BLUSH. COUNTER-GOSPELS.
Philosophy, when just escaping from its golden pupa-skin, mythology,
proclaimed the great evolutionary agency of the universe to be Love. Or,
since this pirate-lingo, English, is poor in such-like words, let us say
Eros, the exuberance-love. Afterwards, Empedocles set up passionate-love
and hate as the two coördinate powers of the universe. In some passages,
kindness is the word. But certainly, in any sense in which it has an
opposite, to be senior partner of that opposite, is the highest position
that love can attain. Nevertheless, the ontological gospeller, in whose
days those views were familiar topics, made the One Supreme Being, by
whom all things have been made out of nothing, to be cherishing-love.
What, then, can he say to hate? Never mind, at this time, what the scribe
of the apocalypse, if he were John, stung at length by persecution into
a rage unable to distinguish suggestions of evil from visions of heaven,
and so become the Slanderer of God to men, may have dreamed. The question
is rather what the sane John thought, or ought to have thought, in order
to carry out his idea consistently. His statement that God is love
seems aimed at that saying of Ecclesiastes that we cannot tell whether
God bears us love or hatred. “Nay,” says John, “we can tell, and very
simply! We know and have trusted the love which God hath in us. God is
love.” There is no logic in this, unless it means, that God loves all
men. In the preceding paragraph, he had said, “God is light and in him
is no darkness at all.” We are to understand, then, that as darkness
is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect
stages of ἀγάπη and ἀγαθόν, love and loveliness. This concords with
that utterance reported in John’s Gospel: “God sent not the Son into the
world to judge the world; but that the world should through him be saved.
He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been
judged already.... And this is the judgment, that the light is come into
the world, and that men loved darkness rather than the light.” That is
to say, God visits no punishment on them; they punish themselves, by
their natural affinity for the defective. Thus, the love that God is, is
not a love of which hatred is the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a
coördinate power; but it is a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect
stage of it, an Anteros—yea, even needs hatred and hatefulness as its
object. For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he
loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that
which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It
is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in
another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing
can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose
tenderness _ex vi termini_ must be reserved only for what intrinsically
is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” This is from “Substance
and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation.” It is a pity he had
not filled his pages with things like this, as he was able easily to do,
instead of scolding at his reader and at people generally, until the
physics of creation was well-nigh forgot. I must deduct, however, from
what I just wrote: obviously no genius could make his every sentence as
sublime as one which discloses for the problem of evil its everlasting
solution.
The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting
creations into independency and drawing them into harmony. This seems
complicated when stated so; but it is fully summed up in the simple
formula we call the Golden Rule. This does not, of course, say, Do
everything possible to gratify the egoistic impulses of others, but
it says, Sacrifice your own perfection to the perfectionment of your
neighbor. Nor must it for a moment be confounded with the Benthamite, or
Helvetian, or Beccarian motto, Act for the greatest good of the greatest
number. Love is not directed to abstractions but to persons; not to
persons we do not know, nor to numbers of people, but to our own dear
ones, our family and neighbors. “Our neighbor,” we remember, is one whom
we live near, not locally perhaps, but in life and feeling.
Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an
evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love,
from—I will not say self-_sacrifice_, but from the ardent impulse to
fulfil another’s highest impulse. Suppose, for example, that I have an
idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my creature; for as
shown in last July’s _Monist_, it is a little person. I love it; and I
will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice
to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing
and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we
draw from John’s gospel is that this is the way mind develops; and as
for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it
capable of further evolution. Love, recognising germs of loveliness in
the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is
the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay “The Law of
Mind,” must see that _synechism_ calls for.
The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all
begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to
bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians.
It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political
economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity
than has any other science. Well, political economy has its formula of
redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures
the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct
of all the dealings between men, and leads to the _summum bonum_, food
in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master
of intelligence. I do not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate
conclusions of political economy, the scientific character of which I
fully acknowledge. But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will
often temporarily encourage generalisations extremely false, as the study
of physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that
the great attention paid to economical questions, during our century has
induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the
unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy
which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the
elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.
I open a handbook of political economy,—the most typical and middling one
I have at hand,—and there find some remarks of which I will here make a
brief analysis. I omit qualifications, sops thrown to Cerberus, phrases
to placate Christian prejudice, trappings which serve to hide from author
and reader alike the ugly nakedness of the greed-god. But I have surveyed
my position. The author enumerates “three motives to human action:
The love of self;
The love of a limited class having common interests and feelings with
one’s self;
The love of mankind at large.”
Remark, at the outset, what obsequious title is bestowed on greed,—“the
love of self.” Love! The second motive _is_ love. In place of “a limited
class” put “certain persons,” and you have a fair description. Taking
“class” in the old-fashioned sense, a weak kind of love is described. In
the sequel, there seems to be some haziness as to the delimitation of
this motive. By the love of mankind at large, the author does not mean
that deep, subconscious passion that is properly so called; but merely
public-spirit, perhaps little more than a fidget about pushing ideas. The
author proceeds to a comparative estimate of the worth of these motives.
Greed, says he, but using, of course, another word, “is not so great an
evil as is commonly supposed.... Every man can promote his own interests
a great deal more effectively than he can promote any one else’s, or than
any one else can promote his.” Besides, as he remarks on another page,
the more miserly a man is, the more good he does. The second motive “is
the most dangerous one to which society is exposed.” Love is all very
pretty: “no higher or purer source of human happiness exists.” (Ahem!)
But it is a “source of enduring injury,” and, in short, should be
overruled by something wiser. What is this wiser motive? We shall see.
As for public spirit, it is rendered nugatory by the “difficulties in
the way of its effective operation.” For example, it might suggest
putting checks upon the fecundity of the poor and the vicious; and “no
measure of repression would be too severe,” in the case of criminals.
The hint is broad. But unfortunately, you cannot induce legislatures to
take such measures, owing to the pestiferous “tender sentiments of man
towards man.” It thus appears, that public-spirit, or Benthamism, is
not strong enough to be the effective tutor of love, (I am skipping to
another page,) which must therefore be handed over to “the motives which
animate men in the pursuit of wealth,” in which alone we can confide, and
which “are in the highest degree beneficent.”[20] Yes, in the “highest
degree” without exception are they beneficent to the being upon whom all
their blessings are poured out, namely, the Self, whose “sole object,”
says the writer in accumulating wealth is his individual “sustenance and
enjoyment.” Plainly, the author holds the notion that some other motive
might be in a higher degree beneficent even for the man’s self to be a
paradox wanting in good sense. He seeks to gloze and modify his doctrine;
but he lets the perspicacious reader see what his animating principle
is; and when, holding the opinions I have repeated, he at the same time
acknowledges that society could not exist upon a basis of intelligent
greed alone, he simply pigeonholes himself as one of the eclectics of
inharmonious opinions. He wants his mammon flavored with a _soupçon_ of
god.
The economists accuse those to whom the enunciation of their atrocious
villainies communicates a thrill of horror of being _sentimentalists_. It
may be so: I willingly confess to having some tincture of sentimentalism
in me, God be thanked! Ever since the French Revolution brought this
leaning of thought into ill-repute,—and not altogether undeservedly, I
must admit, true, beautiful, and good as that great movement was,—it has
been the tradition to picture sentimentalists as persons incapable of
logical thought and unwilling to look facts in the eyes. This tradition
may be classed with the French tradition that an Englishman says _godam_
at every second sentence, the English tradition that an American talks
about “Britishers,” and the American tradition that a Frenchman carries
forms of etiquette to an inconvenient extreme, in short with all those
traditions which survive simply because the men who use their eyes and
ears are few and far between. Doubtless some excuse there was for all
those opinions in days gone by; and sentimentalism, when it was the
fashionable amusement to spend one’s evenings in a flood of tears over
a woeful performance on a candle-litten stage, sometimes made itself a
little ridiculous. But what after all is sentimentalism? It is an _ism_,
a doctrine, namely, the doctrine that great respect should be paid to
the natural judgments of the sensible heart. This is what sentimentalism
precisely is; and I entreat the reader to consider whether to contemn
is not of all blasphemies the most degrading. Yet the nineteenth
century has steadily contemned it, because it brought about the Reign
of Terror. That it did so is true. Still, the whole question is one of
_how much_. The reign of terror was very bad; but now the Gradgrind
banner has been this century long flaunting in the face of heaven, with
an insolence to provoke the very skies to scowl and rumble. Soon a flash
and quick peal will shake economists quite out of their complacency, too
late. The twentieth century, in its latter half, shall surely see the
deluge-tempest burst upon the social order,—to clear upon a world as
deep in ruin as that greed-philosophy has long plunged it into guilt. No
post-thermidorian high jinks then!
So a miser is a beneficent power in a community, is he? With the same
reason precisely, only in a much higher degree, you might pronounce
the Wall Street sharp to be a good angel, who takes money from
heedless persons not likely to guard it properly, who wrecks feeble
enterprises better stopped, and who administers wholesome lessons to
unwary scientific men, by passing worthless checks upon them,—as you
did, the other day, to me, my millionaire Master in glomery, when you
thought you saw your way to using my process without paying for it,
and of so bequeathing to your children something to boast of their
father about,—and who by a thousand wiles puts money at the service of
intelligent greed, in his own person. Bernard Mandeville, in his “Fable
of the Bees,” maintains that private vices of all descriptions are
public benefits, and proves it, too, quite as cogently as the economist
proves his point concerning the miser. He even argues, with no slight
force, that but for vice civilisation would never have existed. In
the same spirit, it has been strongly maintained and is to-day widely
believed that all acts of charity and benevolence, private and public, go
seriously to degrade the human race.
The “Origin of Species” of Darwin merely extends politico-economical
views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life. The
vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the opinion that the
true cause of those exquisite and marvellous adaptations of nature for
which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom is that
creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to
have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations
unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the
age of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is
vastly reënforced as a power making for good by the animal’s ruthless
greed. As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for
existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for
himself, and the Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the
Mount, expressed a different opinion.
Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes
from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his
neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is
that progress takes place by virtue of every individual’s striving for
himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever
he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of
Greed.
Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could not
conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession will probably
shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I
think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of
evolution,—so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of
the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were possible to believe in agapasm
without believing it warmly, that fact would be an argument against the
truth of the doctrine. At any rate, since the warmth of feeling exists,
it should on every account be candidly confessed; especially since it
creates a liability to one-sidedness on my part against which it behooves
my readers and me to be severally on our guard.
SECOND THOUGHTS. IRENICA.
Let us try to define the logical affinities of the different theories
of evolution. Natural selection, as conceived by Darwin, is a mode
of evolution in which the only positive agent of change in the whole
passage from moner to man is fortuitous variation. To secure advance in
a definite direction chance has to be seconded by some action that shall
hinder the propagation of some varieties or stimulate that of others.
In natural selection, strictly so called, it is the crowding out of the
weak. In sexual selection, it is the attraction of beauty, mainly.
The “Origin of Species” was published toward the end of the year 1859.
The preceding years since 1846 had been one of the most productive
seasons,—or if extended so as to cover the great book we are considering,
_the_ most productive period of equal length in the entire history of
science from its beginnings until now. The idea that chance begets order,
which is one of the corner-stones of modern physics (although Dr. Carus
considers it “the weakest point in Mr. Peirce’s system,”) was at that
time put into its clearest light. Quetelet had opened the discussion
by his “Letters on the Application of Probabilities to the Moral and
Political Sciences,” a work which deeply impressed the best minds of that
day, and to which Sir John Herschel had drawn general attention in Great
Britain. In 1857, the first volume of Buckle’s “History of Civilisation”
had created a tremendous sensation, owing to the use he made of this same
idea. Meantime, the “statistical method” had, under that very name, been
applied with brilliant success to molecular physics. Dr. John Herapath,
an English chemist, had in 1847 outlined the kinetical theory of gases
in his “Mathematical Physics”; and the interest the theory excited had
been refreshed in 1856 by notable memoirs by Clausius and Krönig. In
the very summer preceding Darwin’s publication, Maxwell had read before
the British Association the first and most important of his researches
on this subject. The consequence was that the idea that fortuitous
events may result in a physical law, and further that this is the way
in which those laws which appear to conflict with the principle of the
conservation of energy are to be explained, had taken a strong hold upon
the minds of all who were abreast of the leaders of thought. By such
minds, it was inevitable that the “Origin of Species,” whose teaching
was simply the application of the same principle to the explanation of
another “non-conservative” action, that of organic development, should
be hailed and welcomed. The sublime discovery of the conservation of
energy by Helmholtz in 1847, and that of the mechanical theory of heat
by Clausius and by Rankine, independently, in 1850, had decidedly
overawed all those who might have been inclined to sneer at physical
science. Thereafter a belated poet still harping upon “science peddling
with the names of things” would fail of his effect. Mechanism was now
known to be all, or very nearly so. All this time, utilitarianism,—that
improved substitute for the Gospel,—was in its fullest feather; and was
a natural ally of an individualistic theory. Dean Mansell’s injudicious
advocacy had led to mutiny among the bondsmen of Sir William Hamilton,
and the nominalism of Mill had profited accordingly; and although the
real science that Darwin was leading men to was sure some day to give a
death-blow to the sham-science of Mill, yet there were several elements
of the Darwinian theory which were sure to charm the followers of Mill.
Another thing: anæsthetics had been in use for thirteen years. Already,
people’s acquaintance with suffering had dropped off very much; and
as a consequence, that unlovely hardness by which our times are so
contrasted with those that immediately preceded them, had already set
in, and inclined people to relish a ruthless theory. The reader would
quite mistake the drift of what I am saying if he were to understand me
as wishing to suggest that any of those things (except perhaps Malthus)
influenced Darwin himself. What I mean is that his hypothesis, while
without dispute one of the most ingenious and pretty ever devised, and
while argued with a wealth of knowledge, a strength of logic, a charm
of rhetoric, and above all with a certain magnetic genuineness that was
almost irresistible, did not appear, at first, at all near to being
proved; and to a sober mind its case looks less hopeful now than it
did twenty years ago; but the extraordinarily favorable reception it
met with was plainly owing, in large measure, to its ideas being those
toward which the age was favorably disposed, especially, because of the
encouragement it gave to the greed-philosophy.
Diametrically opposed to evolution by chance, are those theories which
attribute all progress to an inward necessary principle, or other form of
necessity. Many naturalists have thought that if an egg is destined to
go through a certain series of embryological transformations, from which
it is perfectly certain not to deviate, and if in geological time almost
exactly the same forms appear successively, one replacing another in the
same order, the strong presumption is that this latter succession was as
predeterminate and certain to take place as the former. So, Nägeli, for
instance, conceives that it somehow follows from the first law of motion
and the peculiar, but unknown, molecular constitution of protoplasm,
that forms must complicate themselves more and more. Kölliker makes one
form generate another after a certain maturation has been accomplished.
Weismann, too, though he calls himself a Darwinian, holds that nothing
is due to chance, but that all forms are simple mechanical resultants
of the heredity from two parents.[21] It is very noticeable that all
these different sectaries seek to import into their science a mechanical
necessity to which the facts that come under their observation do not
point. Those geologists who think that the variation of species is due
to cataclasmic alterations of climate or of the chemical constitution of
the air and water are also making mechanical necessity chief factor of
evolution.
Evolution by sporting and evolution by mechanical necessity are
conceptions warring against one another. A third method, which supersedes
their strife, lies enwrapped in the theory of Lamarck. According to
his view, all that distinguishes the highest organic forms from the
most rudimentary has been brought about by little hypertrophies or
atrophies which have affected individuals early in their lives, and have
been transmitted to their offspring. Such a transmission of acquired
characters is of the general nature of habit-taking, and this is the
representative and derivative within the physiological domain of the
law of mind. Its action is essentially dissimilar to that of a physical
force; and that is the secret of the repugnance of such necessitarians
as Weismann to admitting its existence. The Lamarckians further suppose
that although some of the modifications of form so transmitted were
originally due to mechanical causes, yet the chief factors of their first
production were the straining of endeavor and the overgrowth superinduced
by exercise, together with the opposite actions. Now, endeavor, since it
is directed toward an end, is essentially psychical, even though it be
sometimes unconscious; and the growth due to exercise, as I argued in
my last paper, follows a law of a character quite contrary to that of
mechanics.
Lamarckian evolution is thus evolution by the force of habit.—That
sentence slipped off my pen while one of those neighbors whose function
in the social cosmos seems to be that of an Interrupter, was asking me
a question. Of course, it is nonsense. Habit is mere inertia, a resting
on one’s oars, not a propulsion. Now it is energetic projaculation
(lucky there is such a word, or this untried hand might have been put to
inventing one) by which in the typical instances of Lamarckian evolution
the new elements of form are first created. Habit, however, forces them
to take practical shapes, compatible with the structures they affect, and
in the form of heredity and otherwise, gradually replaces the spontaneous
energy that sustains them. Thus, habit plays a double part; it serves to
establish the new features, and also to bring them into harmony with the
general morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they
belong. But if the reader will now kindly give himself the trouble of
turning back a page or two, he will see that this account of Lamarckian
evolution coincides with the general description of the action of love,
to which, I suppose, he yielded his assent.
Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the
continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution takes
on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can achieve
almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one’s
stature, as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by
merely straining for it, before it is ready to come. We haunt in vain
the sacred well and throne of Mnemosyne; the deeper workings of the
spirit take place in their own slow way, without our connivance. Let but
their bugle sound, and we may then make our effort, sure of an oblation
for the altar of whatsoever divinity its savor gratifies. Besides this
inward process, there is the operation of the environment, which goes
to break up habits destined to be broken up and so to render the mind
lively. Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit
makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens
the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is
the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and
sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open,
but slumbering when it is closed. Few psychologists have perceived how
fundamental a fact this is. A portion of mind abundantly commissured to
other portions works almost mechanically. It sinks to the condition of
a railway junction. But a portion of mind almost isolated, a spiritual
peninsula, or _cul-de-sac_, is like a railway terminus. Now mental
commissures are habits. Where they abound, originality is not needed and
is not found; but where they are in defect, spontaneity is set free.
Thus, the first step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting
of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play. As to
growth by exercise, I have already shown, in discussing “Man’s Glassy
Essence,” in last October’s _Monist_, what its _modus operandi_ must be
conceived to be, at least, until a second equally definite hypothesis
shall have been offered. Namely, it consists of the flying asunder of
molecules, and the reparation of the parts by new matter. It is, thus, a
sort of reproduction. It takes place only during exercise, because the
activity of protoplasm consists in the molecular disturbance which is
its necessary condition. Growth by exercise takes place also in the mind.
Indeed, that is what it is to _learn_. But the most perfect illustration
is the development of a philosophical idea by being put into practice.
The conception which appeared, at first, as unitary, splits up into
special cases; and into each of these new thought must enter to make a
practicable idea. This new thought, however, follows pretty closely the
model of the parent conception; and thus a homogeneous development takes
place. The parallel between this and the course of molecular occurrences
is apparent. Patient attention will be able to trace all these elements
in the transaction called learning.
Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us; evolution by
fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution
by creative love. We may term them _tychastic_ evolution, or _tychasm_,
_anancastic_ evolution, or _anancasm_, and _agapastic_ evolution,
or _agapasm_. The doctrines which represent these as severally of
principal importance, we may term _tychasticism_, _anancasticism_, and
_agapasticism_. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute
chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love, are severally
operative in the cosmos, may receive the names of _tychism_, _anancism_,
and _agapism_.
All three modes of evolution are composed of the same general elements.
Agapasm exhibits them the most clearly. The good result is here brought
to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon
the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch
the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general
purpose. In order to express the relation that tychasm and anancasm bear
to agapasm, let me borrow a word from geometry. An ellipse crossed by a
straight line is a sort of cubic curve; for a cubic is a curve which is
cut thrice by a straight line; now a straight line might cut the ellipse
twice and its associated straight line a third time. Still the ellipse
with the straight line across it would not have the characteristics of a
cubic. It would have, for instance, no contrary flexure, which no true
cubic wants; and it would have two nodes, which no true cubic has. The
geometers say that it is a _degenerate_ cubic. Just so, tychasm and
anancasm are degenerate forms of agapasm.
Men who seek to reconcile the Darwinian idea with Christianity will
remark that tychastic evolution, like the agapastic, depends upon a
reproductive creation, the forms preserved being those that use the
spontaneity conferred upon them in such wise as to be drawn into harmony
with their original, quite after the Christian scheme. Very good! This
only shows that just as love cannot have a contrary, but must embrace
what is most opposed to it, as a degenerate case of it, so tychasm is
a kind of agapasm. Only, in the tychastic evolution progress is solely
owing to the distribution of the napkin-hidden talent of the rejected
servant among those not rejected, just as ruined gamesters leave their
money on the table to make those not yet ruined so much the richer.
It makes the felicity of the lambs just the damnation of the goats,
transposed to the other side of the equation. In genuine agapasm, on the
other hand, advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among
the created springing from continuity of mind. This is the idea which
tychasticism knows not how to manage.
The anancasticist might here interpose, claiming that the mode of
evolution for which he contends agrees with agapasm at the point at which
tychasm departs from it. For it makes development go through certain
phases, having its inevitable ebbs and flows, yet tending on the whole to
a foreordained perfection. Bare existence by this its destiny betrays an
intrinsic affinity for the good. Herein, it must be admitted, anancasm
shows itself to be in a broad acception a species of agapasm. Some forms
of it might easily be mistaken for the genuine agapasm. The Hegelian
philosophy is such an anancasticism. With its revelatory religion, with
its synechism (however imperfectly set forth), with its “reflection,”
the whole idea of the theory is superb, almost sublime. Yet, after all,
living freedom is practically omitted from its method. The whole movement
is that of a vast engine, impelled by a _vis a tergo_, with a blind and
mysterious fate of arriving at a lofty goal. I mean that such an engine
it _would_ be, if it really worked; but in point of fact, it is a Keely
motor. Grant that it really acts as it professes to act, and there is
nothing to do but accept the philosophy. But never was there seen such an
example of a long chain of reasoning,—shall I say with a flaw in every
link?—no, with every link a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a
dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard model of a philosophy that in reality
does not exist. If we use the one precious thing it contains, the idea
of it, introducing the tychism which the arbitrariness of its every step
suggests, and make that the support of a vital freedom which is the
breath of the spirit of love, we may be able to produce that genuine
agapasticism, at which Hegel was aiming.
A THIRD ASPECT. DISCRIMINATION.
In the very nature of things, the line of demarcation between the three
modes of evolution is not perfectly sharp. That does not prevent its
being quite real; perhaps it is rather a mark of its reality. There is
in the nature of things no sharp line of demarcation between the three
fundamental colors, red, green, and violet. But for all that they are
really different. The main question is whether three radically different
evolutionary elements have been operative; and the second question is
what are the most striking characteristics of whatever elements have been
operative.
I propose to devote a few pages to a very slight examination of these
questions in their relation to the historical development of human
thought. I first formulate for the reader’s convenience the briefest
possible definitions of the three conceivable modes of development
of thought, distinguishing also two varieties of anancasm and three
of agapasm. The tychastic development of thought, then, will consist
in slight departures from habitual ideas in different directions
indifferently, quite purposeless and quite unconstrained whether by
outward circumstances or by force of logic, these new departures being
followed by unforeseen results which tend to fix some of them as habits
more than others. The anancastic development of thought will consist
of new ideas adopted without foreseeing whither they tend, but having
a character determined by causes either external to the mind, such
as changed circumstances of life, or internal to the mind as logical
developments of ideas already accepted, such as generalisations. The
agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental
tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly
by the mere force of circumstances or of logic, as in anancasm, but by
an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined
before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by
virtue of the continuity of mind; and this mental tendency may be of
three varieties, as follows. First, it may affect a whole people or
community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated
to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with
the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable
of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps
of consciously apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person
directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or
to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his
neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of
thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what
is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently of his human
affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even
before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been
well called the _divination_ of genius; for it is due to the continuity
between the man’s mind and the Most High.
Let us next consider by means of what tests we can discriminate between
these different categories of evolution. No absolute criterion is
possible in the nature of things, since in the nature of things there is
no sharp line of demarcation between the different classes. Nevertheless,
quantitative symptoms may be found by which a sagacious and sympathetic
judge of human nature may be able to estimate the approximate proportions
in which the different kinds of influence are commingled.
So far as the historical evolution of human thought has been tychastic,
it should have proceeded by insensible or minute steps; for such is the
nature of chances when so multiplied as to show phenomena of regularity.
For example, assume that of the native-born white adult males of the
United States in 1880, one fourth part were below 5 feet 4 inches in
stature and one fourth part above 5 feet 8 inches. Then by the principles
of probability, among the whole population, we should expect
216 under 4 feet 6 inches, 216 above 6 feet 6 inches.
48 ” 4 ” 5 ” 48 ” 6 ” 7 ”
9 ” 4 ” 4 ” 9 ” 6 ” 8 ”
less than 2 ” 4 ” 3 ” less than 2 ” 6 ” 9 ”
I set down these figures to show how insignificantly few are the cases in
which anything very far out of the common run presents itself by chance.
Though the stature of only every second man is included within the four
inches between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 8 inches, yet if this interval
be extended by thrice four inches above and below, it will embrace all
our 8 millions odd of native-born adult white males (of 1880), except
only 9 taller and 9 shorter.
The test of minute variation, if _not_ satisfied, absolutely negatives
tychasm. If it _is_ satisfied, we shall find that it negatives anancasm
but not agapasm. We want a positive test, satisfied by tychasm, only. Now
wherever we find men’s thought taking by imperceptible degrees a turn
contrary to the purposes which animate them, in spite of their highest
impulses, there, we may safely conclude, there has been a tychastic
action.
Students of the history of mind there be of an erudition to fill an
imperfect scholar like me with envy edulcorated by joyous admiration,
who maintain that ideas when just started are and can be little more
than freaks, since they cannot yet have been critically examined, and
further that everywhere and at all times progress has been so gradual
that it is difficult to make out distinctly what original step any given
man has taken. It would follow that tychasm has been the sole method of
intellectual development. I have to confess I cannot read history so; I
cannot help thinking that while tychasm has sometimes been operative, at
others great steps covering nearly the same ground and made by different
men independently, have been mistaken for a succession of small steps,
and further that students have been reluctant to admit a real entitative
“spirit” of an age or of a people, under the mistaken and unscrutinised
impression that they should thus be opening the door to wild and
unnatural hypotheses. I find, on the contrary, that, however it may
be with the education of individual minds, the historical development
of thought has seldom been of a tychastic nature, and exclusively in
backward and barbarising movements. I desire to speak with the extreme
modesty which befits a student of logic who is required to survey so
very wide a field of human thought that he can cover it only by a
reconnaisance, to which only the greatest skill and most adroit methods
can impart any value at all; but, after all, I can only express my own
opinions and not those of anybody else; and in my humble judgment, the
largest example of tychasm is afforded by the history of Christianity,
from about its establishment by Constantine, to, say, the time of the
Irish monasteries, an era or eon of about 500 years. Undoubtedly the
external circumstance which more than all others at first inclined men
to accept Christianity in its loveliness and tenderness, was the fearful
extent to which society was broken up into units by the unmitigated greed
and hard-heartedness into which the Romans had seduced the world. And yet
it was that very same fact, more than any other external circumstance,
that fostered that bitterness against the wicked world of which the
primitive Gospel of Mark contains not a single trace. At least, I do
not detect it in the remark about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,
where nothing is said about vengeance, nor even in that speech where the
closing lines of Isaiah are quoted, about the worm and the fire that
feed upon the “carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me.”
But little by little the bitterness increases until in the last book
of the New Testament, its poor distracted author represents that all
the time Christ was talking about having come to save the world, the
secret design was to catch the entire human race, with the exception of
a paltry 144000, and souse them all in brimstone lake, and as the smoke
of their torment went up for ever and ever, to turn and remark, “There
is no curse any more.” Would it be an insensible smirk or a fiendish
grin that should accompany such an utterance? I wish I could believe
St. John did not write it; but it is his gospel which tells about the
“resurrection unto condemnation,”—that is of men’s being resuscitated
just for the sake of torturing them;—and, at any rate, the Revelation is
a very ancient composition. One can understand that the early Christians
were like men trying with all their might to climb a steep declivity of
smooth wet clay; the deepest and truest element of their life, animating
both heart and head, was universal-love; but they were continually, and
against their wills, slipping into a party spirit, every slip serving
as a precedent, in a fashion but too familiar to every man. This party
feeling insensibly grew until by about A. D. 330 the lustre of the
pristine integrity that in St. Mark reflects the white spirit of light
was so far tarnished that Eusebius, (the Jared Sparks of that day,) in
the preface to his History, could announce his intention of exaggerating
everything that tended to the glory of the church and of suppressing
whatever might disgrace it. His Latin contemporary Lactantius is worse,
still; and so the darkling went on increasing until before the end of the
century the great library of Alexandria was destroyed by Theophilus,[22]
until Gregory the Great, two centuries later, burnt the great library of
Rome, proclaiming that “Ignorance is the mother of devotion,” (which is
true, just as oppression and injustice is the mother of spirituality,)
until a sober description of the state of the church would be a thing
our not too nice newspapers would treat as “unfit for publication.” All
this movement is shown by the application of the test given above to
have been tychastic. Another very much like it on a small scale, only a
hundred times swifter, for the study of which there are documents by the
library-full, is to be found in the history of the French Revolution.
Anancastic evolution advances by successive strides with pauses between.
The reason is that in this process a habit of thought having been
overthrown is supplanted by the next strongest. Now this next strongest
is sure to be widely disparate from the first, and as often as not
is its direct contrary. It reminds one of our old rule of making the
second candidate vice-president. This character, therefore, clearly
distinguishes anancasm from tychasm. The character which distinguishes
it from agapasm is its purposelessness. But external and internal
anancasm have to be examined separately. Development under the pressure
of external circumstances, or cataclasmine evolution, is in most cases
unmistakable enough. It has numberless degrees of intensity, from the
brute force, the plain war, which has more than once turned the current
of the world’s thought, down to the hard fact of evidence, or what has
been taken for it, which has been known to convince men by hordes. The
only hesitation that can subsist in the presence of such a history is
a quantitative one. Never are external influences the only ones which
affect the mind, and therefore it must be a matter of judgment for which
it would scarcely be worth while to attempt to set rules, whether a
given movement is to be regarded as principally governed from without
or not. In the rise of medieval thought, I mean scholasticism and
the synchronistic art developments, undoubtedly the crusades and the
discovery of the writings of Aristotle were powerful influences. The
development of scholasticism from Roscellin to Albertus Magnus closely
follows the successive steps in the knowledge of Aristotle. Prantl
thinks that that is the whole story, and few men have thumbed more
books than Carl Prantl. He has done good solid work, notwithstanding
his slap-dash judgments. But we shall never make so much as a good
beginning of comprehending scholasticism until the whole has been
systematically explored and digested by a company of students regularly
organised and held under rule for that purpose. But as for the period we
are now specially considering, that which synchronised the Romanesque
architecture, the literature is easily mastered. It does not quite
justify Prantl’s dicta as to the slavish dependence of these authors
upon their authorities. Moreover, they kept a definite purpose steadily
before their minds, throughout all their studies. I am, therefore, unable
to offer this period of scholasticism as an example of pure external
anancasm, which seems to be the fluorine of the intellectual elements.
Perhaps the recent Japanese reception of western ideas is the purest
instance of it in history. Yet in combination with other elements,
nothing is commoner. If the development of ideas under the influence of
the study of external facts be considered as external anancasm,—it is on
the border between the external and the internal forms,—it is, of course,
the principal thing in modern learning. But Whewell, whose masterly
comprehension of the history of science critics have been too ignorant
properly to appreciate, clearly shows that it is far from being the
overwhelmingly preponderant influence, even there.
Internal anancasm, or logical groping, which advances upon a predestined
line without being able to foresee whither it is to be carried nor to
steer its course, this is the rule of development of philosophy. Hegel
first made the world understand this; and he seeks to make logic not
merely the subjective guide and monitor of thought, which was all it had
been ambitioning before, but to be the very main-spring of thinking,
and not merely of individual thinking but of discussion, of the history
of the development of thought, of all history, of all development.
This involves a positive, clearly demonstrable error. Let the logic in
question be of whatever kind it may, a logic of necessary inference or
a logic of probable inference, (the theory might perhaps be shaped to
fit either,) in any case it supposes that logic is sufficient of itself
to determine what conclusion follows from given premises; for unless it
will do so much, it will not suffice to explain why an individual train
of reasoning should take just the course it does take, to say nothing of
other kinds of development. It thus supposes that from given premises,
only one conclusion can logically be drawn, and that there is no scope
at all for free choice. That from given premises only one conclusion can
logically be drawn, is one of the false notions which have come from
logicians’ confining their attention to that Nantucket of thought, the
logic of non-relative terms. In the logic of relatives, it does not hold
good.
One remark occurs to me. If the evolution of history is in considerable
part of the nature of internal anancasm, it resembles the development of
individual men; and just as 33 years is a rough but natural unit of time
for individuals, being the average age at which man has issue, so there
should be an approximate period at the end of which one great historical
movement ought to be likely to be supplanted by another. Let us see if we
can make out anything of the kind. Take the governmental development of
Rome as being sufficiently long and set down the principal dates.
B. C. 753, Foundation of Rome.
B. C. 510, Expulsion of the Tarquins.
B. C. 27, Octavius assumes title Augustus.
A. D. 476, End of Western Empire.
A. D. 962, Holy Roman Empire.
A. D. 1453, Fall of Constantinople.
The last event was one of the most significant in history, especially
for Italy. The intervals are 243, 483, 502, 486, 491 years. All are
rather curiously near equal, except the first which is half the others.
Successive reigns of kings would not commonly be so near equal. Let us
set down a few dates in the history of thought.
B. C. 585, Eclipse of Thales. Beginning of Greek philosophy.
A. D. 30, The crucifixion.
A. D. 529, Closing of Athenian schools. End of Greek philosophy.
A. D. 1125, (Approximate) Rise of the Universities of Bologna and Paris.
A. D. 1543, Publication of the “De Revolutionibus” of Copernicus.
Beginning of Modern Science.
The intervals are 615, 499, 596, 418, years. In the history of
metaphysics, we may take the following:
B. C. 322, Death of Aristotle.
A. D. 1274, Death of Aquinas.
A. D. 1804, Death of Kant.
The intervals are 1595 and 530 years. The former is about thrice the
latter.
From these figures, no conclusion can fairly be drawn. At the same time,
they suggest that perhaps there may be a rough natural era of about 500
years. Should there be any independent evidence of this, the intervals
noticed may gain some significance.
The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be
distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the
development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic
comprehension and recognition of it, by virtue of the continuity of
thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of thought
has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my paper on the
“Law of Mind” in _The Monist_ of last July. Even if those arguments are
not quite convincing in themselves, yet if they are reënforced by an
apparent agapasm in the history of thought, the two propositions will
lend one another mutual aid. The reader will, I trust, be too well
grounded in logic to mistake such mutual support for a vicious circle in
reasoning. If it could be shown directly that there is such an entity
as the “spirit of an age” or of a people, and that mere individual
intelligence will not account for all the phenomena, this would be proof
enough at once of agapasticism and of synechism. I must acknowledge
that I am unable to produce a cogent demonstration of this; but I am, I
believe, able to adduce such arguments as will serve to confirm those
which have been drawn from other facts. I believe that all the greatest
achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals;
and I find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic
considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements,
direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their
occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of individuals
of no extraordinary general powers. The pointed Gothic architecture in
several of its developments appears to me to be of such a character. All
attempts to imitate it by modern architects of the greatest learning and
genius appear flat and tame, and are felt by their authors to be so.
Yet at the time the style was living, there was quite an abundance of
men capable of producing works of this kind of gigantic sublimity and
power. In more than one case, extant documents show that the cathedral
chapters, in the selection of architects, treated high artistic genius as
a secondary consideration, as if there were no lack of persons able to
supply that; and the results justify their confidence. Were individuals
in general, then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high
intellect? Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.
How many times have men now in middle life seen great discoveries made
independently and almost simultaneously! The first instance I remember
was the prediction of a planet exterior to Uranus by Leverrier and Adams.
One hardly knows to whom the principle of the conservation of energy
ought to be attributed, although it may reasonably be considered as the
greatest discovery science has ever made. The mechanical theory of
heat was set forth by Rankine and by Clausius during the same month of
February, 1850; and there are eminent men who attribute this great step
to Thomson.[23] The kinetical theory of gases, after being started by
John Bernoulli and long buried in oblivion, was reinvented and applied to
the explanation not merely of the laws of Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro,
but also of diffusion and viscosity, by at least three modern physicists
separately. It is well known that the doctrine of natural selection was
presented by Wallace and by Darwin at the same meeting of the British
Association; and Darwin in his “Historical Sketch” prefixed to the
later editions of his book shows that both were anticipated by obscure
forerunners. The method of spectrum analysis was claimed for Swan as well
as for Kirchhoff, and there were others who perhaps had still better
claims. The authorship of the Periodical Law of the Chemical Elements is
disputed between a Russian, a German, and an Englishman; although there
is no room for doubt that the principal merit belongs to the first. These
are nearly all the greatest discoveries of our times. It is the same with
the inventions. It may not be surprising that the telegraph should have
been independently made by several inventors, because it was an easy
corollary from scientific facts well made out before. But it was not so
with the telephone and other inventions. Ether, the first anæsthetic,
was introduced independently by three different New England physicians.
Now ether had been a common article for a century. It had been in one of
the pharmacopœias three centuries before. It is quite incredible that
its anæsthetic property should not have been known; it was known. It had
probably passed from mouth to ear as a secret from the days of Basil
Valentine; but for long it had been a secret of the Punchinello kind. In
New England, for many years, boys had used it for amusement. Why then had
it not been put to its serious use? No reason can be given, except that
the motive to do so was not strong enough. The motives to doing so could
only have been desire for gain and philanthropy. About 1846, the date
of the introduction, philanthropy was undoubtedly in an unusually active
condition. That sensibility, or sentimentalism, which had been introduced
in the previous century, had undergone a ripening process, in consequence
of which, though now less intense than it had previously been, it was
more likely to influence unreflecting people than it had ever been. All
three of the ether-claimants had probably been influenced by the desire
for gain; but nevertheless they were certainly not insensible to the
agapic influences.
I doubt if any of the great discoveries ought, properly, to be considered
as altogether individual achievements; and I think many will share this
doubt. Yet, if not, what an argument for the continuity of mind, and for
agapasticism is here! I do not wish to be very strenuous. If thinkers
will only be persuaded to lay aside their prejudices and apply themselves
to studying the evidences of this doctrine, I shall be fully content to
await the final decision.
CHARLES S. PEIRCE.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] How can a writer have any respect for science, as such, who is
capable of confounding with the scientific propositions of political
economy, which have nothing to say concerning what is “beneficent,” such
brummagem generalisations as this?
[21] I am happy to find that Dr. Carus, too, ranks Weismann among the
opponents of Darwin, notwithstanding his flying that flag.
[22] See _Draper’s History of Intellectual Development_, chap. x.
[23] Thomson, himself, in his article _Heat_ in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_, never once mentions the name of Clausius.
RENAN.
A DISCOURSE GIVEN AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, LONDON, OCTOBER, 9, 1892.
“Be calm and resigned,” said Renan to his weeping wife. “We undergo
the laws of that nature of which we are manifestations. We perish, we
disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and the march of time goes on for
ever.”
It is hard to-day to respond to these last words of the dying
philosopher. Heaven and earth remain, but they seem cold and grey when
the great heart in which they were united has ceased to beat, and when
our sweet English singer has gone silent. By the passing away of the two
highest-mounted minds in Europe this society is especially bereaved. The
earliest welcome given to the genius of young Tennyson came from the pen
of William Johnston Fox, the first Minister of this Chapel; here has his
spiritual pilgrimage been followed, and its songs here sung as hymns.
But for their magnitude Tennyson and Renan might have been considered
together. They were children of the same spiritual epoch; the son of the
Catholic Church, and the English Rector’s son, were fellow-pilgrims on
the painful road of scepticism; they encountered the same phantoms, were
attended by the same mighty shades, and found no altar but such as their
own genius could raise and their glowing hearts kindle in the wilderness
of doubt and denial. Alike they distrusted democracy, and dreamed of the
ideal monarch,—as of Arthur, “flower of kings,” whom ancient legends of
Britain and Brittany said would some day return to lead up the Golden
Year. Renan loved to tell the story of how Tennyson, roaming in Brittany,
stopped at an inn in Lannier, birthplace of Renan’s mother. In the
morning the poet demanded his account, but the hostess said, “There is
nothing to pay, Monsieur. It is you who have sung of our King Arthur.”
But the people have a greatness of their own. They enshrine Tennyson
in Westminster Abbey, Renan in the Pantheon. The career of Renan is a
triumph of republican France. Under the Empire he was deprived of his
professorship, and of his office in the Imperial Library, for writing the
“Life of Jesus.” But the Republic made him President of the College of
France, gave him every honor, in life as in death. The national homage to
that ex-priest, that outspoken rationalist, who flattered not the masses
nor fawned on power, is a high water-mark of civilisation. For it marks
the rise of a steady tide of liberty, and not the mere leap of waves
under some tempest of momentary emotion. The great fact is that this
unique heretic, thinker, and scholar, has been able, without compromising
his independence, without help of any sect or school, to live his life,
think his thought, and round out his life-work with completeness, on the
scene of a thousand martyrdoms.
In Renan’s “Feuilles Détachées,” which appeared last spring but is not
yet translated, there are outbursts of gratitude to his time, which,
he says, has been good to him, and pardoned many faults. He had just
finished, he says, his “History of the People of Israel”—“the serious
work of my life.”
“The bridge which it remained to me to build between Judaism
and Christianism is built.... In the ‘Life of Jesus’ I tried
to exhibit the majestic growth of the Galilean tree from the
stock of its roots to the summit, where sing the birds of
heaven. In the volume just finished I have sought to make
known the subsoil in which shot the roots of Jesus. Thus my
principal duty is accomplished. At the Academy the work on the
Rabbins also nears conclusion, and the _Corpus Inscriptionum
Semiticorum_ is in excellent hands. So that now, having paid
all my debts, I am free enough to amuse myself a little,
and without scruples to indulge myself with the pleasure of
gathering these leaves, often light enough.”
So radiant was the author, at sixty-nine, having achieved the main
schemes of a life which, at forty, was threatened with ruin by
intolerance. Of course it was but a small part of what he would fain have
accomplished. Last year (September 11) there was a festival, in the
Island of Bréhat, where Renan was the chief speaker. In the course of his
address he said:
“Every year I used to come hither with my mother to visit
my aunt Périne, who loved me much, for she thought me like
my father. Here on your rocks, and in your paths, I formed
plans and dreamed dreams, of which I have realised a third
or a quarter. That is much; I consider myself fortunate; I
hold myself among the privileged ones of life. I have been
more sad than now, for I feared I might die young (misfortune
notably not arrived) and never produce what was in my mind.
Oh certainly, could I live a long time yet, I would know what
to do. I have schemes of work for three or four lives. I
would write a history of the French Revolution, showing it an
attack of fever, grand, strange, horrible, and sublime; the
foundation, let us hope of something better. I would compose
a history of Athens, almost day by day; also a history of
science and freethought, telling by what steps man has come
to know something of how the world is made; I would write a
history of Brittany in six volumes. I would study Chinese,
and review critically all the problems of Chinese history and
literature. Of all that I would make nothing. There is a crowd
of things I wish to know and shall never know. But why reproach
nature for refusing me? Let us recognise what she has given
us. I have traversed the world at an interesting moment in its
development, and, after all, have seen enough. After my time
humanity will do surprising things: I can rest content during
eternity.”
The happiness of this venerable author, conscious that his life is
closing, his work ended,—a happiness not derived from any hope of future
reward, or even existence,—is a salient testimony of our time. In one of
these recent addresses Renan says: “Let us die calmly, in the communion
of humanity, the religion of the future.” The dying Voltaire was fed with
a wafer, even while he ridiculed it. Renan partakes the communion of
humanity, the religion of the future. It may appear cold comfort to the
superstitious, for they comprehend not that to such a man the communion
of humanity implies an eternal life.
In one sense Renan lived not quite threescore years and ten; in another
he lived ages on ages. By his mastery of Eastern and Oriental languages
and literatures, by his studies of ancient and modern systems, he had
familiarly dwelt among primitive tribes, with them set up their sacred
dolmens, knelt at their altars, travelled with their migrations in India,
Persia, Egypt, Syria, shared their pilgrimages from lower to higher
beliefs, listened to their prophets, visited the home of Mary and
Joseph, walked with the disciples, conversed with Jesus, witnessed the
crucifixion, journeyed through the middle ages, reached the Renaissance,
passed through Protestantism, gathered every spiritual flower of the
nineteenth century. Such long experience of the past, such knowledge
of the attractions of humanity,—predicting its fulfilments,—carry the
thinker equally far into the future. Knowing the angles of convergence in
time’s rising pyramid, he can calculate the apex, and look down from it.
He is able to rejoice in realisations of ideals now mere tendencies. His
immortality is present. Such to Renan meant that communion of humanity,
into which he entered by patient studies, and by the devotion of his life
to the spiritual essence of the world. And this vision sustained him in
his last hour.
And let me here say, that Renan’s optimism was not based in any belief
in a superhuman providence, or any dynamic or compulsory destiny in
nature. It was his faith in the heart and brain of man. In his last work
he reminds youth that their efforts at new abstractions and theologies
are idle: the new notions will follow the old into extinction. “Dear
children,” he says—
“Dear children, it is useless to give yourself so much
headache to reach only a change of error. Let us die calm,
in the communion of humanity, the religion of the future.
The existence of the world is assured for a long time. The
future of science is guaranteed, for in the great scientific
book everything adds itself and nothing is lost. Error is not
deep; no error lasts long. Be tranquil. Before a thousand
years, let us hope, the earth will find means to supply its
exhausted coal, and, in some degree, its diminished virtue. The
resources of humanity are infinite. Eternal works accomplish
themselves without loss to the fountain of living forces, ever
rising again to the surface. Science, above all, will continue
to astonish us by its revelations, substituting the infinite
of time and space for a poor creationism that can no longer
satisfy the imagination of a child. Religion also is true to
the infinite. When God shall be complete, he will be just. I am
convinced that virtue will find itself one day clearly to have
been the better part. The merit is in affirming duty against
the apparent evidences. [As for the future] denying not,
affirming not, let us hope. Let us keep a place at our funerals
for the music and the incense.”
It will be seen that Renan’s deity is the brother of man’s divinity.
God is as dependent on man as man on God. Natural evil is God’s
incompleteness: when man is complete God will be complete: there will be
no more injustice.
But I must warn you that while this is the way in which Renan impresses
me, he is not a man to be caught or held in any one theory. He is the
many-sided man of our time. When I heard his lectures in his college, two
years ago,—his French was so clear and expressive that even a limping
listener could follow him tolerably,—he impressed me as a sort of Buddha.
Buddha is supposed by some to have got his large form by sitting so long
in contemplation, by others his size is regarded as a protest against
the meagreness of ill-fed ascetics. The unfurrowed serenity of Buddha’s
face, his infantine smile, were those of Renan, also the remembered music
of his voice. This association has been extended to Renan’s spiritual
nature by a letter of his to a friend, in his “Feuilles Détachées.” He
is fascinated by the legends of Buddha and Krishna which describe them
as multiplying themselves. When Buddha was born into this world, ten
thousand women entreated to be his nurses, and Buddha multiplied himself
into ten thousand babies. Each woman believed that she alone had nursed
the true Buddha. In the legend of the god Krishna, he first appeared to
some shepherdesses who were dancing. The beautiful god multiplied himself
into as many forms as there were maidens, so that each believed, that she
alone had danced with Krishna, and through life kept her heart sacred to
him. Writing of these legends, Renan says:
“The ideal loses nothing by dividing itself: it is entire
in each of its parts. We live that part of Krishna which we
assimilate according to our genius. The ideal is for all
partakers, like morsels modified to each taste. Each creates
his divine dancer. One refinement I would introduce into
the legend of Krishna, should I ever make it into a drama,
or, better, a philosophic ballet: at the time when the
shepherdesses believed they were singly dancing with Krishna,
he should find that they were in reality dancing with different
Krishnas. Each had made her Krishna to her fancy, and when
they came to describe to each other their heavenly lover, they
should find their visions in nowise alike; and nevertheless to
each it was always Krishna.”
The legend which thus charmed Renan has many correspondences in religious
history; in Christianity, for instance, where we to-day find a hundred
and fifty sects, each believing that it alone has the true Christ for
partner. But it applies to all great personalities, and to all spiritual
influences. The finest spirits frame no systems, found no schools. They
are akin to the sun and rain which nourish and paint innumerable and
diverse growths. It was so with Emerson. Dean Stanley said that he heard
many different preachers in America, but their sermons were generally
by Emerson. It was preëminently the case with Renan. The Catholic, the
Protestant, the idealist, the sceptic, the man of the world, the mystic,
the conservative, the radical, provided they are unsophisticated like
the shepherdesses, not champions of some sect or party, find that Renan
has spoken better for them than they can for themselves; he knows their
secret heart, is their partner by unbounded sympathies. Yet it is always
the same Renan, full and entire in each and all of his manifestations.
Some time ago, when his friend Littré, the Positivist, was buried by his
family with Catholic rites, the aspersoir passed round the grave, and
came to Renan, who, like the rest, sprinkled holy water on the coffin.
There were cries of “Shame” among the freethinkers present; but really it
was the act of a man less sectarian than themselves. The same tenderness
that could not wound the family parting for ever from their beloved, is
visible in the gentleness with which he treats old beliefs, when it is
a question of affection or sentiment, not of dogma and authority. They
have died out of his mind utterly; he sees the creeds already in their
graves; he no longer fears them, but is glad to soothe those who cling
to their lifeless forms by speaking kindly of their virtues in the past.
His “Life of Jesus” is, in large part, a wreath of immortelles laid on
the tomb of a faith to him utterly dead,—that is, faith in a supernatural
Christ. He once told me of a little island on the coast of his native
Brittany, from which some medieval saint was supposed to have driven
monstrous serpents, or worms. To that island the peasants still repair
to get a little of the soil to use as a—vermifuge. To similarly small
size had shrunk, in Renan’s view, the greatest dogmas and superstitions
of Christendom. Others might still compliment them with fear and wrath,
but Renan was tender to them because of their smallness. He was endlessly
good-natured with his ignorant opponents, from whom he often received
warning letters. Of one who wrote him simply the words, _Remember, there
is a Hell_, he said that this monitor did not terrify him as much as he
may have supposed. He (Renan) would be rather glad to know for certain
that there was beyond the grave even a hell. And if he should go there
he felt certain that he would be able to address to the deity such
subtle arguments to prove that he ought not to remain there, but to be
transferred to paradise; (only he feared his exhorter’s paradise would be
very dull,) that he would presently be released.
One purpose of the “Life of Jesus” has been mentioned, but that work had
also another and a higher aim. With a love like that of Mary Magdalene,
in whose rapt vision Jesus rose from the tomb, to be transformed into
a supernatural Christ, Renan sought to raise out of the grave of that
supernatural Christ the human Jesus. He had travelled through Palestine,
visited every spot associated with the great teacher, and drew the most
realistic portraiture he could of the parents, home, friends, disciples,
and daily life of Jesus. The outcry against that book was a confession
by theology of its utter loss of the human personality of Jesus. There
had been a time when the religious heart loved to dwell on the sweet
humanities of Jesus. In the seventeenth century the poet, Thomas Dekker,
wrote:
“The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.”
And such remembrance of Jesus, in his life among the people, his
friendships, smiles and tears, are found in the sermons of Tillotson,
South, Jeremy Taylor. But the descended God gradually consumed the
humanity. In the last century it became a heresy to consider Jesus as a
man. The man was crucified on a cross of dogmas; he lay dead and buried
under a stony theology, until Renan rolled away the stone, raised him
to life, clothed him with flesh and blood, invested him with beauty,
and said once more to the Pharisee, the sceptic, the scoffer—_Behold
the man!_ For writing that book,—just after Strauss had shown the
Christ of Christendom a mythological figure,—the churches should have
clasped Renan’s knees. But for it they heaped him with abuse, declared
that Jewish bankers had bribed him to write it, drove him from his
professorship of Hebrew, reduced him to poverty. The Pope denounced
him as “The European Blasphemer.” He has been terribly avenged in his
own country, where every educated man has abandoned the church. And he
lived to see the Christianity of England striving to gain a new hold
on the people by following his brave gesture,—rationalising away the
supernatural Christ, and exalting the humanity of Jesus as the sign of
his divinity. The criticism of that work is not at all so destructive
as that of many who have written in the generation that has elapsed
since its appearance,—of Dr. Martineau, for instance, on whom Oxford
has conferred a doctor’s degree. Indeed, in reading Renan’s “Life of
Jesus” now, one is surprised by its concessions. He accepts the four
Gospels as coming from the first century, a belief which even the learned
theologians have abandoned. Some newspaper has said that Renan borrowed
from Strauss; on the contrary, the fault of the book is that it did not
borrow from Strauss, and from English authors, who had proved that the
Gospels are all of the second century. That would have relieved him of
the necessity of apologising for Jesus in some matters of which Jesus
never heard, of which Paul in the first century knew nothing, as when he
intimates that Jesus may have once lent himself to an amiable deception.
No miracle was ever ascribed to Jesus by any writer of his own century.
In several other respects Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” on its negative side,
is behind the advance of research and criticism. But those are small
details compared with the spirit and general purpose of the work. In
this moment, when we are celebrating the discovery of a western world,
we may well pay homage to the scholar who rediscovered and exhumed an
eastern world, long buried under débris of mythology and rubbish of
superstitions. This Renan has done in his series of works on the “Origins
of Christianity,” beginning with the “Life of Jesus,” dealing with the
“Apostles,” with “St. Paul,” with “Antichrist,” and other studies,
leading up to his “History of the People of Israel.”
In all these works there is not a line that is not interesting, alike
to learned and unlearned. As some one has said, Renan could make Hebrew
roots blossom with roses and lilies. But that super-fine art of his was
carrying the cause of intellectual and religious emancipation. For these
works concerned the constitution of Europe. This Great Britain, with all
its physical freedom, is religiously a mere dependency of Judea. Here
men were formerly burnt, until lately imprisoned, and even now denied
equal advantages, not in accordance with what Englishmen think, but
with the opinions of some ancient Jews. The voice of the Jews was the
voice of God. But Judea, like the Grand Llama, could rule only while
veiled. Renan unveiled it. He did it all the more effectually because
in the literary and philosophic spirit. All the ages of Judea, from the
first tribal groups to the movement of John the Baptist and Jesus, are
assigned their exact place as successive chapters of human history, the
natural origin of their mythology is explained, Jehovah takes his seat
beside Jupiter and Brahma, Jesus is revered with Buddha and Zoroaster;
and all this is done, not by mere opinion, but by impregnable facts,
unwearied researches, inflexible veracity. It was also done lovingly.
A superstition can survive combat, but not explanation. Renan did much
to remove Christianity from the field of militant camps to the quiet
province of literary investigation. In the Republic of Letters there is
no arbitrary authority. The combat is left to salvation armies,—“theirs
not to reason why.”
There is a large Renan literature. More than three hundred works
represent the efforts of theology to get the resuscitated human Jesus
back into his grave again. Renan’s accessible life-work is represented
by about twenty-five volumes, of which some are philosophic diversions
written amid the heavy labours of his College, and while collecting
and preserving for scholars the whole body of Semitic inscriptions.
For more than twenty years Renan has been training the young scholars
of France—those who are to fashion France in the future, and influence
mankind. Those acquainted with his larger works can realise his immense
service in elevating the standard of criticism, and establishing the
method of exact research and exact thought. But there are other works of
Renan, notably his _Philosophic Dramas_, not yet translated, from which
may be better gathered the great variety of his ability, the poetic play
of his genius, and the charm of his personality, which some of us have
personally felt, and which so won all hearts that even the priesthood
have not raised discordant notes in the homage and emotion with which
his nation has laid him in an honored grave.
Farewell, great heart, and great leader! On your coffin I laid a wreath
of immortelles for friendship, for the homage of America, and for the
sake of this free English Society. For your victory is ours also: your
triumph is that of every independent mind on earth.
MONCURE D. CONWAY.
INTUITION AND REASON.
The question whether we act more frequently from intuition or reason,
and the question that follows it, which faculty is the more noble
guide to conduct, would have no more interest for the general public
than any other of the subjects which the metaphysician exercises his
ingenuity upon,—than the question, for instance, whether we execute a
greater number of analytic or of synthetic judgments in the course of
the day,—were it not that there is an ancient opinion to the effect that
reason and intuition are marks respectively of the manner of working of
men’s and of women’s minds. The opinion is wholly unfounded, and could
only have had its origin at a time when the psychology of the working of
the human mind was thoroughly misunderstood. As the very terms in which
the opinion is expressed make plain, it dates from the period when it
was the custom to speak of the human mind as having a lot of separate
“faculties” under its control, and of calling up now one and now another
of them to do its bidding. It is time that the belief in the different
quality of men’s and of women’s minds should follow the whole antiquated
machinery of “faculties” into the limbo of old and worn-out fashions of
thought and of speech.
This illusion, however, like most of the illusions that have had a firm
foot-hold in their day, has a perfectly comprehensible reason for its
existence. It is not true that men’s minds and women’s minds have a
different way of working; but it is true that upon certain occasions
(and by far, the greatest number of occasions) we all—men, women, and
negroes alike—act from intuition, and that the circumstances of women’s
lives have hitherto been such as to make their interests lie somewhat
more exclusively in those regions in which conduct is intuitive than in
those in which it is long thought out. It is not true that the Creator
has made two separate kinds of mind for men and for women; but it is true
that society, as at present constituted, offers two somewhat separate
_fields of interest_ for men and for women, and that the nature of their
conduct is of necessity determined by the character of the action which
is demanded of them.
What is the difference for the psychologist, between the mental state
of a being who acts from reason, and of one who acts from intuition?
It is not a difference of the _kind of mind_ which controls him, but
of the _kind of knowledge_ upon which his present conduct is based. If
one individual has got at his command a lot of general propositions
bearing upon the case in hand, and if his familiarity with them is not
such that they flow together without conscious effort, then he must
laboriously piece them together, and think out the conclusions which they
necessitate. If another individual, having led a different life, has had
a lot of experiences which cover just such cases as this, and if he has
been taught by thousands of instances that under these circumstances a
certain course of conduct will nearly always lead to good results, then
he can trust to his hands or his feet to execute that course of conduct
without a moment’s aid from conscious reflection; he can go on with his
novel, or whatever other pleasant occupation engages his attention,
without the wear and tear of mind which is involved in consciously
thinking about the circumstances in question.
Now the differences in the mental processes of men and women are exactly
of this nature. They are differences dependent upon the fact that the
_knowledge_ at their command—that is, the stored up premises upon which
action is based—is, to a certain extent, of a different kind, and got
from different sources. So far as the knowledge is not of a different
kind, the character of the action is not of a different kind. There is
an immense number of conclusions which men and women alike “jump at,”
every hour in the day; and some of them represent reasoning so fixedly
instinctive, that even the closest attention does not enable us to drag
it up into the light of consciousness. How many people know that a
certain feeling of strain in the muscles which move the eyes is a sign of
a certain distance of an object looked at, and a different feeling of
strain, a sign of a different distance; and that when the eyes are fixed
upon one point, objects in the lateral field of view are judged to be
nearer or farther away than that point, according as the two disparate
images which they cast upon the two retinas are, the right-hand one or
the left hand one, the brighter? The common man _knows_ that one object
is near and the other far, but he is not _conscious_ even of the feeling
of strain, nor of the existence of double images; the physiological
psychologist knows the unconscious syllogism by which he _must_ reach
his conclusion, but even he cannot, by any possibility, make it cease
to be instinctive,—that is, make himself conscious of its different
steps. On the other hand, no one, whether man or woman, can pass from
one proposition in geometry to another by a process which is in any
sense unconscious, though one person may be obliged to give a much more
strained attention to what he is doing than another.
Now it is very possible that a greater _number_ of the actions of women
have their ground in unconscious causes than of the actions of men.
The subjects upon which action is of vital concern to them have been
different subjects, and hence their stored-up stock of knowledge is
knowledge about different subjects. To the woman of the past, who was to
a great extent confined to her own home, the temper of her house-mates
was what her happiness depended upon more than anything else in the
world. It was impossible that she should not acquire a keen intelligence
in interpreting every slightest shade of expression upon the human face.
But this sort of knowledge is always instinctive, whether it is practised
by men or by women. If the eyes of the most reasonable man in the world
should chance to show him a certain curve of the lip and a certain
elevation of the posterior angle of the alæ of the nostrils on the face
of the fair lady to whom he was talking, would he try to call to mind the
pictures in Sir Charles Bell’s great work on expression and the general
theorems in Darwin’s book on the same subject, and piecing this and that
laboriously together, would he try to arrive at some just conclusion
regarding the contents of the fair lady’s mind? Would he not, rather,
instinctively change the subject of conversation, or even discreetly
beat a retreat, long before he had time to _think_? Women’s interests
have been so exclusively social that they have developed a sense for the
physical expression of emotion which makes society for them a matter of
complicated relations, of delicate susceptibility to play of feeling,
which—except in the hyper-sensitive period of courtship—is not common
among men. But there are men who are quite the equals of women in this
respect; and if any man is markedly deficient in these qualities, we
recognise him as belonging to a low and brutal type which is in process
of extinction. If a woman on the other hand, goes into business, she does
not fix the prices of her straw hats each morning in accordance with the
feelings which straw hats awaken in her when she first looks at them,
but in accordance with the fluctuations of the market. The President of
a New Hampshire Street Railway did not carry through her improvements by
her intuitions, but by a plain, common-sense weighing of reasons. Nor are
all masculine occupations under the guidance of the reasoning faculty. If
you go to a stove-man and ask him to mend your smoking chimney, does he
do it by reason? Not a bit of it! There may be stove-men who have enough
knowledge of the laws which regulate the movements of masses of hot air
to be able to apply general principles to particular instances, but in
the course of a long and checkered experience with stove-men, it has not
been my lot to fall in with them. Their knowledge of chimneys, such as it
is, is got by experience and applied by intuition, and nothing is farther
from their minds than any trace of deductive reasoning. It is not that
there are men’s minds and women’s minds, but that there are theoretical
subjects and practical subjects, and that knowledge is not the same kind
of knowledge in both.
Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male and
female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions
which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience ingrained
from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those which we perform
automatically, or by individual experience become so familiar that
it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious reflection. The
relative distances of objects looked at we know instinctively; the
trained musician with mind intent upon expression, reads his notes
automatically; the beginner at the piano goes through a painful process
of syllogism before each key is struck. All is, at bottom, reason; in one
case it is conscious; in another it is unconscious, but can be forced
into consciousness; in another, it is unconscious and cannot by any
effort be made conscious. Because a woman’s interests lie more than a
man’s in regions in which thought is instinctive and automatic, it does
not follow that she has developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor
is there any possibility that mothers should occasionally transmit their
powers of intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of
his apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested; some men
have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry and art mental
activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different with powers
of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted from mother to
son, but that is merely saying metaphorically that a good firm texture of
mind may be transmitted. Hume and James Mill are two men who are supposed
to owe much to their mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually
considered to lie in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an
intuitive mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the
higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician
leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had jumped at his
conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his thorough knowledge
of this particular subject, the intermediate steps have seemed to him too
easy to set down. If his book is hard to read, it is simply because he
has assumed a greater amount of learning in his readers than they are in
possession of.
The question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty is an
exceedingly meaningless question. All knowledge which finds frequent
occasion to be put in practice has a tendency to become first automatic
and then instinctive. Human progress consists in making conscious
action automatic as soon as it can be done with safety, and in setting
free consciousness to attend to more and more complicated combinations
of circumstances. After the musician has learned to read his notes
mechanically, shall we urge him to go back to the period of conscious
linking of note to key, because reason is a diviner gift than intuition?
Is it desirable to turn the act of walking into a conscious fitting of
muscular tension to variations in the position of the centre of gravity
in order to distinguish ourselves the more effectually from the brutes
that perish? Reason is merely intuition in its formative stage, and
the sooner all our present reasoned convictions become mechanical, and
conscious thought is set free to bring in more and more far reaching
considerations to bear upon our actions (including in that term our
conclusions), the sooner will a higher form of life be reached.
Wundt’s students have made some experiments in his laboratory in the
last two or three years, which throw a great deal of light upon this
question,—they have caught automatism in the very act of formation. It
has been noticed that different observers differed very much in the
reaction time which they assigned to the several senses,—that is, the
time required, for instance, to hear the tap of a bell, and to press a
button in response. Wundt’s students found that there are two different
reaction times,—in one, time is taken to bring the tap of the bell into
the focus of consciousness and to decide consciously what to do in
response; in the other, the process is unconscious. The first is nearly
twice as long as the second, and both are very constant quantities, for
the same sense. The exact figures are, in seconds:
FULL. SHORT.
Sound .216 .127 N. Lange
” .235 .121 Belkin
” .230 .124 L. Lange
Light .290 .172 L. Lange
” .291 .182 Martius
It may be inferred from this that, even in the simplest matters intuition
is very nearly twice as valuable a “faculty” as reason, as far as
economy of time is concerned. (It would be interesting to determine
the difference in fatigue.) But the interesting point is that the
experimenter can teach himself to give either reaction time at his
pleasure. If he thinks of his ears, he has a feeling of strain in them,
and a long reaction time; if he directs his attention to his fingers (or
if he thinks of indifferent matters) he is unconscious of what is going
on, and his reaction time is short. It is plain that the more of these
educated brain-reflexes we can produce, the fuller and more complicated
lives we shall be capable of carrying on. It may also be assumed that
the ideal human being is the one who has many brain-reflexes, but who
is capable of bringing them all into consciousness upon occasion.
Connections that we cannot make conscious are a frequent source of
illusion. When we move the eye-ball about by the will, objects seem to
remain stationary; but when, putting the finger on the under eyelid, we
push the eye-ball up and down in the socket, we cannot help _perceiving_
that objects are moving up and down. Prof. William James suggests as
a good experiment that some one who has eyes that he is not afraid of
injuring should do this pushing several hours a day, and see if he cannot
force conscious reason to do her work and to make him _see_ that the
objects are not moving.
For perfectly regular circumstances,—that is, for the world of nature
or of human character so far as is governed by fixed laws,—reflex
action presents an immense economy of time and work. To provide against
extraordinary emergencies, it would seem to be desirable that we
should have the power of interposing consciousness in the chain which
begins with stimulus and ends in action. Whenever a large number of
considerations, or considerations of an abstract character, have to be
weighed and balanced, then reason is the only sufficient guide.
That women have no deficiency in the power of putting this and that
together, when _this_ and _that_ are pieces of knowledge which are in
their possession, is absolutely proved by a single circumstance. Geometry
is a branch of learning which is entirely built up out of abstract
reason, pure and undefiled. Geometry is studied, in the United States, in
high schools, and it must not be forgotten that there are in this country
(according to the Report of the Bureau of Education) _three times_ as
many girls as boys who take the high school course. It cannot be said,
therefore, (as is said of girls who go to college) that the girls who go
to the high school are a selected lot; they are the very bone and fibre
of the women who make up the country. Now if women could not reason, we
ought to hear a great hue and cry from the teachers of the geometry
classes about the difficulty of teaching that subject to girls, and the
girls ought to lament and moan over the impossibility of getting safely
through with their demonstrations. Is this the case? I have never met
with a teacher of geometry who thought his boys did better than his
girls,—I have met with several who thought the reverse. As long ago as
1865, Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, after travelling through this
country, said: “The teachers all tell me that the girls do fully as well
as the boys in mathematics,—fully.” Nor are any sad effects noticeable
upon health or spirits. Day after day an army of girls goes smiling into
the class-room and comes smiling out, utterly unaware that an unnatural
wrench has been given to their delicate minds, and that they are being
rapidly transformed into monstrous products of over-reason.
If girls show no defect in reason in the class-room, neither do boys show
any defect in intuition,—in fact, their intuition about stretched strings
and lines on balls are usually better than those of girls. I have kept
a record for many years of errors committed by boys and by girls, and I
have not been able to detect any difference in their character. It is
true that it was a boy who once failed to get a problem in trigonometry
for a week, because it was not expressly stated in the book that the
milestones to which the problem related were a mile apart. My intimate
acquaintance with the character of his mind prevented me, however, from
attributing this failure in intuition to his superior reasoning powers.
The simple matter is that a good _mind_ has good reasons and good
intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive popular
phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in full possession of
your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when you must; to your
acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger; and to your reason,
when the question requires debate. It would be greatly for the good of
the race if the common virtues should become more instinctive in men;
and if women should be put into a position in which they can reflect
more wisely upon the virtues which are only just in process of getting
known to be such. The only reason that women do not guide themselves by
far-reaching principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have
not made themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy
and of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher
education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice,
so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted that
it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions merely
learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely convinced
of, it may leave one side, but not what it really _knows_. Nor is
there any danger that woman will lose her powers of intuition. The
knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social matters will not
desert her because she has made herself familiar with the speculations
of philosophers, and can turn to them for guidance in the intricate
questions of conduct which the complexities of modern life give rise to.
So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master,
her task was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider
responsibilities. They are now aware that it is their highest duty _to
be_ the best possible kind of a human being, and _to do_ whatever lies
within their strength towards making the world the best possible kind of
a world to live in. For this end they have urgent need of _all_ the gifts
that God has given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the
ground that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a
grievous wrong.
CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN.
CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN.
I.
CRUELTY.
Spencer says[24] that among savage nations the women are as perverse as
the men, and that if they do not work so much evil it is because they
are less able to do so. This is not entirely true; doubtless women among
savages are much more inclined to cruelty than to pity, but, generally
speaking, woman even at the very beginnings of human evolution is less
cruel than man.
WOMAN AND WAR.
Woman, even among savage nations, is rarely a warrior. In the Antilles,
the women watched over the safety of the islands whenever their husbands
went to war with the neighboring islands; they were brave, strong,
courageous, nearly equalling the men in their cleverness in handling
weapons.[25] Amongst the ancient Bretons, armies were always commanded by
women. In Dahomey, the élite of the army is composed of a troop of six
or seven thousand Amazons, who are very ferocious, particularly in the
mutilation of dead bodies; women then become tigers, is a popular saying.
Among the ancient Scots, women followed the army, and cruelly mutilated
the prisoners. Among the Botocudos, when war breaks out between the
tribes, the men fight the men with sticks, and the women fight the women,
by scratching and by tearing the _botoques_ (cylinders of wood) from
their ears and lips.[26] But these are all exceptional cases. Generally
speaking, the savage woman plays a secondary part in war; she acts as an
auxiliary, picks up arrows, throws stones from a distance, and carries
the provisions etc.
REVENGE.
It is above all in revenge, that feminine cruelty shows itself the most
terrible. Man is capable of destroying whole families or nations, to
satisfy a particular revenge; but nothing equals the ingenuity of woman,
in slowly tormenting her victim, in gloating over his sufferings and
lengthening them out in order that her enjoyment of vengeance may endure
as long as possible.
In Tasmania, when the _black war_ broke out between the English and the
aborigines, the Tasmanian women terribly tortured the prisoners, in order
to avenge their companions who had been carried off by the English. We
must also attribute to the desire for vengeance, the torments inflicted
by the women upon prisoners of war among the Red Indians.
Elizabeth of Russia, betrayed by her lover, obliged him to marry a
deformed dwarf, and to pass his wedding night in an ice palace, where
the furniture and the bed were all of ice. The next morning, attended by
her Court, she went to present the newly wedded pair with a bouquet. She
found them, stretched out upon their bed of ice, nearly frozen. She then
banished her rival to Siberia first causing her ears and nose to be cut
off.
A wealthy Russian Prince, in love with a very beautiful peasant girl of
fifteen, took her to live with him for five years; at the end of which
time, wishing to contract an alliance, he paid her a sum of money in
dower and obliged her to marry a peasant. The young girl made no sign
for ten years, until the death of her husband; but after the lapse of
that period, a rising having taken place among the peasantry against the
nobles, she excited them and led a body of peasants to the castle of her
ancient lover, had him taken and dragged into his _izba_, harnessed him
to the plough instead of the oxen, and for three days obliged him thus
to work, lashing him with the whip each time that he fell to the ground.
At night she led him to the stable and made him lie down with the oxen;
compelling him to eat fodder with the beasts and making merry over his
sorry plight. This amusement lasted for three days, at the end of which
time, the man fell dead in one of the furrows he was ploughing.[27]
A Russian, an idle and worthless fellow who had let his wife suffer
hunger, proposed to her that she should be sold as a slave to the
Sultan. After some hesitation, she accepted and they started off; but
when they had gone about half the way, the husband having fallen asleep
intoxicated, the idea came into her mind to sell him for a slave, in her
place. She then tied him on the horse, started off again on the road and
arriving at the place of rendezvous, she delivered her husband to the
merchant, and remained to watch the Turk push the half-awakened man into
the boat, laughing whilst he showered blows upon him.[28]
A young Russian peasant woman lived with a small land-owner, who betrayed
her; at last she took refuge with a band of brigands, who treated her
like a queen. One day she caused two of them to capture her old lover,
and had him brought to the camp where she used him as a kind of living
foot-stool: when she sat down she covered him with a carpet and put her
feet upon him, and when she wanted to go out she made him carry her on
his shoulders.
CRUELTY TO THE HELPLESS.
Woman sometimes displays the same amount of ingenuity in tormenting
the helpless creatures who may be in her power. I do not know, says
Bourgavel, any one more perfidious, immoral, or perverse than the New
Caledonian woman. In certain portions of Australia women are mortal foes
to each other. When the men wish to punish any one of them, they turn
her over to her companions, who inflict upon her horrible tortures.[29]
Sitting on her body, they cut her flesh with sharpened stones.
In Tasmania, as amongst the ancient Saxons, the unfaithful wife was
punished by her companions; she was not killed, but she was tortured for
a long time with sharp pointed stones or knives, in all parts of her body.
Women have often been cruel mistresses to their slaves. A lady in Guiana,
being envious of a very handsome mulatto slave, had her branded on the
mouth, cheeks and forehead. In the case of another slave, who was also
very beautiful, she had the tendon of Achilles cut thus causing her to
become a deformed and crippled monster.[30]
It is a notorious fact that Roman and Greek ladies often inflicted most
terrible punishments on their slaves, and that it was more particularly
towards the female slaves, the _ancillæ_, that the cruelty of their
mistresses was shown. The Roman ladies, if, while they were having their
hair dressed, they were vexed with their attendants, used to thrust pins
into their arms and breasts. Darwin relates that at Rio Janeiro, an old
lady possessed a kind of thumb screw which she had had made expressly to
crush the fingers of her slaves.
EPIDEMIC CRUELTY.
During periods of great national excitement, such as revolutions,
feminine cruelty shows how far it can go.
The women, writes M. Du Camp, were the fiercest heroines of the Commune;
it was a woman who incited the assassination of the Dominicans. When the
hostages were shot, they surpassed the men in cruelty; they taunted them
with not knowing how to kill. When employed to seek out the insurgents
they were implacable; when acting as infirmarians, they killed the
wounded by giving them brandy to drink.
At the time of the French Revolution, on the days of execution, writes
M. Legouvé,[31] the front rows nearest the guillotine were reserved
for the women of the political clubs. They even hung on to the boards
of the scaffold, in order the better to witness the death throes of
the condemned, and drowned the cries of the victims by their peals of
laughter.
II.
PITY.
But again we find a series of contradictory facts, which bear witness
that the sentiment of pity also is much keener in woman than in man.
Even with animals, we observe this phenomenon. Hens often separate two
young cocks who are fighting together. Sir George Le Grand Jacob has
observed females of the wild goat (Steinbock) raise with their heads
he-goats that had been shot, support them and help them to escape.
Romanes relates, that sometimes the female gibbon, takes great care of
all the members of the troop when they are wounded, even if they are not
related.[32]
The savage woman also is very often kind and good. It is notorious that
the explorers of savage countries have often escaped serious perils,
thanks to the kindness of the native women. Australasian women have
often revealed to European travellers the plots laid against them by
the men of their tribe: they have even risked their own lives for that
purpose.[33] Stanley, at the island of Bambyrch, on the Nyanza, was
roughly greeted by the natives, who were desirous of exterminating his
expedition; but a woman came to warn him and to advise him to perform
a certain ceremony with the King Shekka by which he would acquire his
friendship. In Senegambia an old woman, meeting Mungo Park, who was half
dead of starvation and had just been despoiled by a negro king, gave
him food, and went away without waiting to be thanked. Another time the
same traveller, being left with nothing but his saddle, was hospitably
entertained by some women, whom he heard chant these words as he fell
asleep: “The winds roared and the rain beat, the poor white man came
and sat down under our tree, he had no mother to give him milk, no wife
to grind him corn. Let us take pity on the white man, he has no mother,
etc., etc.”[34] Michelet says that woman was the first physician;
and certainly she fulfils the office of infirmarian among many savage
peoples, the Esquimaux, the Mincopies, etc. etc.
In war the Samoan woman often interferes to make peace between the
belligerents. Among the Khonds, also, when two tribes quarrel, the women
sometimes make peace, calling in the intervention of a third tribe.
Quite recently, among the Montenegrins and Albanians, fierce strife
broke out between different families, but in these fights, if a man took
refuge with a woman and she covered him with her apron, he was safe.
Among the Bedouin Arabs a woman can save the life of the condemned man
who implores her protection. So it also was among the Roman Vestals,
when in the streets they accidentally met a man condemned to death; it
was required, however, that the meeting should be evidently a chance
one, for it was feared that the privilege might be carried too far.
Among civilised nations this sentiment of pity becomes naturally more
developed. Christianity owed a great deal of its success among women
to the fact, that it knew how to make use of their pity, by organising
those associations of women which are its greatest ornament. From the
earliest years after the death of Jesus, in the cenobitic form of society
lived by the disciples of the Messiah, they made use of the charitable
sentiment of childless widows and created the order of Deaconesses, which
was devoted to the care of the poor and the sick.[35] Legouvé says:
“Women offered their services to Christianity like a volunteer battalion
consecrated to charitable work. In the Apostles’ time their mission was
one of sympathy and watchfulness, a mother’s vocation; in the time of the
Martyrs they remained womanly in their modesty, while exhibiting a manly
courage; in the time of the Doctors, whilst orators speak and learned men
write, women continue to love and console.”[36]
This Christian tradition has survived and is still powerful, thanks to
the deeply laid sentiment of pity in the heart of woman. “Private charity
in Paris,” writes M. du Camp,[37] “is almost entirely in the hands of
women. There are in Paris women of the world, young and beautiful, born
for pleasure, accustomed to every luxury, who visit the poor, nurse
the sick, rock little motherless children, and all this they do simply
without a word of self-praise.”
The society of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” in Paris, is composed of widows,
who, without binding themselves by religious vows, engage to nurse the
sick gathered into the hospitals of the association, poor outcasts
attacked by loathsome diseases—cancer, for example. Women of wealth and
belonging to great families often obtain admission to this society.
Female religious orders are rarely contemplative; they are nearly always
charitable in aim. “The Daughters of Charity” possess establishments all
over the known world; they migrate, says M. du Camp, “like benevolent
birds, carrying with them the principle of self-sacrifice and the love
of those that suffer. In all countries I have visited, among sects most
antagonistic to their religion, I have beheld them at work; their faces
shadowed by the immense cap, which resembles the wings of a white swan;
instructing children, visiting the sick, caring for the plague-stricken,
blessed by our sailors whom they nurse in the French hospitals in foreign
lands.”[38]
Pity in woman is sometimes so powerful a sentiment that it supplies the
place in her of a higher faculty, intelligence. It was thus that a humble
servant-maid, without learning, who could neither read nor write, founded
one of the most prominent nursing sisterhoods in France, “Les petites
Soeurs des Pauvres,” which to-day numbers 3,400 sisters, and possesses
207 houses, where more than 25,000 old men are received and cared for.
In the first half of this century there was such misery in Brittany that
the old men were literally abandoned by all. Jeanne Jugau, whose earnings
hardly sufficed to maintain herself, took in one, then two, then a number
of them, without a thought of her own poverty, slaving might and main for
their support. Two women, Virginie Tredaniel and Marie Catherine, helped
her; a priest, Le Pailleur, took the direction of their work, and in a
short time the order was founded, and grew apace. There, where genius
might have failed, the love and pity of a servant-maid succeeded.
Another heroine of charity, though of a different type, was Jeanne
Garnier. She was perpetually haunted by a desire to do good, to help
and succour the unfortunate. M. du Camp has portrayed her character
in a most graphic manner: impulsive, prone from childhood to adopt
extreme measures, while in the convent she was given to rebellious and
untractable conduct, for which she was sent away. When she was twenty
years old she married; the love she bore her husband and two sons was
deep and ardent. Three years after her marriage she had the unspeakable
grief of losing both husband and sons at one fell stroke. After this
occurrence her life had but one aim, ceaselessly and untiringly to
succour and help the sorrowful. One day she was told that a woman,
disfigured by a cutaneous disease, was lying in an attic in Lyons,
abandoned by every one. She went at once to her, ministered to her, and
every day went to wash her sores. Thus was suggested to her the founding
of the association of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” of which we have already
spoken, and the idea of pressing into the service of the sick, widows
who found themselves in the same position as herself. She was not rich,
but being an untiring and determined worker, capable of attacking the
same person ten times a day, she obtained money. When they had to convey
the sick to the new hospital, there was among them one woman so horribly
disfigured by burns that no conveyance could be found whose driver was
willing to take her. Jeanne Garnier then took her on her own shoulders
and carried her there herself. The association of “Les Dames du Calvaire”
was not the only charitable work which owes its existence to her. She
conceived a great many other plans, of which many were carried out, for
she never ceased working, up to the moment of her death, which occurred
at forty-two years of age, of exhaustion.
In the United States, where woman enjoys much greater freedom than
in Europe, she makes an excellent use of her liberty. In fact, all
associations of women have a charitable end in view; and these societies
not being subjected to the severe rules of Catholic religious orders,
and not requiring from their members so absolute a renunciation of the
pleasures of life, exhibit the most perfect and most modern form of
charitable associations, which have been known up to the present day. The
first woman’s club that was founded in that country, the Sorosis, has for
its object the amelioration of the condition of shop-girls: it has also
founded asylums for homeless children. The Temperance Union, founded by
women, seeks to stem the tide of intemperance. The Women’s League has
obtained the admission of women on commissioners boards for schools and
hospitals. The College Settlement Girls, composed of female graduates
from universities, carry help into the purlieus of the city.[39]
CRUELTY, PITY, AND THE MATERNAL SENTIMENT.
Is woman kind or cruel? Can we reconcile these two series of facts, so
contradictory in themselves? That is the question which now comes before
us. Let us seek, first of all, the origin and the genesis of feminine
cruelty. We have seen women exhibiting great ingenuity in torturing; she
does not wish to destroy her enemies, but to torment and torture them;
she seeks to protract their pain as long as possible, and to lengthen
out her enjoyment of vengeance. On this point woman goes much further
than man: for among savages men do not amuse themselves by prolonging the
miseries of their enemies; they rather wreak their vengeance by killing
them at one stroke. Savages often make a wholesale carnage, massacring
whole tribes and nations. But it is always the woman who practices the
art of killing a man by inches, over a slow fire, as it were. Thus we
find that the redskins give their prisoners of war over to their women.
Notice, even at the present day, the difference between the quarrels of
men and women. Women scratch each other, tear out the hair, fly at the
eyes of their adversaries, trying to inflict some painful wound: men
give blows and stabs; they strive to disable or stun their enemy, or to
destroy him. There is the same difference but on a smaller scale. This
aptitude in inflicting pain is an outgrowth of weakness. We know from
the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and from the struggle for
life, that every living being must be provided with a certain number of
means of defense and offense, and amongst these means must be classed
many instincts and sentiments which spring from natural selection,
adaptation, and heredity. The cruelty of woman is one of these instincts
and sentiments. Woman not being powerful enough to destroy her enemies,
had to seek for the means of defending herself, by wounding their more
delicate organs, by inflicting such acute pain as would serve to disable
them. This tendency to protect one’s self by such means has become
instinctive by heredity; and so much the more since the woman who was
able thus to defend herself, had at the outset of man’s evolution a far
better chance of survival.
All this is so true, that we find other weak creatures also to be cruel.
Children take pleasure in tormenting insects, birds, or little dogs, and
are very cruel to each other. I knew a child who used to cut his nails
like the teeth of a saw, in order to inflict more painful scratches on
his companions. Humming birds, says Brehm, are the smallest and the
cruelest of birds. When they are attacked by a more powerful enemy they
try to peck out his eyes with their long, sharp beaks. The struggle for
life and natural selection has provided their weakness with this means of
defense, and they are even cruel to each other when they fight, to such
an extent has the sentiment of cruelty in them become instinctive.
And now we must seek for the genesis of the other phenomenon, pity. It
is a notorious fact, that maternity being the great function of woman,
through the whole order of animal life, with the exception of some few
fishes, it is always the female who is thus the benefactress of the race.
Maternity is always an altruistic function; in the inferior orders this
altruism is a purely physical act, and consists merely in a material
sacrifice; (the detaching of a portion of the maternal body, under
the form of bud, or egg;) in the higher orders, this altruism becomes
psychical and consists in a conscious sacrifice of self and of vitality
in the interests of the race.
What then is the essential nature of these altruistic sacrifices?
Maternity is protection given to weakness; for the infant is above all
other created things a being requiring succour.
It is thus that, the images relating to the state of weakness being in
great numbers strongly impressed on the mind of woman, when one of them
presents itself to her, by the law of association it awakens all those
maternal sentiments whose function it is to help the weak. At first,
motherhood only extends from a woman’s own children to those of others;
this is the first stage of pity, such as we find it in the animals and
among many undeveloped savage peoples. Afterwards in a region of higher
psychical development the sentiment of pity broadens till it embraces a
wider group, the sick, the aged, those condemned to death; for all those
unfortunates who claim the pity of woman are the weak appealing for help
to the strong. It is only the weak who can inspire pity. Thus pity, in
woman, is but the outgrowth of the maternal sentiment applied to a larger
class of helpless people. “Woman,” says M. du Camp, “may bind herself
by the religious vow of chastity; but she is a born mother and remains
a mother, even though circumstances may have broken the physical law of
her sex. The Little Sisters of the Poor, call their pensioners ‘the good
little old men,’ and themselves ‘the good little sisters,’ their superior
‘the good little mother.’ With them everybody is good and little; all
these expressions are the reflection of maternal love.”
We must mention also, that one cause of a livelier sense of pity in
woman, is her own weakness and her lower intellect. “Anger,” writes A.
Bain, “the passion for war, are bound up with activity and strength;
conditions of weakness and of repose are favorable to the softer
sentiments.” Strong men who display great muscular or mental activity,
and who often experience the satisfactions arising from power, only
realise with extreme difficulty the feelings of the weak; for, as H.
Spencer remarks,[40] “to feel pity for any suffering which we witness,
we must have experienced it ourselves to the same extent or in an
approximate degree.” Thus healthy persons become, after a serious
sickness, more feeling than they formerly were for those who are
suffering; women are continually in a state of ill-health.
Besides which women have not been involved in the struggle for life,
as have men during the whole process of evolution: this struggle for
life implying, as it does, the necessity of pursuing one’s own object
irrespective of the ills which it may entail on the unhappy competitors,
and often rendering a man insensible to the sorrows of those around him.
To this we add, that love for man has not been without influence in
developing the sense of pity in woman. The main characteristic of the
love of woman towards man, is self-abnegation and devotion; woman finds
her happiness in devotion to the man she loves and in making for him
the most painful sacrifices. Read the “Letters of Heloise,” the “Life
of Carlyle,” or the “Life of Mme. de Lespinasse.” Each woman, carries
hidden in her heart, an inexhaustible treasure of devotion which heredity
has added to through all the centuries, during which woman has lived in
contact with man and sought to win his good-will, displaying an affection
and an ardent zeal in his behalf; nothing then is easier than to spend
this treasure on the unhappy, when she has not found the man on whom to
lavish it.
The close relationship between pity, maternity, and love, is also shown
by this fact, that the heroines of charity are almost always widows
without sons, or unmarried women. When a woman has a husband or sons
to love and cherish, she does not feel the same tenderness towards
the suffering; this goes to prove that if these two sentiments are
interchangeable, they are but two different forms of the same thing.
PITY AND CRUELTY.
We are now in a position to answer the question: Is woman kind or cruel?
Pity and cruelty coexist together in her; we might call this state in
woman a state of unstable equilibrium; to-day she is kind, divinely
good, charitable; to-morrow she will be perverse and cruel. On one side
her feebleness renders her cruel, and her impulsive nature prevents her
from repressing the outbursts of anger and of vengeance; on the other
hand, the gentle habits of maternal affection, her lower intelligence,
and even the weakness of her nature develop in her kindly sentiments.
Woman may experience the strongest feelings of maternal affection at the
sight of a helpless creature; but that will not prevent her from cruelly
persecuting a rival, especially if she has been wounded in her sentiments
of wife or mother. Thus woman, who is the natural protector of the weak,
treats them oftentimes with a cruelty of which man is totally incapable.
Woman loves, hates, consoles, inflicts pain, according as she finds
herself in the presence of a friend, an enemy, a helpless being, or of a
rival.
Many of the fiercest heroines of the Paris Commune, had been trained
nurses during the war, and distinguished for their devotion to the sick.
There is nothing astonishing in this, for contradiction in feeling is so
often a psychical law that a great Italian philosopher, Robert Ardigò,
has said that man is not a logical being.
We have noticed before that weakness is in part the cause of cruelty and
partly also of pity, and this accounts for the co-existence of the two
contrary sentiments. They coexist because they have a common origin.
But this instability of equilibrium is lessened by evolution, and pity
becomes stronger than cruelty. Among civilised nations the cruelty of
women has become merely a moral attitude: the civilised woman, less
powerful than her savage sister, no more subjects her enemies to physical
pain, does not shed their blood; she contents herself with slandering
them, turning them into ridicule, and humiliating them. The diminution
of muscular strength is in itself favorable to the softening of female
character.
Furthermore, sexual selection also helps in this; in the human race
as civilisation advances the male assumes more and more the right of
selection, and man shrinks instinctively from meeting in a woman a high
development of the qualities which he himself possesses, for he wishes
to dominate her and to be her superior. This explains to us the singular
fact, which we notice every day, that of a _savant_ marrying a stupid
or unintelligent wife; this is why the normal man, as also the vicious,
choose gentle and good women when they desire to found families. If
sometimes the choice falls on a wicked woman, it is because the man
desires to form a criminal co-partnership, such as was perhaps the normal
condition of family life during the early days of human evolution. Many
of the domestic tragedies which we witness to-day can be traced to no
other cause than this _penchant_ of the male, even of the vicious, to
choose the woman who appears to be the most gentle. Women with their
clear penetration and sure instincts have seized upon this inclination
in man and made capital out of it with infinite ability: do we not see
many young women simulate a gentleness, a sweetness, and kindness which
they do not naturally possess in order to capture the good-will of men?
Women have thus practised the habit of repressing their evil _penchants_,
through interested motives, because they saw that men chose the most
gentle among them as wives.
Besides sexual selection, physical grace plays a conspicuous part, as
well as those psychical qualities which are associated with it. Man
having set a high value on graceful demeanour, woman sought and still
seeks with all her strength to adorn herself with it.
We know that by the law of association between the emotional states and
their outward expression, which mutually correspond, each gesture, each
attitude, and each graceful expression of the countenance has a tendency
to throw the mind into some sweet and peaceful condition; this is why the
culture of physical grace has been for woman an exercise of goodness.
This fostering of physical beauty has had a beneficial influence on her
moral character. We might say that as woman grew in beauty, she became
better. Finally woman being in the present day more respected than in
former times, she has less often the occasion to exercise her instinctive
cruelty, which on this account is being gradually obliterated. Pity each
day becomes more and more the normal state of the feminine mind, and
cruelty the exception. In order to be cruel, a woman’s character must
be perverted, as is the case in female criminals, whose vice exceeds
that of man in similar circumstances. Or she must have received some
deep provocation, wounding her profoundly in her deepest and tenderest
sentiments, which has awakened the original cruelty slumbering latent in
the depths of her heart.
We may thus predict that in the ages to come, woman will become entirely
good.
GUILLAUME FERRERO.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Spencer. _Principles of Sociology_, II., p. 361.
[25] Irving. _Hist. of the Life and Voyages of Chris. Columbus_, II., p.
15.
[26] Hovelacque. _Les débuts de l’humanité_.
[27] Sacher-Masoch. _Rev. des Deux Mondes._
[28] Sacher-Masoch. Ibid.
[29] Letourneau. _Evolution de la Morale_, p. 122.
[30] Mantegazza. _Fisiologia etc._ Milan. 1889.
[31] _Histoire morale des femmes._
[32] Romanes. _Animal Intelligence_, Vol. II.
[33] Hovelacque. _Op. cit._
[34] Letourneau. _La Sociologie d’après l’ethnographie._ Paris, 1884.
[35] Renan. _Les Apôtres._
[36] Op. cit.
[37] _La charité privée à Paris_, 1887.
[38] Op. cit.
[39] _The Forum._ 1891.
[40] Spencer. _Principles of Psychology_, II, p. 648.
PANPSYCHISM AND PANBIOTISM.
I. PROFESSOR HAECKEL’S PANPSYCHISM.
Professor Haeckel, in his article “Our Monism,”[41] propounds the theory
of Panpsychism, which he considers as an essential feature of Monism. He
says:
“One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be
that I regard _all_ matter as _ensouled_, that is to say, as
endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain) and with motion, or,
better, with the power of motion. As elementary (atomistic)
attraction and repulsion these powers are asserted in every
simplest chemical process, and on them is based also every
other phenomenon, consequently also the highest developed
soul-activity of man.
“Simplest example: sulphur and quicksilver rubbed together form
cinnabar, a new body of entirely different properties. This is
possible only on the supposition that the molecules (or atoms)
of the two elements if brought within the proper distance,
mutually _feel_ each other, by attraction move toward each
other; on the decomposition of a simple chemical compound the
contrary takes place: repulsion. (Empedocles’s doctrine of ‘the
love and hatred of atoms.’)”
Not being able to accept Professor Haeckel’s doctrine of Panpsychism, I
propose what might best be called Panbiotism, briefly set forth in the
maxim πᾶν βιωτόν; that is, everything is fraught with life; it contains
life; it has the ability to live.
The word βιωτός is mostly used by Greek authors in the negative, as in
the phrase βίον οὐ βιωτόν, an unlivable life, in the sense of a life
unendurable or not worth living. Thus Sophocles and others. The word
βιωτός is embodied in the term Panbiotism in its etymological sense of
“livable.”
I am willing to concede to Professor Haeckel that all nature is alive.
Indeed, I have most emphatically insisted on the doctrine that there is
a spontaneity pervading all nature. (See “Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed.,
pp. 110 et seqq.)
By spontaneity is to be understood that kind of activity which springs
from the nature of the being or thing which is active. A motion that is
caused by pressure or push is not spontaneous; but a motion, the motive
power of which resides in the moving object, is spontaneous. Thus a cart
rolling down a hill by its own weight performs a spontaneous motion,
but when drawn by horses moves, or rather is moved, by pull without any
spontaneity.[42] Now everything that exists is possessed of certain
qualities; its existence is of some definite, peculiar kind, and this
its peculiar kind is the character of the thing. In the character of
a thing lies the source of its spontaneous actions. The spontaneous
actions of the chemical elements depend upon their qualities, which
always react under certain circumstances in a definite way, and under the
same conditions in the same way. The action of sulphur and quicksilver
lies in the nature of these elements. Their union is not passive, but
active. They _are_ not combined, but they _do_ combine. He who observes
and studies nature cannot be blind to the fact that an inalienable,
intrinsic power is resident in every thing that exists. This is true not
only of organised life, but also of the chemical elements as well as of
gravitating masses. The motion of a falling stone can, no more than the
actions of oxydising substances, be considered as ultimately due to an
extraneous pressure that makes them move by push, or to a _vis a tergo_
acting upon inert matter. These motions must be spontaneous; they are due
to powers inherent in the nature of reality. They are self-motions, and
in this sense we say that all nature is alive.
The term “life” is here used in a broader sense than ordinarily. It means
spontaneity or self-motion, while in its common signification the term
“life” is restricted only to the spontaneous action of organised beings,
i. e. of plants and animals. In order to distinguish life in the broader
sense from the narrower or common acceptance of the term, we call the
latter “organised life.”
It is not impossible, and I consider it even as most probable, that the
difference between Professor Haeckel and myself rests on a different
usage of the term soul. But a vague or inconsistent usage of the term,
unless we are especially careful in so defining it as to prevent
misunderstandings, will inevitably beget errors. Thus the doctrine of
Panpsychism is liable to lead to fantastic ideas, and to cause great
confusion concerning the activity of what is generally called inanimate
nature.
Soul (as I understand the term) is a system of sentient symbols.
The problem of the origin of the soul is solved as soon as we understand
how feelings can acquire meaning.
Suppose we have some sentient substance exposed to the impressions of the
surrounding world. The sense-impressions of the surrounding world leave
traces in the sentient substance; these traces, which are structures of
a certain form corresponding exactly to the various impressions, are
preserved and constitute a predisposition to being very easily revived
by impressions of the same kind. The revival of feeling in traces left
in the sentient structure from former impressions is called memory. If a
new impression of the same kind as the traces of the former impressions
affects a sentient being, the new impression already finds a convenient
path for its reception prepared. Its peculiar vibration fits in the old
trace and thus runs along very easily in the memory-grooves of former
impressions, reviving at the same time the feelings perceived at their
original formation. The feeling thus caused is composed of several
elements, which naturally melt into one: first, there is that kind of
feeling which is produced by the present impression; secondly, there is
the revival of former feelings or memory-sensations; and thirdly, there
is a feeling of congruence resulting from the combination of these two.
This third element is a new and a very important feature. We suppose that
it is extremely insignificant in the beginning, but being a constantly
growing factor, it rapidly increases in importance. The stronger and the
more independent the memory-structures become, the more clearly will
their congruence with fresh sense-impressions be felt as a congruence.
This feeling of congruence is the simplest form of what psychologists
generally call “recognition.”
The recognition of a sense-impression, as being the same as some former
sense-impression, adds to the feeling a new quality; it imparts meaning
to it. This feeling of a special kind will now stand for something. In
this way impressions upon sentient substance will, in the course of
their natural development, simply by the repetition of similar and same
impressions, come to indicate the presence of certain conditions that
cause the impression. This act of indicating something, of symbolising
the presence of a reality, of possessing meaning, is the birth of soul.
Sense-impressions that have acquired meaning are called sensations. A
sensation standing for a special object symbolises that object. Abstract
ideas are symbols of a higher degree, but they remain symbols just the
same. And it is the sentient symbols which constitute the soul.
Those actions which are regulated by the meanings of sentient symbols of
which a soul consists should alone, according to a strict terminology,
be called “psychical.” The falling stone, the chemical elements, when
combining or separating, etc., are alive; there is a spontaneously acting
power even in unorganised nature; but the actions of unorganised nature
are not determined by the meaning of feelings, and, in truth, we have
no reason to believe that their feelings—granting that they really do
possess feelings of some kind—are freighted with even so much as the
slightest inkling of significance. In a word, there is no soul in the
stone; there is no mind in the water-fall; and there is nothing psychical
in either oxygen or hydrogen. But there is soul wherever meaning can be
found as the regulating motive of actions; there is purpose. And wherever
purpose is, there is mind.
II. PLEASURE AND PAIN.
Professor Haeckel goes still farther in the application of his theory
of Panpsychism: he speaks of the atoms not only as feeling each other,
but also as having pleasure and pain. This indicates either that he
is serious in his belief in the psychical nature of all things, or it
proves how dangerous it is to introduce an allegorical expression the
allegorical character of which is from the beginning lost sight of.
What are pleasure and pain?
Pleasure and pain are known to us by experience; they are feelings.
Pleasure is an agreeable, pain a disagreeable feeling.
Pleasure and pain are different from sensation. Sensations are
representative of certain somethings called objects. Pleasures and pains,
however, are not representative, they are purely subjective states.
There may be pleasurable or painful sensations, and there may be pain
indicating the presence of pain-producing objects, but that does not
concern us now. When speaking of pleasure and pain we do not refer to
the representative value of feelings, but consider a merely subjective
aspect, pleasure being the agreeableness, pain the disagreeableness of
feeling.
Accordingly pleasure and pain presuppose the existence of an organised
system of feelings. An isolated feeling, we have learned, is meaningless;
it is still less pleasurable or painful. In order to agree or disagree,
there must be something with which to agree or disagree. Therefore,
although pleasure and pain are not symbols indicative of some objective
presence, they can take place only in sentient organisms, in systems of
feelings, in souls. Where these complex conditions, indicative of the
presence of a soul, are absent, we have no right to speak of the presence
of pleasure and pain.
We cannot interpret the phenomena of unorganised nature as being endowed
with feelings of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are psychical
phenomena, and psychical phenomena can take place in souls only.
We might as well speak of the presence of positive and negative
electricity in the cataract, the water-power of which is employed
to produce electricity. Electricity is, in such a case, transformed
water-power; but can we, for that reason, say that the motion of water is
either positive or negative electricity?
All the motions of the objective world must be supposed to have their
subjective correlates; but the simplest forms of objective phenomena
cannot have those subjective correlates which, according to our
experience, appear and have their conditions of appearance only in the
most complex and highest developed forms of existence—in organised nature.
* * * * *
The physiological conditions of pleasure and pain are now just beginning
to be investigated (see Goldscheider’s article in Dubois-Reymond’s
_Archiv_, 1891), and most philosophical theories concerning the nature
of pleasure and pain are mere assumptions. Almost all the views that are
now current attempt an explanation by generalising the idea of pleasure
and pain so as to regard the feelings of pleasure and pain as a universal
feature of nature. This vicious method of generalisation at the cost
of discrimination has produced much confusion in the world; and its
influence is the more pernicious as average minds are easily satisfied
with generalities.
Now, the theory of making pleasure and pain universal features of
existence is a palpably erroneous theory; it is a wrong generalisation.
It is true that sentient beings naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain.
But are we allowed, according to the laws of logic, to transfer the
special feature of the case to the whole class of all processes where a
seeking and an avoiding can be observed? Certainly not. Because sentient
beings are repelled by pain and attracted by pleasure, we cannot say
that every repulsion is due to pain and that every attraction is due to
pleasure.
The theory according to which pleasure and pain alone are the causes of
attraction and repulsion we may fairly consider as a poetical license
justifiable within certain narrow limits, and actually justified in so
far as there is in every natural process some peculiar feature that is
analogous to the feelings of sentient beings. This peculiar feature—viz.
its subjectivity—is, as we have seen, not visible, not observable; yet it
exists: it is that something which in the course of evolution becomes, in
special combinations, first feeling and then consciousness. But for that
reason it is not as yet either consciousness or feeling.
While on the one hand the theories of pleasure and pain that regard
pleasure and pain as universal features of natural phenomena, are
arrived at by a wrong method of generalisation, we find on the other
hand they do not agree with facts. They neither explain nor account for
the appearance or disappearance of real pleasures and pains such as take
place in animal life.
* * * * *
Starting from merely theoretical considerations, Kant defines pleasure as
a feeling of furtherance, pain, as a feeling of hindrance of life; and
so prominent a physiologist and psychologist as Alexander Bain says that
“States of pleasure are connected with an increase, states of pain, with
an abatement of some or of all the vital functions.”
A consideration of the actual causes of our pleasures and pains will
prove the incorrectness of these views, which are also due to wrong
generalisations. An increase of the vital functions and a further growth,
either of the organs or of the whole organism, is very often accompanied
with pain. A growing tooth causes, as a rule, as much pain as a decaying
tooth. And if by some drug the decay is hastened and the nerve is killed,
there is, connected with the suppression and sometimes with the mere
abatement of the vital function, an abatement of the pain also.
Feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose that habits have been formed in
a sentient organism.
Pain is not always a hindrance of life, nor is every hindrance of life
painful. Pain is not an abatement of the functions of life, not a decay,
nor a destruction. But pain is always a disturbance of life and of the
habits that have been formed.
Growth is, under certain circumstances, as much a disturbance as is
decay. And decay, if it is simply an abatement or cessation of function,
is not accompanied with pain.
While pain is always a disturbance of the functions of an organism,
pleasure is simply the gratification of wants; functions and wants being
formed by habits, we may briefly say that pleasure is agreement, pain
disagreement, with habits.
There are natural wants and unnatural wants. There are habits beneficial
to the furtherance of life, and there are habits injurious to the
furtherance of life. The pleasure connected with the gratification of
wants does not depend on its being a furtherance or a hindrance of life,
but solely on the intensity of the want. And the intensity of the want,
again, depends on the degree to which a habit has become inveterate.[43]
* * * * *
The theory of pleasure and pain which regards pleasure as indicative
of the growth, and pain, of the decay of life, leads ultimately to the
ethics of hedonism, which identifies the good with the pleasurable.
However, if our view of pleasure and pain be correct, it is apparent
that the pleasure theory in ethics is wrong in its very foundation. The
pleasurable would cease to be a criterion of goodness; for many things
are pleasurable that are bad, and many things are painful that are good.
Growth, development, progress, evolution have often been, nay must mostly
be bought with great pain, tribulation, anxiety, and also with the
renunciation of pleasures. On the other hand the fulness of pleasure is
always a very dangerous symptom for any state of existence.
The seeking of pleasure and the avoiding of pain are certainly very
questionable guides in determining what right conduct is. In adopting
pleasure and pain as the principles of ethics, we adulterate the nature
of morality; for morality exists and has been called into being simply
to counteract the dangerous allurances of that which promises to produce
pleasure and to avoid pain. Ethics has to teach us how to live, how to
develop, how to grow, how to make our lives useful and serviceable. If
ethics were simply a method of how to obtain the greatest amount of
pleasure, we might better openly confess that there is no moral goodness
but only pleasurableness, and consequently that morality is a chimera and
ethics a farce.
A defender of the pleasure theory in ethics writes in reply to this
criticism of his view: “To seek pleasure and to avoid pain is not wrong.
Why shall we deprive men of their enjoyments?” Certainly, everyone has
a right to enjoy himself; every one has a right to seek pleasure and to
avoid pain. But seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is not as yet ethical.
Under ordinary circumstances it is right enough to follow the natural
impulses of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. But there are cases
where seeking pleasure, be it for ourselves or for others, and avoiding
pain, be it for ourselves or for others, become actual wrongs; not
because present pleasures will lead to future pains, but because certain
pleasures are a hindrance to the higher evolution of the soul.
It is often said that the renunciation of pleasures is richly made up for
by the pleasures which are afforded in a more fully developed life. But
this, in my opinion, is not true. The adult has rather less pleasures
than the child, and the civilised or highly cultured man does not enjoy
himself as much, as easily, and as cheaply as does the savage, the
uncultured, the fool.
III. MR. THOMAS A. EDISON’S PANPSYCHISM.
Some time ago Mr. Thomas A. Edison was interviewed on the question, “What
is life?” Mr. Edison answered the question; and his view is quite in
accord with Professor Haeckel’s idea of panpsychism. The article appeared
first in a daily newspaper. Being remarkable for its coincidence with the
views of a great scientist, and coming from the pen of so interesting
a man as the famous inventor of the phonograph, we deem it best to
republish it in full, with Mr. Edison’s permission, who, at the same
time, acknowledged the copy we sent him as correct.
This is the article:
INTELLIGENT ATOMS.
BY THOMAS A. EDISON.
My mind is not of a speculative order, it is essentially
practical, and when I am making an experiment, I think only of
getting something useful, of making electricity perform work.
I don’t soar; I keep down pretty close to earth. Of course
there are problems in life I can’t help thinking about, but I
don’t try to study them out. It is necessary that they should
be studied, and men fitted for that work are doing it. I am not
fitted for it. I leave the theoretical study of electricity to
the physicists, confining my work to the practical application
of the force. It is my belief, however, that every atom of
matter is intelligent, deriving energy from the primordial
germ. The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the
intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed. Every atom
has an intelligent power of selection and is always striving to
get into harmonious relation with other atoms. The human body
is, I think, maintained in its integrity by the intelligent
persistence of its atoms, or rather by an agreement between
the atoms so to persist. When the harmonious adjustment is
destroyed the man dies, and the atoms seek other relations.
I cannot regard the odor of decay but as the result of the
efforts of the atoms to dissociate themselves; they want to get
away and make new combinations. Man, therefore, may be regarded
in some sort as a microcosm of atoms agreeing to constitute his
life as long as order and discipline can be maintained. But, of
course, there is dissatisfaction, rebellion and anarchy leading
eventually to death, and through death to new forms of life.
For life I regard as indestructible.
All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses
intelligence. Consider growing corn, for example. An atom
of oxygen comes flying along the air. It seeks combination
with other atoms and goes to the corn, not by chance, but by
intention. It is seized by other atoms that need oxygen, and is
packed away in the corn where it can do its work. Now carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen enter into the composition of every organic
substance in one form of arrangement or another. The formula
_CHO_, in fact, is almost universal.
Very well, then, why does a free atom of carbon select any
particular one out of 50,000 or more possible positions unless
it wants to? I cannot see how we can deny intelligence to this
act of volition on the part of the atom. To say that one atom
has an affinity for another is simply to use a big word. The
atom is conscious if man is conscious, is intelligent if man is
intelligent, exercises will-power if man does, is, in its own
little way, all that man is. We are told by geologists that in
the earliest periods no form of life could exist on the earth.
How do they know that? A crystal is devoid of this vital
principle, they say, and yet certain kinds of atoms invariably
arrange themselves in a particular way to form a crystal. They
did that in geological periods antedating the appearance of any
form of life and have been doing it ever since in precisely
the same way. Some crystals form in branches like a fern. Why
is there not life in the growth of a crystal? Was the vital
principle specially created at some particular period of the
earth’s history, or did it exist and control every atom of
matter when the earth was molten? I cannot avoid the conclusion
that all matter is composed of intelligent atoms and that life
and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic
intelligence.
Of course there is a source of energy. Nature is a perpetual
motion machine, and perpetual motion implies a sustaining and
impelling force.
When I was in Berlin I met Du Bois-Reymond, and, wagging the
end of my finger, I said to him, “What is that? What moves
that finger?” He said he didn’t know; that investigators have
for twenty-five years been trying to find out. If anybody could
tell him what wagged this finger, the problem of life would be
solved.
There are many forms of energy resulting from the combustion
of coal under a boiler. Some of these forms we know something
about in a practical way, but there may be many others we don’t
know anything about.
Perhaps electricity will itself be superseded in time, who
knows? Now, a beefsteak in the human stomach is equivalent to
coal under a boiler. By oxidisation it excites energy that
does work, but what form of energy is it? It is not steam
pressure. It acts through the nerve-cells, performs work that
can be measured in foot pounds, and can be transformed into
electricity, but the actual nature of this force which produces
this work—which makes effectual the mandate of the will—is
unknown.
It is not magnetism, it doesn’t attract iron. It is not
electricity—at least such a form of electricity as we are
familiar with. Still, here it is necessary to be guarded,
because so many different forms of electricity are known to
science that it would be rash to say positively that we shall
not class vital energy as a form of electrical energy. We
cannot argue anything from difference in speed. Nerve-force
may travel as fast as electricity, once it gets started.
The apparent slowness may be in the brain. It may take an
appreciable time for the brain to set the force going.
I made an experiment with a frog’s leg that indicates something
of the kind. I took a leg that was susceptible to galvanic
current. The vibration produced a note that was as high as a
piccoto. While the leg was alive it responded to the electrical
current; when it was dead it would not respond. After the
frog’s leg had been lying in the laboratory three days I
couldn’t make it squeal. The experiment was conclusive as
to this point: The vital force in the nerves of the leg was
capable of acting with speed enough to induce the vibration of
the diaphragm necessary to produce sound.
Certainly this rate of speed is greater than physiologists
appear to allow, and it seems reasonable that there is a close
affinity between vital energy and electricity. I do not say
they are identical; on the contrary I say they are very like.
If one could learn to make vital energy directly without fuel,
that is without beefsteak in the stomach, and in such manner
that the human system could appropriate it, the elixir of life
would no longer be a dream of alchemy. But we have not yet
learned to make electricity directly, without the aid of fuel
and steam.
I believe this is possible; indeed, I have been experimenting
in this direction for some time past. But until we can learn
to make electricity, like nature, out of disturbed air, I am
afraid the more delicate task of manufacturing vital energy so
that it can be bottled and sold at the family grocery store
will have to be deferred.
Electricity, by the way, is properly merely a form of energy,
and not a fluid. As for the ether which speculative science
supposes to exist, I don’t know anything about it. Nobody
has discovered anything of the kind. In order to make their
theories hold together they have, it seems to me, created the
ether. But the ether imagined by them is unthinkable to me. I
don’t say I disagree with them, because I don’t pretend to have
any theories of that kind, and am not competent to dispute with
speculative scientists. All I can say is, my mind is unable to
accept the theory. The ether, they say, is as rigid as steel
and as soft as butter. I can’t catch on to that idea.
I believe that there are only two things in the universe—matter
and energy. Matter I can understand to be intelligent, for
man himself I regard as so much matter. Energy I know can
take various forms, and manifest itself in various ways. I
can understand also that it works not only upon, but through,
matter. What this matter is, what this energy is, I do not know.
However, it is possible that it is simply matter and energy,
and that any desire to know too much about the whole question
should be diagnosed as a disease; such a disease as German
doctors are said to have discovered among the students of their
universities—the disease of asking questions.
THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE.
Mr. Thomas A. Edison’s article is full of suggestions which invite
further discussion. We must here limit ourselves solely to those which
touch the problem of Panpsychism and Panbiotism.
Any one who has read Mr. Edison’s article will be struck with the strange
coincidence that obtains between his and Professor Haeckel’s views. The
famous naturalist considers what he calls panpsychism as the corner-stone
of his monism: he says that atoms possess souls; and in a similar way
the famous inventor believes in the intelligence of atoms, he declares
that atoms are endowed with minds. There is certainly a deep truth in
this conception of nature; and yet we cannot accept it in the way it is
presented by either Professor Haeckel or Mr. Edison.
With reference to Professor Haeckel’s views we have explained why atoms,
the actions of which are not endowed with meaning, have no soul, and also
why they cannot feel pleasure and pain. It remains for us to explain why
atoms are not in possession of intelligence.
What is intelligence?
That reaction upon a stimulus which takes place in the way it does
because of the presence of meaning, is called mental, or intelligent
action; and the ability to adjust action to mental representations is
intelligence.
Intelligence is a psychical quality, and the psychical process which is
preparing to act with intelligence is called deliberation. Deliberation
is the successive revival of several soul-structures, either of memories
of former experiences, or of rules derived therefrom, or of advice
formerly received, including also new combinations of these mental
structures, and keeping in view the probable results of the intended
action. In a word, deliberation is thought, and thought is an interaction
among meaning-freighted feelings.
Among these ideas, which in so far as they can influence action (i. e.
purposive motions) are called “motives,” the strongest one will determine
the result. Now, any atom of non-organised matter, say an atom of
hydrogen, acts (as we said above) with spontaneity. It is in this sense
as much alive as is any ever so complex vegetable or animal substance. It
is self-acting, and its action reveals the innermost nature of its being
just as much as the action of the man shows the character of the man.
There is, however, a great difference between the action of animal
beings whose action is regulated by the meanings of their feelings,
which in their totality we call the soul, and the actions of inorganic
matter, of crystals, minerals, gases, chemical elements, and gravitating
masses, all of which we comprise under the name “inanimate nature.”
The stone’s fall does not depend upon any representative feeling; it
depends solely upon that quality of the stone which we popularly call
its weight. Nor has the falling stone any choice whether to fall or
not to fall. Under certain circumstances it falls. There is no act of
deliberation preceding the fall. Nor has it any choice concerning the
direction of its fall. The surrounding conditions, viz., its position
with regard to the centre of the earth together with its mass, determine
the process. The stone’s action can satisfactorily be explained without
attributing to it psychical qualities. The stone possesses no soul;
it is void of mentality; and although we believe that everything,
organised or unorganised, is endowed with subjectivity (by which we
understand the conditions of psychical life, or the potentiality of
feeling and consciousness), this subjectivity can only be analogous
to the blind impulse of the stone’s mass. If some other, psychical or
mental, subjectivity were present, we should say that it apparently does
not enter as a factor in the determination of the event. Accordingly
such an assumption is gratuitous. There is subjectivity, but there
is no intelligence. There is potentiality of feeling, but there is
no consciousness. There is present the elementary condition of that
something which is going to develop into mind, but there is no mind;
there is no meaning-freighted awareness of the surrounding conditions.
Says Mr. Edison:
“The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the
intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed.”
The sum total of the intelligences of the atoms in a human body (if,
in this connection, for the sake of argument, we grant that atoms are
intelligent) would not as yet make up the intelligence of man. Suppose we
are contemplating a mosaic picture or inscription. Are such compositions
really only the sum of the little stones? Are they not rather a certain
peculiar form in which these colored stones are arranged? It is not
the sum of the stones that makes the picture, but the form of their
composition. The picture is not contained in any single one of them, nor
is it the whole number of all the single stones: it originates through
their peculiar combination and consists of the form in which they are
combined.
Mr. Edison’s explanation of the soul, applied to this example of a mosaic
picture, would be as follows: Every little stone is in itself a little
mosaic picture. The whole picture of the mosaic is the sum of the little
pictures of the stones of which it is composed.
The intelligence of the soul, however, is not even as yet the form in
which feeling structures combine; it originates with the representative
faculty of the feeling structures. The soul is the organised totality of
a set of images and abstract mental symbols representing the qualities,
the influences, and the interactions of the different objects of the
surrounding world, the thinking subject included.
Says Mr. Edison:
“Every atom has an intelligent power of selection, and is
always striving to get into harmonious relation with other
atoms.”
The latter is true; the former is an error. Every atom “is always
striving to get into harmonious relation with other atoms”; this is its
nature; and its nature being stable, consisting of certain inalienable
and intrinsic qualities, the atom acts with consistency. Certain
atoms, say atoms of hydrogen, are of such a nature as to combine with
certain other atoms, say atoms of oxygen, into molecules that form a
certain substance of peculiar properties, which, if each atom of oxygen
combines with two atoms of hydrogen, would be _H₂O_, or water. This
substance again, having certain definite qualities, will in a temperature
below freezing point crystallise at a definite angle. The angle of
crystallisation being the same for all molecules _H₂O_, the result will
necessarily be one of most marvellous regularity. And not being able to
observe the atoms in their secret activity, not knowing all the details
of nature’s marvellous laboratory, we are astonished to find such a
wonderfully harmonious relation. And yet, considering the nature of
things, we are urged to confess that it is the result of an inevitable
necessity, which takes place according to strict mathematical laws.
Although every atom strives, according to its nature, to get into
harmonious relation with other atoms, we do not see any “intelligent
power of selection” in the province of inorganic nature. Every atom of
inorganic substances acts according to its nature in one and the same
way throughout. There is no choice, no selection, allowed. Choice and
selection are faculties that are reserved for the higher domains of
psychical life, which originates in the domain of animal existence when
meaning, conditioned by the presence of sentiency, rises into being and
creates the soul.
Supposing that through some combination of atoms their subjectivity be
combined in such a form as to produce sentiency or feeling, we can very
easily understand how this feeling will in time become representative of
the conditions by which it is affected. The soul does not consist of the
atoms of its organism, nor of the sum of the qualities of the atoms. The
soul consists of something more subtle than matter: the soul consists of
the meaning that is attached to the different forms of the feelings which
obtain in living organisms.
THE PROBLEM OF THEISM.
The problem as to whether or not there is an element of feeling present
in the unorganised realm of nature, is connected also with the problem
of theism. The monistic view of the world, which considers nature as
alive throughout, can neither accept the old supernaturalism, nor the
materialistic theory of atheism. Theism, as it is usually conceived,
believes in a personal creator and ruler of the world. Materialism denies
the existence of any God; it regards matter and its actions as the only
reality.
Monism does not regard mental phenomena as an incidental by-play of
blindly operating forces. It regards mind as a necessary product of
reality. Mind and the peculiar qualities of mind are characteristic of
the world-tree, of which it is the highest efflorescence we know. From
the fruit we can know the root, from the product we can judge of the
factors, in the creature we see the creator.
That great something which has produced us, the All-power in which we
live and move and have our being, and obedience to the laws of which are
the conditions of life, of welfare, and of an advance to higher life, is
called with a popular religious name “God.”
Let us comprise under the name “theism” all those views which recognise
any conception of God, and reserve the term anthropotheism for that view
which regards God as a person, a mind, a conscious being, or a world-ego.
Atheism in that case will be a negation of the existence of God in any
form, a negation of the All-power of which we are parts and to which we
have to conform; and accordingly atheism will be also a negation of any
authority of moral conduct.
We call attention to the fact that many who call themselves atheists,
simply because they do not believe in anthropotheism, are according to
this definition not to be classed among the atheists.
What has monism to say, on the problem of the existence of God?
Prof. George J. Romanes, in an article which appeared some time ago in
the _Contemporary Review_ under the title “The World as an Eject,”
declares that monism has left the problem of theism in the same state it
was in before. He says:
“The views of the late Professor Clifford concerning the
influence of monism on theism, are unsound. I am in full
agreement with him in believing that monism is destined to
become the generally accepted theory of things, seeing that it
is the only theory of things which can receive the sanction
of science on the one hand, and of feeling on the other. But
I disagree with him in holding that this theory is fraught
with implications of an anti-theistic kind. In my opinion,
_this theory leaves the question of theism very much where
it was before_.[44] That is to say, while not furnishing any
independent proof of theism, it likewise fails to furnish any
independent disproof.
“As a matter of methodical reasoning it appears to me that
monism alone can only lead to agnosticism. That is to say,
it leaves a clear field of choice as between theism and
atheism.”[45]
Clifford says in the passage referred to by Professor Romanes:
“Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex
which is made up of elements themselves not rational, not
intelligent, not conscious.”
Rational, intelligent, conscious beings, so far as their material
existence is concerned, are made up of elements not rational, not
intelligent, not conscious. But mind, reason, intelligence are not at
all made up of material elements; they are neither latent nor germinal
and least of all fully developed properties of the single atoms. Reason
can in our conception never be explained as a complex result of the
interaction of absolutely irrational elements. The material elements of
the world, it is true, are not intelligent, not conscious; but the world
as a whole (although _not_ conscious and _not_ endowed with purposive
volition) is at least _not ir_rational and not void of determination. On
the contrary the world as a whole is the prototype of all rationality,
and human reason is a mere image of the world-order. What is the reason
of a rational being but an incarnation of this world-order?
Reason is not a thing of matter; exactly so the world-order is not a
thing of matter. But it exists none the less; it is a reality. On the
other hand, the world-order need neither be a personal being nor the
work of a personal being. The order that prevails in the real world and
in the laws of nature appears also in the ideal world, in the laws of
formal thought, in mathematics, and its kindred sciences; and the same
rationality that obtains in the ideal domain permeates the realms of
reality, the universe of objective existence.
The idea that God created the world-order and dictated its laws is a
fanciful and poetical allegory; it is as such a pagan notion which
belongs in the same category with Hesiod’s Cosmology, but it is
scientifically and philosophically unthinkable. For God is eternal and
God’s being is eternal. God has not created his own attributes and the
world-order is simply an attribute of God; it is part and parcel of his
nature. Or can you think of God without that attribute of irrefragable
order that appears to science as necessity, to religion as holiness, to
ethics as justice, to art as the law of beauty, to the mystic as the key
to all the wonders of existence which though solving all the problems
remains most wonderful itself?
The world as a whole, the cosmos, God, or whatever we call the One and
All, is the prototype of all reason, but he is not a mind; he is not a
system of sentient symbols; he is not a soul. Minds are a special kind of
God’s creatures; but God is not a creature: he is the condition of the
existence of creatures, he is the creator.
The objection is made from materialistic quarters: “What is the world
as a whole but the sum of all atoms!” This is an error. The world is
not merely the sum of all its atoms; the universe does not consist of
innumerable little particles which in their combination form the All. On
the contrary: the world as a whole, existence in its oneness, or speaking
religiously God, is alone the only true reality; all other things and
beings are parts of him. Atoms are abstract concepts; the existence of
an atom and of its actions presupposes the existence of the great whole
of which it is a part, and without which it would have no reality. There
are no atoms in themselves. Atoms regarded as things in themselves are a
scientific superstition.
Professor Romanes advances the proposition, that cosmical events, being
as highly complex as nervous phenomena, might be possessed of a similar
subjectivity. The nervous phenomena which constitute the physiological
action of mind in the province of objectivity are, it is true, very
complex, but complexity does not constitute that characteristic feature
on the presence of which depends the origin of mind.
Professor Romanes says:
“Both mind and matter in motion admit of degrees: first as to
quantity, next as to velocity, and lastly as to _complexity_.
But the degrees of matter in motion are found, in point
of observable fact, not to correspond with those of mind,
save in the last particular of complexity, where there is
unquestionably an evident correspondence.
“Now, if we fix our attention merely on this subject-matter
of complexity, and refuse to be led astray by obviously false
analogies of a more special kind, I think that there can be
no question that the macrocosm does furnish amply sufficient
opportunity, as it were, for the presence of subjectivity, even
if it be assumed that subjectivity can only be yielded by an
order of complexity analogous to that of a nervous system. For,
considering the natural and dynamical system of the universe as
a whole, it is obvious that the complexity presented is greater
than any of its parts. Not only is it true that all these parts
are included in the whole, and that even the visible sidereal
system alone presents movements of enormous intricacy, but we
find, for instance, that even within the limits of this small
planet there is presented to actual observation a peculiar
form of circumscribed complex, fully comparable to that of the
individual brain, and yet external to each individual brain.
For the so-called ‘social organism,’ although composed of
innumerable individual personalities, is, with regard to each
of its constituent units, a part of the objective world—just as
the human brain would be, were each of its constituent cells
of a construction sufficiently complex to yield a separate
personality.”
The so-called social organism which is composed of innumerable
personalities undoubtedly yields a peculiar spiritual existence, which
cannot be explained solely as the sum of the parts and actions of its
constituent individuals. The relations in which the members of society
stand to each other are of an analogous importance to the relations of
the cells and organs in an organism. It is the form that constitutes this
or that kind of an organism, not the sum of atoms, nor the intricacy or
complexity of their combinations. Different forms of perhaps the same
material amount, and of the same intricacy of combination, yield quite
distinct types of individuality, and every state, every nation, every
society possesses, as it were a personality of its own.
Mind is not constituted by complexity. Mind is a system of sentient
symbols. Wherever we find organisms acting in such a way that their
actions depend upon the _meanings_ of certain stimuli, we have to
attribute to them that characteristic feature which we call mind, or
soul. The action of a falling stone is explainable without attributing
to it any mentality. There is no representative value, no meaning in
that quality of the stone which, under certain conditions, makes the
stone fall. However, if a man acts, the motive of his action does not
consist in the gravity of certain material particles of his brain. It
consists in the meaning that resides in certain feelings. Without taking
into consideration the meaning that dominates the man’s motives, we
cannot explain his action, and it is the meaning of feelings that the
soul consists of. Only where and when we can discern the presence of
meaning as the raison d’être of actions, are we justified in calling
phenomena mental. When the action that takes place in response to a
stimulus depends solely upon the significance of a symbol, the inference
is legitimate, nay, it is inevitable and conclusive, that we have to
deal with a mind. The motion of a comet, which depends perhaps not only
upon the gravity of its mass, but also upon the chemical actions and
explosions of its constituent elements during its approach to the sun,
may be ever so intricate; but this does not in the least justify the
assumption of the presence of mind in the comet.
The assumption of mind in inorganic nature is not only fantastical, it is
also needless. Facts are better explained without this speculation.
The world as a whole is not bare of subjectivity. In this we agree
with both Clifford and Romanes. But we do not identify subjectivity
and mind, the latter being a special and indeed a very complex form
of subjectivity. We suppose that subjectivity pervades also all the
processes of unorganised nature, and no less the cosmic events; but be
they ever so much more complex than nervous phenomena, there is present
only a non-mental subjectivity.
Yet although the phenomena of so-called inanimate nature, be they motions
of celestial bodies or physical and chemical processes, are non-mental,
there is in every one of them present that grand feature which is as
it were the breath of God. This feature appears in all the phenomena of
nature, but in none of them more gloriously than in the soul of man. Even
the cosmical events of marvellous sublimity appear as a mere prelude to
the appearance of soul-life, for in soul-life is focused all the divinity
of nature. Reason is the reflex of the world-order and thus a rational
being is made in the likeness of God.
[Illustration]
Professor Romanes presents the problem of the subjectivity of existence
by the adjoined diagram, which he explains as follows:
“Following Clifford, I will call these inferred subjectivities
by the name of ‘ejects,’ and assign to them the symbol _Y_.
Thus in the following discussion _X_ = the objective world,
_Y_, the ejective world, and _Z_, the subjective world. Now,
the theory of monism supposes that _X_, _Y_ and _Z_ are all
alike in kind, but presents no definite teaching as to how far
they may differ in degree. We may, however, at once allow that
between the psychological value of _Z_ and that of _X_, there
is a wide difference of degree, and also that while the value
of _Z_ is a fixed quantity, that of _Y_ varies greatly in the
different parts of the area _Y_.”
The deep shading of _Z_ indicates consciousness, and consciousness is
that form of subjectivity which constitutes our mind. _Z_ is not,
as Professor Romanes asserts that it is, a fixed quantity; it varies
greatly, as every one knows from his own experience. It is lowest
in trance or swoon or profound sleep. It is highest in the state of
concentrated attention. The ejective element, which we assume to be
present as a correlative concomitant in the objective world, we assume,
with Professor Romanes, varies greatly in the different parts of the
area _Y_. Like Professor Romanes, we also do _not_ assume the existence
of any unshaded _X_. There is no objectivity without its subjective
correlate. But, according to the theory of monism, the nature of the
concomitant subjectivity is not unknowable: it can be inferred from the
nature of objective existence. The subjectivity of the falling stone
is most elementary, and _not mental_; its action is not prompted by
meaning. That something which impels the stone to fall, and which science
calls gravity, does not possess any representative element. There is no
symbolism involved in gravity. There is no soul in the stone. The stone
is not incited to falling by any purpose; it has no end in view. Purpose
originates with and through the presence of representative symbols.
According to the theory of monism the shading of the surrounding zones is
not a matter concerning which we have to suspend our judgment. If monism
is true, we know very well how deeply we have to shade the different
phenomena of objective nature.
Taking this view, we object to Professor Romanes’s conclusion when he
says:
“Without in any way straining the theory of monism, we may
provisionally shade _X_ more deeply than _Z_, and this in some
immeasurable degree.
“Monism sanctions the shading of _X_ as deeply as we choose;
but the shading which it sanctions is only provisional.”
While the presence of mind in the phenomena of the stellar universe and
of inorganic nature must decidedly be denied, I would not, for that
reason, declare that monism is atheistic.
Monism is decidedly theistic although not anthropotheistic. It is
monotheistic in so far as it recognises that the all-existence in which
we live and move and have our being is the ἙΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΝ, the One and All.
But there is not the slightest reason for the theory, and there are
sufficient reasons against it, that the universe is possessed of a huge
world-ego, that it is a person or a mind.
We maintain on the one hand that the laws of nature are not designs
arranged With consciously preconceived purposes. Yet on the other hand,
we do not forget, that the world-order possesses quite definite features
and that the course of evolution runs in a very unmistakable direction.
We can plainly decipher its character, and the great religious teachers
of mankind have with a truly prophetic instinct proclaimed the ethical
injunctions to be derived therefrom—injunctions which, millenniums after
them, science has discovered to be founded in the nature of things.
God is no mind, yet God is mentality, the source of all mind: God is not
a spirit, but he is spirituality. The subjectivity of the universe from
which all consciousness rises is part of his being, and whatever that
subjectivity, considered as a whole, be or be not, that much is certain,
that in grandeur it corresponds to the objectivity of the world. It does
not think in symbols as a man does; it is not a mind: but it exists
nevertheless. Whatever it is like we learn from the revelation of its
appearance in objective existence, from the cosmic order, the laws of
nature, and the moral ideas of mankind.
Knowledge of nature means knowledge of God, for nature is God as he
appears and the objectivity of being is the revelation of God.
We would not limit God to the subjectivity of nature: God is both
subjectivity and objectivity combined. He is that All-power that is, was,
and will be, thus being the ultimate authority of conduct.
God is not a mind, he is more than a mind; God is not a system of
symbols, he is the reality symbolised in mind. He is not a person, he is
super-personal.
He who does not see that the God of monism is greater than the God
of anthropotheism, had better believe in a personal God, until he
appreciates the truth that God is not personal but super-personal. For
after all anthropotheism is nearer the truth than atheism, for atheism
(well understood, the atheism of our definition above) is a moral
nihilism devised to shake off all ethical obligation so as to make the
lust of the moment and the pleasure of the individual the supreme rule of
action.
Monism, accordingly, does not leave the problem of theism where it was
before. Monism proves that God is not to be conceived in the likeness
of man, but the reverse: man, being a system of symbols representing
the world, is to be conceived as having been made or rather as having
originated in the likeness of God. God is the original, man is the copy.
God is the whole, man is the part, in which the whole finds a more or
less correct representation. The picture is not perfect, but the grandest
duty a man has is the constant approach to a greater perfection. Man is
the temporal, God is the eternal. Man is limited, God is the infinite.
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 4.
[42] Spontaneous motion (as here defined) does not mean action without
a cause; nor does the spontaneity of the cart exclude the co-operation
of other spontaneities (_e. g._ the attraction of the earth) entering as
factors in bringing about the final result.
[43] This theory of pleasure and pain was first set forth in an editorial
article of No. 120 of _The Open Court_, which has been republished in
the chapter “Pleasure and Pain,” pp. 338-345, of _The Soul of Man_. A
correct view of the nature of pleasure and pain is of great importance,
especially in ethics. Notwithstanding the palpable erroneousness of the
old view, several articles written by prominent authors have appeared
of late, that continue in the old strain without taking notice of the
criticism that overthrows the basis of their theories.
[44] _Italics are ours._
[45] This same position is maintained with equal vigor in Professor
Romanes’s latest work _Darwin and After Darwin_, pp. 412-442. The Open
Court Publishing Co., 1892.
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
I.
FRANCE.
Dr. Paul Sollier has just published, in the Bibliothéque
Charcot-Debove,[46] a new and excellent work, _Les troubles de la
memoire_. This work is not identical in its purpose with that of
M. Ribot; it corrects the latter in certain points, completes and
corroborates it in others. M. Sollier set out to discuss this question
solely from a medical standpoint, which was intentionally passed over
by M. Ribot, but he has also necessarily touched upon its psychological
aspects, and, as he informs us himself, he was obliged on the whole to
make a medico-psychological study of the question.
The subject is a vast one; one could include in it aphasia and all the
weaknesses resulting from the destruction of the brain-centres, whether
those of motion or of sensation. M. Sollier has taken the pains to reduce
it, however, to definite limits. He studies especially the subject of
acquired amnesia (diminutive changes and disaggregations of the memory).
He does not consider the subject of congenital amnesia, which is an
absence and not a loss of memory. Strictly considered, the only cases
of true amnesia, or _organic_ amnesia, are those which result from the
destruction of the nerve-centres, since in this case there is an absolute
loss of the power of forming mental images, and not simply an enfeebling
or forgetting of them, which is characteristic of _functional_ amnesia.
From a clinical standpoint amnesia exists only in the last case. Though
the effect may be the same in both cases, the causes are not identical.
Clinical investigation cannot, however, overlook the diminutive changes
which take place in the memory and which, as early as 1817, were called
by Louyer-Villermay dysmnesia, and which are always closely allied
to organic modifications of the brain. As regards amnesia itself, it
is important to distinguish simple amnesia from retrogressive and
progressive amnesia. M. Sollier explains the motive causes of these
different conditions with great lucidity, and renders them easy of
comprehension by means of ingenious illustrations.
I call attention to the information he gives us as to the conditions
under which a revival of mental images takes place, p. 30; to his
criticism of Ribot’s opinion, according to which the power of correctly
locating events in the scale of time is the true characteristic of
psychical memory: it is quite enough if it reproduces events as in
the past, that is to say if there exists a conscious knowledge which
shows that the mental conception belongs to the past, or is, simply, a
remembrance, p. 35 and 40; to his remarks on the strengthening of mental
images due to the repetition of remembrances, the necessary sequence of
which is that a weakening of old memories follows the destruction of
accumulated mental images, p. 48; to his explanation of the processes
of retrogressive amnesia (coming suddenly after an attack of vertigo,
a blow, etc.) which he bases upon a supposition of a group of mental
conceptions in touch with one another, in such a way that the loss of
one leading conception in a group deprives this group of sufficient
consistency to form a conscious synthesis, p. 70.
As regards the classifications of amnesia M. Sollier censures that of M.
Ribot as being neither openly psychological nor openly clinical, and of
taking successively as bases the extent of an observed phenomenon, its
evolution, its location in time. Moreover, from a clinical standpoint
it has led to a joining together of totally incongruous disorders. M.
Sollier therefore rejects it, and contents himself with adopting first of
all, with M. Falret, the natural classification of general amnesia and of
partial amnesia. Moreover, in taking account of the systematising of lost
remembrances, he proposes to make a distinction as to the two varieties
of systematised (functional) and of non-systematised (organic) amnesia,
considered from the purely psychological standpoint, p. 59. We should
thus have, firstly, the classification of general amnesia, including
(A) true organic amnesia (destruction of the centre of mental images),
and, under the classification of the systematised, (B) functional,
or apparent, amnesia (imperfect performance of the functions of the
centres): this latter subdividing into two groups, (_a_) amnesia with its
varieties (_a´_) simple, (_b´_) retrogressive, (_c´_) progressive, and
(_b_) paramnesia: (_a´_) that of locality, (_b´_) that of exactness; to
which it is proper to add (_c_) dysmnesia, which is organic-functional.
Secondly, the classification of partial amnesia whether systematised or
not, which may be either organic or functional. M. Sollier abandons,
moreover, every pathological or etiological classification as being
exceedingly unsatisfactory. In the presence of a patient, he justly
remarks, the physician can only employ semiology.—I will not enter
here into the details of the inquisitor-like investigation entered
upon by the author. I must even proceed without stopping through the
observations intended for medical men, which form the second part of the
work, but I judge that every reader will also find therein many facts
which may prove of interest. After having read it, one is more impressed
than ever with the importance and delicacy of the motive forces of the
memory, in noting the frequency and the varieties even of its sources of
weakness. M. Sollier has the credit of pointing them out—in the shape
of “defects in synthetical power” and in “will power”—in the sources of
weakness where one had not been accustomed to look for them. It would be
interesting, he thinks, to find out what part amnesia may perhaps take in
the pathogeny of certain nervous disorders, and the influence which it
has on their evolution. Specialists for the insane might find therein a
new subject of study, and psychology will profit, on the other hand, by
that which clinical experience offers it. Is not its main object to learn
to understand life as a unit at the same time that it analyses it as a
diversity?
* * * * *
When one passes from a book like that of M. Sollier to the work of M.
l’Abbé MAURICE DE BAETS, _Les bases de la morale et du droit_,[47]
one is impressed by the change of method. It has become impossible
for us to consider pathology as unallied to questions of morality; and
we have accomplished this great object of studying matters pertaining
to the moral world, the evolution of law, without seeking our base of
support in a religious faith or in a metaphysical affirmation. Even M.
l’Abbé de Baets himself declares emphatically that he desires to adopt
only one starting point from among those we are acquainted with,—the
verification of facts,—and truly he shows a good will and knowledge;
nevertheless the ground which he considers so firm has, as we believe,
no stability. All seems strange to us, if I may so speak, in books of
this description. The tone which is peculiar to them, the nature of the
facts cited, the progress of the reasoning, impeach them just as surely
as the blue color of his costume reveals afar off an inhabitant of the
Celestial Empire. I am not an impassioned adversary of the clergy; far
from it. I appreciate their intentions and esteem their persons as one
should, but I am unable to share their opinions, and I consider indeed
that they deceive themselves when they think that faith has ever given to
the world an absolute assurance. It has not given it because it has not
proved sufficient. Mankind, variable and vacillating though it may be,
does not change its beliefs because of fickleness of heart: its mental
evolution takes place too slowly for that, and is also too painful. The
Catholic church of to-day has adopted as its watch-word the return to
St. Thomas of Aquinas; it will gain by this unity of effort, without
succeeding however in leading back the minds of men to its point of view.
The diverse ways we follow tend doubtless as a matter of fact toward the
same objective point, and run more or less in the same direction; but
humanity scarcely ever passes back again over the paths which it has once
traversed.
* * * * *
We have another little volume by M. LOMBROSO, _Les applications de
l’anthropologie criminelle_; a sequel to _Nouvelles recherches_, which
I have mentioned before. We find here interesting pages in regard to
transportation and reform schools, and a criticism of the new theories
of the penal code (Garofalo, Tarde, Sighele, Onanoff and Blorg, Ferri)—a
part of the question considered in the Congress. A chapter indeed is
devoted to the subject of criminal anthropology in modern literature,
in regard to which it seems to me M. Lombroso always makes more of
a question than is desirable, but which he well understands how to
criticise. Then follow several pages on the criminal type in art, after
a work of Dr. Edward Lefort; then comes a description of anthropological
instruments and methods. I will not affirm that this last work brings us
much of novelty; it is chiefly a new and energetic presentation of his
views, and M. Lombroso has no doubt whatever that by dint of striking the
nail upon the head he will succeed in driving it into the wall of his
adversaries.
* * * * *
The work of M. B. BOURDON, _L’expression des emotions et des tendances
dans le langage_, is certainly one of the most curious books one can
read. He treats in an original manner of phonetical questions, which
are less rife in France than in England and Germany, as to what sounds
signify, or speech; what is their worth in intensity, elevation, form or
quality, duration; what phenomena are shown by successions of intensity,
of elevation, of elementary articulation, of syllables, of words, etc.,
of duration; what are the relations of these phenomena to versification
and what comparison one can make between writing and speech: such are the
problems particularly studied, at times with the aid of very simple but
instructive facts culled from experience.
These studies—I need scarcely add that they are comparative ones—are
of interest for various reasons. They lead up to new ideas of grammar
and of language, and furnish arguments for a reform in orthography of
which M. Bourdon is a very warm partisan. His readers will not be slow
to notice for the matter of that, that he is in regard to this frankly
revolutionary; and it may seem paradoxical to say to them, for example,
that “the distinction between analytical and synthetical languages is
absolutely artificial, and could only be produced through our bad systems
of writing.” Writing, M. Bourdon indeed remarks, introduces separations
in places where spoken language makes no pause. The English write _I
will go_, they pronounce it _Iwillgo_. The analysis which pertains to
writing masks the true cohesion of the spoken language, and “if in the
past all series of articulations had been written as a single word which
were in fact pronounced as a single word, we should not have known the
error which consists in opposing certain languages classed as synthetical
to others which we class as analytical.” The argument is perhaps not
a decisive one, and in the neo-Latin languages, for example, one can
scarcely deny that the analysis of the written language has conformed to
the work of decomposition of the antique forms, so as to adapt itself to
the new groupings of their essential elements, groupings wherein these
elements remain variable because speech separates them effectively, in
many cases by interpolating governing words or others.
But it is not my intention to enter into these detailed discussions.
I leave M. Bourdon in further calling attention to his last chapter,
_Ecriture_. Persons curious as to graphology will find in it some good
ideas concerning this method of “character reading.” The author does not
tell everything, and I have a suspicion that he greatly despises certain
signs valued by the graphologists, and arrived at empirically, but we
should note what he has actually said.
* * * * *
Under the title, _Le monde physique, Essai de conception expérimentale_,
M. Dr. JULIEN PIOGER offers to the public a sketch of a world-system.
This system is summed up in the expression of “Universal Solidarity,”
and is based on the idea of infinitely minute matter-particles, or
“infinitesimals,” the mutual relations of which, and their equilibrium,
constitute the machinery of the universe. The atomic-mechanical
hypothesis, says M. Pioger, is wrong in resolving matter into perfected
differential particles and in assigning to its atoms qualities which
make of them either true material corpuscules or a real entity, “a thing
in itself.” On the contrary, far from intending to assign a limit to
materiality, the hypothesis of infinitesimals confines itself to limiting
the conception which we may have of it. The infinitesimal corresponds
to the infinitely small, that is to say to the non-perfected, to the
non-differentiable, beyond our cognisance and our perceptivity; it
expresses the most reduced condition of the affinities which constitute
matter; it is the expression of the infinitesimal existence of that
which we call motion, extension, ponderability, under the general name
of matter. Now the most simple thing which can be conceived of in the
physical world, is the _couple_ formed by the essential equipoise of two
infinitesimals. In developing the couple it becomes possible to form the
universe in all its great variety. The solidarity of the parts in the
whole appears as the essential condition of existence of all that which
Is—the necessary condition of all individuality.
In conclusion I call attention to two new editions, one the well-known
work of M. BERNARD PÉREZ, _Les trois premières années de l’enfant_, fifth
edition, revised and supplied with an introduction by Mr. James Sully;
the other _Les functions du cerveau_, by M. JULES SOURY, a work highly
esteemed, embodying the most recent researches.
LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] Rueff, publisher.
[47] This book and the following ones are published by F. Alcan.
II.
GERMANY.
One of our foremost psychiatrists, Professor v. Krafft-Ebing of Vienna,
says in his celebrated text-book on psychiatry: “If Pedagogy made a
more serious study of the character of man in his psychopathological
relations, many of the mistakes and severities of our system of education
would be removed, many an unsuitable choice of vocation would be left
unmade, and thus many a psychical existence rescued.”
Any one who is at all familiar with the most important doctrines of the
diseased phenomena of mental life, and who knows how frequently psychical
disturbances of a more or less serious nature occur during childhood,
will fully agree with Krafft-Ebing, and will only regret that pedagogy,
in this important direction, has completely neglected its task.
Although lately the necessity of psychiatric knowledge for the pedagogue
has been insisted upon in professional circles, for instance, by
Professor STRUEMPELL in his _Pedagogic Pathology_ (comp. _The Monist_ II,
106), yet instruction in this department occupies a wholly subsidiary
place in pedagogic education, and has not been made as it should have
been, an organic part of the same. The writer of these lines has
accordingly discussed this subject in a special treatise, maintaining
that the most important diseased phenomena of mental life might be
treated as a part of pedagogic psychology (comp. _The Monist_ I, 619).
The demands made were met in different ways. While the English and
American press accepted these demands without reserve (for instance, in
HALL’S _Pedagogical Seminary_, I, 297), in Germany there has been more
caution displayed, inasmuch as the opposing difficulties were regarded as
greater than they probably were (Professor REIN’S _Pädagogische Studien_,
1892, Heft I).
We have, however, simply to call to mind the doctrine which more than
twenty years ago Maudsley in his “Physiology and Pathology of the Mind”
laid such special emphasis upon, that psychic laws are the same in
healthy and diseased phenomena, only that they do not operate under the
same conditions and therefore produce different symptoms. Far from its
being true, therefore, that the introduction of psychopathology into
psychology can be opposed by any especially well-founded objections, such
a procedure will, on the contrary, be found to be, just as Maudsley said,
an appropriate and absolutely indispensable auxiliary of the study of
this science. And that which was emphasised by Maudsley, and lately also
by MUENSTERBERG in the treatise already discussed in _The Monist_ (II,
289), _On the Problems and Methods of Psychology_ (Leipsic, 1891, Abel),
Ziehen has done in his “Outlines of Physiological Psychology” in a manner
which will be full of suggestions for the pedagogue (comp. _The Monist_
I, 598).
To be sure, the work of Ziehen is very far from supplying all that
the pedagogue needs. We have in this work a vast mass of valuable
observations, which will have to be elaborated in a manner that accords
with the needs of pedagogy, if this science is to derive any material
profit from psychiatry. For the bibliography of this subject we shall
refer the reader to a former correspondence of ours (_The Monist_ II,
103), and select at present for examination one province only,—a province
which is deserving of especial consideration, inasmuch as the phenomena
which occur in it are phenomena which most frequently confront the
pedagogist, and are most likely to be overlooked by the untrained eye.
We refer to the _psychopathic subsidiary phenomena_ of DR. KOCH, by which
expression this author comprises all the psychical irregularities, be
they natural or acquired, affecting the life of the human personality,
which, though not even in the severest cases amounting to actual mental
disorders, yet in the most favorable instances so affect the persons
afflicted that they appear as lacking the full possession of mental
normality and capacity. The second part of Koch’s work, mentioned in _The
Monist_ in the place above cited, has just now appeared. (Ratisbon, 1892,
Otto Maier). Having discussed in the first part of his work inherited
and chronic psychopathic subsidiary phenomena, the author now proceeds
to discuss acquired subsidiary factors, and holds out the prospect of a
third part, on the appearance of which we shall have occasion again to
discuss the entire work from a different point of view. For the present,
only the pedagogic aspect of the question interests us. On many readers,
Koch’s book must have made the impression,—to judge from his concluding
remarks,—that the author shares Lombroso’s point of view, and to very
many pedagogues such a position would be, from the very outset, a bad
recommendation, for it would necessarily, in the very nature of the case,
involve the pedagogue in great embarrassment, in the same way as it has
involved the philosophical jurist. But embarrassment is no reason why
we should close our ears to the truth, and if Lombroso should be right
in all his teachings, pedagogy would also be obliged to accommodate
its doctrines to his. Upon the whole, however, Koch is opposed to him.
Thus when he says: “What I commend Lombroso for is that he has observed
much, has collected rich materials, and has been the source of great
incentives in many directions, and has worked suggestively in many ways;
what I reproach him with is that he has confounded the healthy with
the diseased, and has brought under one and the same category without
sufficient and appropriate tests, psychotic phenomena and phenomena which
are psychopathically merely of a subsidiary order; what I reject is his
theory of degeneration and his peculiar views of philosophy.”
Material, such as Koch and others offer, must first be elaborated
into a pedagogic psychopathology—or better still into a pedagogic
pathopsychology—before pedagogy, as a whole, can assume in this
direction the proper form. Though we consider, now, this preparatory work
as indispensable, we can, nevertheless, not think of denying the value
of works which, without any profession of far-reaching psychological
analysis, put in effective and available form for pedagogy the diseased
phenomena of the mental life of children. The first German work of this
kind, so far as we know, is from the pen of a Leipsic teacher, GUSTAV
SIEGERT, and bears the title _Problematische Kindesnaturen_.[48] This
little work is now followed by a more comprehensive treatise, published
by a Bremen alienist, Dr. SCHOLZ, already known to the readers of _The
Monist_ (II, 104), and bearing the title _Die Characterfehler des Kindes,
eine Erziehungslehre für Schule und Haus_.[49] Such books are valuable
not only for the observations they offer and the isolated explanations
and pedagogic advice they present, but also for the suggestions which the
attentive and psychologically cultivated reader can always receive from
them.
Like Siegert, Scholz principally shows us isolated child-types wherein
diseased qualities play a more or less pronounced rôle. But while the
former’s presentation is somewhat journalistic in style, that of the
latter is more didactic; although this tendency is not an absolutely
rigid one, as the author counts mothers as readers of his book. But
if the form of presentation leads one to infer greater profundity in
Scholz than in Siegert, this is in still higher degree the case with the
arrangement of the material. While Siegert strings his child-pictures
loosely together, Scholz arranges them according to real psychological
points of view, so that (remarkable to say) the faults of children are
discussed, first, in the province of feeling and sentiment, then in
that of representation, and finally in that of volition and action. The
introductory and concluding chapters show, also, that Scholz attempts
to enter more profoundly into the subject than Siegert proposes, and we
cherish the hope that, now that this popular work has appeared, Scholz
will very soon present us with a strictly scientific book, in which he
shall have occasion to deal with some particular points, such as, for
instance, falsehood and unchastity, more comprehensively than was perhaps
possible in a book intended for his present circle of readers.
With respect, now, to all systematic presentations of pedagogy,
psychopathology can, as we have before indicated, never attain in them
its proper position, until the above-mentioned preparatory work has been
completed. But this fact should not preclude one’s calling especial
attention to the importance of this province, at least in some incidental
manner.
In such a work as the _Allgemeine Pädagogik_ of ZILLER,[50] for instance,
the third edition of which has just been published by F. Mattes of
Leipsic, there surely was abundant opportunity to do this—an opportunity
which one might say almost amounted to obligation. For Ziller treats
hereditary and acquired characteristics in great detail, and such
treatment remains necessarily a one-sided one, if abnormal traits are
not considered in it. Ziller, with Herbart, demands that individuality
always be taken as the starting-point. But how many child-individualities
are there, which, in the different periods of their development, may be
regarded as fully normal!
The reason of this omission must be looked for partly in the
circumstance, that Ziller, as well as the new editor of this otherwise
valuable work, belongs to the Herbartian school. If, namely, we
compare the psychological literature of the Herbartian school with the
publications of French, English, and American writers, or even with
the works which in recent times have issued from other philosophical
quarters of Germany, it will be unmistakably seen that the pathological
conditions of the mind have been little considered by the followers of
Herbart. Nor have voices been wanting, that would make Herbart himself
responsible for this error. He did not, they say, sufficiently appreciate
the importance of the pathological phenomena of mind, and his pupils
were in this respect influenced by him. But this reproach will be found,
on close examination, to be untenable. Herbart, it is true, did express
himself repeatedly against the overestimation of “rare and curious
phenomena,” unusual mental states and such things,[51] and his warning
is applicable also to our epoch, which produces many psychological works
in which remarkable things are to be read but which contribute nothing
worth mentioning towards the explanation of even comparatively simple
events. Herbart holds, that the psychology of the normal and ordinary
states should be the first and principal object of scientific attention;
the explanation of much that is extraordinary will then follow. With
regard to this latter point, he remarks very positively: “I do not,
however, wish by this, to gainsay the value of any real psychological
observation. There must be a welcome place in science for every
experience.” It will be seen, therefore, that Herbart is not at all far
from the point of view of Maudsley and other investigators. We find, in
fact, that he mentions repeatedly abnormal mental conditions, and also
systematically treats them, even quoting such celebrated alienists as
Reil and Pinel (_Text-book of Psychology_, §§ 142-149). The probability
is, therefore, that psychopathology would have been properly employed in
Herbart’s psychology, if it had been at all elaborated in his day, and
its influence would through Herbart have been directly felt in pedagogy,
as no pedagogist has made better or more careful use of psychology than
he.
But Herbart’s pupils have done no further work in the province pointed
out by him. It is true, his psychology has been made use of by physicians
like Griesinger and Spielmann, and recently also to some extent by
Krafft-Ebing, but the works of these men have had no influence on the
psychological text-books of the Herbartian school, and consequently the
science has up to the present day exerted no noticeable influence on
pedagogy, either in Waitz, in Stoy, or in Ziller. In other pedagogic
schools, this has, it is true, also been the case; but in these, who make
no pretensions of relying on the teachings of psychology, the sin is
more easily pardoned. But this is not the only respect in which Ziller’s
_Pedagogy_ is not up to the times. Ziller defined pedagogy as the
influences, formed according to ethical points of view, which are brought
to bear on the mind of the pupil, and would not admit influences brought
to bear on the body, in so far as such should enter into the pedagogic
system. This misconception also springs from Ziller’s adherence to the
Herbartian school, which represents, as we well know, a metaphysical
pluralism; but it is in a still higher degree due to the fact, that
in Ziller’s day both the intimate relation between physiological and
psychological processes had not been satisfactorily established, and also
were not sufficiently known to him. If it were otherwise, his pluralism
need by no means have necessarily led him into such one-sidedness, for
this metaphysical pluralism does not exclude a monistic conception of
_phenomena_; even assuming this doctrine, one may say that motion and
feeling are two different but inseparable sides of the same phenomenon.
The “real things” produce by their interaction, simultaneously and of
necessity, both an inner side and an outer; for which reason one of our
foremost psychologists, Volkmann of Volkmar, explicitly terms Herbart’s
psychology monistic (_Text-book of Psychology_, second edition, I, 63).
A psychologico-physiological work, from which the new editor of Ziller’s
_Pedagogy_ might have extracted many valuable things, is the book of
the Italian MOSSO, _On Fatigue_, which has just been translated into
German,[52] and which will excite much attention owing to the present
active discussion of the question of overwork.
Supplementary to this work I will also mention a little tract by DR.
BURGERSTEIN of Vienna, entitled _Die Arbeitskurve einer Schulstunde_.[53]
This tract is a lecture, which the author gave at the Seventh
International Congress for Hygiene and Demography at London, and in
which he seeks to find by statistical methods, the duration of a
“school-period”—a very laboriously composed treatise and one difficult
to read, but possessed of high interest in psychological and pedagogic
respects.
From pedagogy to evolution is but a step, at least it is in Ziller’s
development of Herbart’s ideas. It is true, Ziller has taken a decided
stand against Darwinism, for Ziller works with two contradictory
ideas; but his theory of education possesses points of resemblance
and analogy to the Darwin-Haeckel theory of development. According
to Ziller, each individual passes, also intellectually, through all
the stages of development that mankind at large has passed through,
only in a shorter time; and it is in conformity with such succession
that the order of the various courses of a pedagogical system is to be
arranged. Following Ziller’s precedent, PROFESSOR VAIHINGER, of Halle,
in his treatise _Naturforschung und Schule_ (Science and the Schools),
has taken up the school-reform initiated by Professor Preyer, and has
expressly transferred the fundamental law of biogenesis to pedagogy.
How instruction is to be arranged under this point of view, cannot be
explained in this letter, which is already long enough. We shall simply
remark that the idea has found in Germany a large number of both friends
and opponents.
The opponents have recently been joined by a natural scientist, DR.
HAMANN, professor of zoology in Göttingen, who has just published a
book under the title _Entwicklungslehre und Darwinismus_ (Evolution and
Darwinism),[54] in which he does not combat the theory of evolution
itself, but simply the Darwin-Haeckelian form of that theory, placing
himself in the ranks of His and Hensen. The book appeared almost
simultaneously with the fourth edition of HAECKEL’S _Anthropogeny_,[55]
but the author, nevertheless, in his supplementary remarks, discusses
the “apology” which Haeckel subjoined to his work. Haeckel’s book needs
no recommendation in scientific circles; it will be sufficient to state
that the work has been subjected to essential alterations, but that its
fundamental features have remained the same.
A new psychology, on the Darwinian basis, by Prof. FRITZ SCHULTZE of
Dresden, is now in course of publication, entitled _Vergleichende
Seelenkunde_ (Comparative Psychology[56]). The first part, which treats
of the fundamental principles of physiological psychology, has already
appeared. On the completion of the work we shall have occasion to return
to it.
CHR. UFER.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] _Problematic Child-natures._ Leipsic, 1890, Robert Vogtländer.
[49] _Faults of Character in Children, A System of Instruction for School
and Home._ Leipsic. Eduard Heinrich Mayer.
[50] Compare also, _The Educational Review_ (New York), Vol. II, page 30.
[51] _Psychologie als Wissenschaft_, § 5.
[52] Salomon Hirzel, Leipsic.
[53] Hamburg, 1891, Leopold Voss.
[54] Jena, 1892, Hermann Costenoble.
[55] Leipsic, 1892, Engelmann.
[56] Leipsic, 1892.
CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
A LETTER FROM MR. HERBERT SPENCER.
_To the Editor of The Monist_:
As I feel it a duty to reserve, for other purposes, the very small
power of work now left to me, I am obliged to decline entering upon
a controversy. I must leave readers to examine for themselves—little
hoping, however, that they will do so.
One point only I wish to note. The use of the expression “forms of
thought,” instead of “forms of intuition,” was simply an inadvertence;
as will be manifest on observing that though I have used the wrong
expression in the note, I have used the right expression in the text
(p. 203), as also throughout my criticism of Kant’s doctrine in _The
Principles of Psychology_, Part VII, Chapter IV, “The Reasonings of
Metaphysicians,” § 399.
HERBERT SPENCER.
LOGIC AS RELATION-LORE.
In the French _Revue Philosophique_, in the August and September 1891
numbers of the same, M. George Mouret has an essay entitled “Mathematical
Equality” in the course of which and as though subsidiary to his
ostensible purpose he discourses upon the topics of relations and
concepts and upon the fundamental elements of logic in general. His essay
is really more important as a contribution to logical doctrine than as a
treatment of mathematical equality.
The scope of his discourse will be seen by reference to his closing
paragraphs in which he sums up what he considers to be the results
achieved by him in his essay. Therein, he says that he has “treated of
the general theory of the composition of concepts and relations and set
the foundations of the logic of analysis and the logic of definition.”
I. THE SPENCERIAN AXIOM.
The determining factor of every philosophical dissertation is of course
some very general supposition which is taken as established and which
exercises a controlling influence over all the observations of its author.
In this case this determining supposition is found in what M. Mouret
calls his “_axiom_ of _symmetry_.” The same is thus stated by him “_Two
things which have the same symmetrical relations to a third thing have
between them that same relation._”
M. Mouret is not one of those scholars that lack hospitality for
other writings than those of their own nationality. From this fault
so noticeable in the work of so many of the French scholars M. Mouret
himself seems to be free. Indeed so far as regards the previous work done
in the domain he sets himself to examine, he accords almost exclusive
esteem to the writings of English thinkers. In fact he declares himself
so far as regards his present topic a disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer
and puts his “axiom of symmetry” as an adaptation of that maxim of his
said master which is of the tenor as follows, viz: “_Things which have
a definite relation to the same thing have a definite relation to one
another._” This maxim, as Mr. Spencer tells us, was suggested to him by
a remark of the late eminent author who is known to the world under the
pseudonym of George Eliot, who herself stated it under the form “_Things
that have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation
to each other._”
Those who are well acquainted with the psychology of Mr. Spencer will
recognise that this maxim of his is made by him the very backbone of all
his observations upon reasoning. If it has the validity which he imputes
to it, it has an importance which it will be hard to overestimate, but if
on the contrary, and as we shall submit, it is in every form in which it
has been stated, certainly unsound and misleading, it is high time that
its virtue should be brought into question.
The _dicta_ of the masters whether they first enounce the same or whether
they only give currency thereto by their ratification are always proper
subjects for special scrutiny. There is always found a disposition to
accept them on their mere _ipse dixit_ without any attempt at criticism
or independent observation. This is decisively _not_ the scientific mood
or mode. The spirit of that modern leaven that is currently referred
to under the name of Science is characteristically a critical one, and
one that is considerably irreverent in regard to the authority of mere
personality. In this it is happily distinguished from the spirit that has
marked the past history of what may be called the “regular” schools of
philosophy.
M. Mouret is not alone in his inadvertent esteem for the maxim in
question. In the issue of _Mind_ for October 1891 Mr. L. T. Hobhouse
publishes an article entitled “Induction and Deduction,” in which he
gives an undue appraisal to the worth of the maxim under consideration,
even though the author of the article seems to be well aware that said
maxim stands in much need of qualification.
We venture to say that this maxim in all its forms has gained whatever
currency it has enjoyed in virtue alone of the incompetent comprehension
that too generally prevails in regard to the nature and characteristics
of that sort of things that are relations.
A notable example of this lack of comprehension is supplied in the
logical treatise of Mr. Carveth Read, a work ostensibly founded upon
the significance of the category of relation and yet in which at the
very start the author tells us that a relation is something which is
indefinable.
II. IMPORTANCE OF RELATION-LORE.
This topic of relations is one that is neglected in a degree that
reflects no credit upon the pretensions of those who undertake to
instruct others in matters logical and philosophical. The thing itself
is in the thinking of every one and the term and its derivations are
in universal use. They are used as though they imported an idea that
no one was liable to misapply or to misunderstand. The truth, however,
is that of all the stock terms in our graver discourse this very word
“relation” and its derivatives are the ones that are oftenest heard and
read without any lucidity of mind concerning their proper intent as a
part of their context. They are used with an assortment of meanings and
non-meanings that are quite distracting to try to follow and quite vain
to try and reconcile. In particular the difference between _relationship_
and _relation_, between the _ground_ or _foundation_ of the relation
and the relation itself, between the plural fact, whether of tendency,
interaction, transition, or _status_, that is a co-condition with the
relations, and the relations that co-condition that same plural fact, is
constantly ignored in thinking and in the expression thereof, to the more
or less confusion in, and inconsequence of, the whole discourse delivered.
It is no slight commendation of the perspicacity of M. Mouret to observe
that he has discovered that the way towards a resolution of the problems
he sets himself to work out lies through what to him appears the
altogether unexplored regions of relation-lore, for it is evident that he
regards himself as a pioneer in this field.
III. WORKS ON RELATION-LORE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
In observing this we cannot but hold M. Mouret unfortunate in not having
been put upon better lines of inquiry. He seems to have been wholly
unaware of the treasures of investigation in this domain that exist in
the English language and that for many years have been available for
the student. His case in this respect is seen in the exaltation which
he gives to the semi-popular discourses of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Read, as
contrasted with the profound researches of DeMorgan and Boole and their
disciples. It is evident that he has judged concerning the comparative
quality of the various lines of English research not after an examination
of his own, but after the current popular renown. For example, he speaks
of the work of DeMorgan and Boole as presenting “only a simple mode of
representing some of the logical laws” and as being “surrounded with a
formidable and complicated apparel which disguises the value of their
tentatives.”
Since M. Mouret is manifestly an earnest student of the topic of
relation-lore this language shows that he has at best only a second or
third-hand knowledge of what DeMorgan and Boole really did. He ought
to have known that in the recondite field of research in question all
really competent treatment of the same would be very far from having
any “popular” quality. For a man to discourse of relation-lore in
ignorance of what DeMorgan, the very father of the “Logic of Relatives,”
accomplished is like discoursing of Darwinism in ignorance of “The Origin
of Species.”
We opine that when M. Mouret shall have consulted the great memoir
of DeMorgan in the tenth volume of the “Cambridge Philosophical
Transactions” or better, when he shall have become acquainted with
the more developed work of Mr. C. S. Peirce, to whom beyond question
relation-lore is most indebted for its present state of progress, he
will have a better esteem for the value of the “tentatives” of DeMorgan
and Boole and their disciples. Mr. Peirce has published three principal
papers on the subject in question. The first of these was published in
1870 in the ninth volume of the “Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.” Then in 1880 and in 1884, while Mr. Peirce was lecturer
on logic at Johns Hopkins University, he published in the _American
Journal of Mathematics_ two papers dealing more or less extensively
with relation-lore. One of these his “_Hauptwerk_” as it is called by
Professor Schroeder of Carlsruhe, appears in the third volume of the
journal mentioned and the other in the seventh volume of the same.
Mr. Peirce was one of the contributors to our new American “Century
Dictionary,” and in that work under the definitions of Relation and
Relativity there appears a summary treatment of the subject which is as
we take it the work of Mr. Peirce and which might have given to M. Mouret
hints which he would have appreciated. Also the editor of this magazine
in his article “Are there Things in Themselves?” in the January 1892
number thereof incidentally touches upon the topic under consideration in
such a way as to correct some of the more inveterate misconceptions.
IV. M. MOURET’S THEORY OF RELATIONS.
The article of M. Mouret is in so many points so excellent a discourse
that the chief reflection one is inclined to make is that upon its own
principles it ought to have been better. He seems to have been widely
awake to the primordial nature of relations as philosophical data.
He says: “Every notion or relation is a _function_ of relations more
directly known and enters as a relational element into other relations
less proximate to the common sources,” and also that “every concept or
notion ought to resolve into a group of relations.”
By such tokens as these we naturally look to see M. Mouret making it his
very first concern to explain fully the nature of those primordial data
that are relations. Indeed he seems himself to be fully aware of this
natural expectation for he says: “What then is a relation; what is a
concept or notion? To this double question an answer is necessary and a
precise answer not consisting in the substitution of one form of words
for another form of words bearing the same meaning or no meaning at all.”
We cannot however find that he has done this. Instead of it and almost
while saying that every concept and notion ought to resolve in a group
of relations he announces, “What I have to examine is the constitution,
the structure of these _relation-generating groups_.” Thus he starts with
a synthesis when what is needed is analysis. He starts with supposing
a group of relational elements indeterminate in number and proceeds to
inquire as to the conditions that must subsist with regard to them,
respectively and in combination, in order that a _definite_ relation may
subsist as to a pair of the relational elements. These conditions he
finds to be four in number. First, he finds that—
“It is necessary that every one of the terms of the group should be
connected one to the other by _definite relations_; that between any two
terms there must always be intermediate terms that connect them in a
continuous way.” This he calls the condition of “Solidarity.” Secondly,
he finds that there must obtain the condition of _Co-Existence_. By
co-existence he intends—
“Not a definite co-existence in time, that is to say, a relation of
simultaneity or concomitance, nor yet that established co-existence
which constitutes the causal relation, but an indefinite co-existence
independent of the order of its terms and of all consideration of time or
duration.”
Having thus supposed his group all well stocked with relations, he
proceeds to relegate most of them to the limbo of inconsequence by
invoking a _principle_ which he calls the principle of _indetermination_.
By virtue of this principle in every particular case the _particular
determinations_ of all the terms become indeterminate and those of the
intermediate terms doubly so. Thus the supposed facts of the case become
fit for the existence of the _Third_ condition, that of _Abstraction_,
and for the arising of a general concept or notion.
But corresponding to every concept or notion is its negative or opposite
concept or notion. As this negative depends necessarily upon certain
_particular determinations_ of the same terms that bear the _particular
determinations_ and which being singly indeterminate admit of the
positive concept or notion, there necessarily must obtain two systems
of singly indeterminate _particular determinations_ relative to but
incompatible with one another, and so relative that the negation of one
set entails the obtaining of the other set, or in other words either
set being negated entails the obtaining of the other set. These facts
constitute what M. Mouret calls the _principle_ of _incompatibility_ and
involve his _Fourth_ condition of _Relativity_ stated by him as follows:
“All the particular determinations of the extreme terms must
not be compatible with the system and the negation of certain
relations of the system must entail the negation of the
relation which they make between the extreme terms.”
V. REFLECTIONS ON M. MOURET’S THEORY.
Now we cannot regard this as a successful attempt to explain the nature
and characteristics of relations, or to unfold the involutions of
relation-lore.
We fully realise that if every concept or relation resolves into a group
of relations we must in some form or other take what are relations in
reality as data to begin with, but this does not prevent us from taking
our datum terms for our turn of explanation as not requiring at present
any recognition other than as relational elements. What is needful as
a prime requisite on the very start of any research in relation-lore
is to obtain a clear idea of what is meant by a relation. Meanings are
primarily matters of mental status. We have to determine the relation
that subsists between the mind and the object through the mediating
interpretation of a word, and the mental affection lies nearest and
logically comes first. It may very well be that the mental affection
requires correction, but this cannot take place until its faults are
observed, and these cannot become evident until the mental affection is
itself duly understood.
The disciples of that school of logic in which DeMorgan and Boole,
both eminent mathematicians, hold so exalted a rank as discoverers,
regard cognition as arising in consequence of brain functioning or
_mental operation_ and study the results of this operation as yielding
their import in dependence upon and only in dependence upon the proper
operation in virtue of which they arise.
Now no cognition whatever, even of the most elementary sort, arises
except in connection with and in consequence of that operation of the
sensibility which is _distinction_. Distinction is of multitudinous and
manifold aspects. In all its phases whether it be passive or active
it is naught else than the arising or the assigning of relations. The
attempt to posit an unqualifiedly absolute—that is, an unqualifiedly
unrelated—universe of discourse must be futile and blank, necessarily
and insuperably. Any form of notation that pretends to express such a
universe of discourse, is only saved, if at all, from being unqualifiedly
nonsensical, by standing as antithetical—that is, by being _related_
to forms of notation that express relation and nothing else than
relation. This rigorously prime operation of distinction is not only pure
relation-ing but it is of that sort of relation-ing that is at once a
distinguishing and a conjoining. The “One and the Many” are insuperably
implicit therein. Distinction having operated to various extents, and
thereby various relations having come into view, we become aware of those
items of experience that are objects or facts. Each and every one of
these objects or facts are in truth distinguished and are therefore in
no strict sense _indiscernible_ from each other, but since no science
can possibly obtain in relation to mere particulars we find it useful to
disregard various points of distinction that obtain in respect to various
objects and facts and to converge our regard upon the points wherein
distinction, not absolutely vanishes, but _tends to vanish_.
By this operation, which is _abstraction_, various objects and facts
become in mental regard fit and useful to be taken as copies of one
another and as indifferent for use in most of the turns of mental life.
There are indeed various relations, objects, and facts, with respect to
which no further operation or operations of distinction than the mere
distinctions of the time, the place, or the occasion of their various
manifestations have been applied nor can without great difficulty be
applied. But we are therefore by no means entitled to say that such
are in truth irresolvable. Contrarily, and reasoning inductively we are
justified in concluding that every relation, object, and fact will under
analysis of adequate power resolve without limit into other relations,
objects, and facts.
We are not yet prepared to see that the ultimate components of relations,
objects, and facts resolve into relations, and nothing but relations,
because we are not yet prepared with an explicit idea of the nature and
characteristics of these elementary objects.
The study of M. Mouret since it starts with relations combining them
under the conditions of Solidarity Co-Existence, Abstraction and
Relativity, (which are nothing else than other relations or compounds
of relations,) does not seem to us to advance us at all in the most
fundamental requisite. He says no more than to say that in order for the
groups of relations to generate further definite relations the relations
thus grouped together must be related to one another and then that most
of these relations must be disregarded.
M. Mouret distinguishes, with respect to a relation three factors, the
_Matter_, or the relational elements grouped together, the _Form_, or the
order in which the relational elements are arrayed, and the _Foundation_.
As his study of the topic of relations is professedly for the purpose
of enabling him the better to solve the nature of the relation of
mathematical equality, his success may be estimated by reference to
his conclusions in regard to that relation. These are as follows: “The
relation of equality is formed of undetermined matter, it possesses a
binary form, and has for a condition a relation of indiscernibility
between the two elements.”
Such conclusions appear to us to be impotent not to say erroneous. If
two things obtain at all, they obtain as two and not one, in very virtue
of being distinguished the one from the other. Except with regard to
some more or less arbitrary distinctions, like the distinction between
coincident points, all distinctions obtain only in virtue of some
relation that can be nothing else than a point of _discernibility_.
Numbers and other mathematical things are taken as not-different not
because they are in truth indiscernible but because for the turn in hand
their points of difference are irrelevant.
Concerning the much mooted question of the proper field of logic as a
science M. Mouret holds it to be the “science of relations and general
concepts.” Although we hold that logic is particularly concerned with the
lore that is more directly related to the phenomena of erroneous thinking
and its correction, the view of M. Mouret is not unacceptable. “Reasoning
consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain
others are found,” as Mr. Peirce has remarked.
VI. CONCERNING MEANINGS AND EXPLANATIONS.
As preliminary to our account of relations we will make an observation
which seems to us of considerable use in connection therewith. It is
not without its bearing on the theory of definition or rather upon the
broader theory of explanation. With M. Mouret we hold that every concept
and relation resolves into a compound of relations. Since relations are
data that are absolutely elementary at least so far as we are at present
instructed they are of course not subsumable under any other sort of
data that are better known. Moreover, whatever explanation we here make
must needs be made by means of written words. Thus an important question
arises as to what method is to be pursued in this special exigency. The
theory of definition leads us to the same difficulty, for although the
meanings of many words can be defined in terms that are more proximate
to the elementary relations, we will always come at last to terms that
admit of no improved explanation by such a method. There is no device
of words that can evade or supersede the ultimate recourse to things.
Now the significations of words are learned in most cases not so much by
definitions and verbal descriptions as by _the observation of the various
applications of the words_. Indeed this is the primitive way in which the
meanings of words are found out. The child knows nothing of what, say,
the word _horse_ means until some one shows it an actual horse and may
be pointing to it says repeatedly, _horse_, in such a way as to excite
the observation of the child to the intended application of the word to
the thing. This is because the relation of every general sign to its
object subsists only in consequence of a mental association, and until
this mental association is created the sign has no meaning. The methods
of evoking these mental associations are at present quite unmethodical
and do not receive the attention which their importance merits. One
feasible method is to present or to state a number of scenes that shall
present the object in various ways in connection with the sign thereof,
and thus to excite attention to the proper application of the sign. The
geometer does this by means of his diagrams without which or their mental
counterparts all his mere words would be in vain.
Mr. Edward T. Dixon has lately published a work on the “Foundations of
Geometry” in which he would introduce as a fundamental datum what is
really an altogether new and exceedingly abstract conception which he
calls by an old name, that of _direction_. The old term has never been
as yet taken in any abstract universal sense because apart from definite
right lines showing it as an attribute any abstract universal meaning
is wholly unassignable. But the conception that Mr. Dixon would instal
is removed in abstractness from such a universal yet one more step in
universality. A three-fold infinity of right lines differing in direction
can be drawn in ordinary space to each of which pertain two corresponding
universals of direction, one converse to the other. Now the conception
of direction that Mr. Dixon proposes for service as an elementary
geometrical datum is the universal that subsumes all these lower ranking
universals as particulars. Of course he has difficulty in even trying to
explain what he means. Realising the impossibility of subsuming it in
any way he takes a method which if it were more thoroughly applied, and
wholly emancipated from the lingering notion of definition, might have
been more successful. As he actually left the matter his real meaning
can only be drawn from close study of the way in which he applies the
term in his discourse in general.
Owing to its excessive abstractness his conception is wholly unfit for
service in elementary geometry. One has to become a good geometer before
the conception can even be approached.
VII. ANOTHER THEORY OF RELATIONS.
We shall proceed to explain what we regard as a true and adequate notion
of a relation by stating some scenes that display the same. We do not
regard it as needful to state many of them and we take for our first one,
the common transaction of making a donation. We have here for relational
elements or terms as they are usually called a set of three. Separately,
or as not yet brought into relation in virtue of the giving, there may
be, say _G_ an owner of _W_ a watch and _R_ the intended beneficiary. The
plural fact of the giving is the _relationship_ or the _foundation_ of
the _relations_ that arise in virtue of said giving. This _foundation_
becomes to be in virtue of the creation of such relations by the giving.
Either one of the set of three may be taken as the datum of reference and
according to the election in this respect, the relations may differ and
the technical names we are about to give will vary in their application.
Since simplicity will be gained thereby and also our present turn fully
subserved we will take _G_ as the datum term of reference. So taking
it _G_ is called the _relate_ and both _W_ and _R_ are called the
_correlates_. For this present turn and in very virtue of the giving and
only in virtue thereof _G_ becomes related to _W_ and _R_ in a certain
relation one of the names of which is giver. When _W_ or _R_ are taken
as relates certain other relations appear, some of the names of which
are respectively _present_ and _recipient_. In relation to the relation
of giver the relations of present and recipient are named _converse_
relations, as are likewise the relations of present and giver to the
relation of recipient and the relations of giver and recipient to the
relation of present. Here are three distinct relations growing out of
the same relationship or foundation. As each relational element has its
corresponding negation, the true logical system of a set of three terms
involves not less than eight relations.
We take for our second scene the case of a boundary. This might be a
surface or a point but we will take the special case of a line on a
surface. Here we have again a set of three, the spread on one side, _A_,
the opposite spread, _B_, and the line _L_. _A_ has a certain relation,
say above, to _L_ and _B_, _B_ has the certain relation, below, to _A_
and _L_, which relation is converse to the relation above: and _L_ has
the certain relation, boundary, to _A_ and _B_ which relation is converse
to the relations above and below.
The two examples now given are cases of the _conjugative_ kind. The
relationship is a conjugative one and the relations are conjugative
relations. The distinguishing characteristic of a conjugative case is the
fact essentially involved of the mediation between relational elements
by another certain element, or in other words the bringing of diverse
relational elements into relation by the function of another relational
element. Without the mediation or function of this conjugating element
neither the relationship nor the conjugative relations can exist. There
is reason to believe that all conjugative cases can be certified as cases
of three relational elements or as compounds of a number of such sets of
three. To ordinary uncritical thought which is largely constrained by
the trammels of ordinary language the most abundant sort of relations
appears to be of that sort that are taken to involve only two relational
elements. These are cases of what are called _dual_ relationships and the
relations that arise out of them are called _dual_ relations. Such are
those like father, son, husband, wife, etc. Strictly viewed they ought to
be regarded as _degenerate_ relationships and relations just as a pair of
lines is regarded as a degenerate conic.
VIII. CAUTIONS AND APPLICATIONS.
Now besides the error of confounding relations with relationship, it is
a very common fault to think and speak of a relation as being _between_
two or more terms. This imports into thought the thoroughly misleading
idea of an intervening independent existence for relations. Relations are
attributive predicates of terms and each one of them pertains strictly to
its proper term or combination of terms, in the same sense for this turn
(_pro hac vice_) that qualities are held to pertain to their so-called
substances. And yet relations so pertain to their proper terms not in
virtue of such terms separately but in virtue of their membership in
the plural fact which obtains as the _relationship_ or _foundation_.
The notion of a relation as a “betweenness” has perhaps been fostered
by the exact coincidence of relations pertaining to the several members
of the same relationship. When on contemplating the connection, say
of two points, we observe that the distance of one from the other is
apparently indistinguishable from the distance of the other from the one,
we naturally overlook the fact that we are truly to regard the connection
as the coincidence of two really distinct relations, and regarding the
pair of relations as one thing and finding it not attributable to one
point more than to the other we dissociate it from both. But when we
consider a pair of relations that are converse to one another and that
arise out of a dual relationship like that of husband and wife we may see
that there is _no_ betweenness, no single relation that interlies, but
two relations, one the relation of husband and the other the converse
relation of wife.
An interaction, say like that of approach under the influence of
gravitation, is a relationship. Each body stands in the relation of a
_puller_ of the other and the mediating term which we find impossible to
argue out of the account we call the attraction of gravitation. In this
case the relation of action of the one body is not usually distinguished
from the relation of action of the other one. Indeed this is the case in
all cases of mechanical action and we lay it down as a maxim that action
and reaction are equal but they are not alike since their directions are
opposite. Sensation is a relationship, since it is our interaction.
The object interacts with the brain. As to the conjugating term we are
as yet in the dark and so we are in the habit of regarding this case
as a dual relation. The relation of the brain to the object is that of
a _knower_ and that of the object to the brain that of a _stimulater_.
Each character or mark of the object that becomes apparent gives rise to
relations and their respective converses each correlative pair of which
are respectively so many distinct interactions of detail in the entire
interaction. Whatever an object as known to us is, it is in virtue of
those relations of brain action and detailed object stimulation, which
are relations and always relations. Since consciousness exists only
by the arising of relations of distinction, supposably in consequence
of internal brain interaction, is it presumptuous to allege that
consciousness consists of relations or a complex of relations?
IX. NATURE OF OBJECTS.
With regard to the object no one can prevent whoever may be so disposed,
from imputing to it various points of possession that do not and cannot
interact with the brain. So far as such imputed points are regarded
as merely not yet interacting but possible to interact with knowing
substance such points in no wise differ in essential nature from the
known attributes. They are potential relations and nothing else. But in
so far as they are regarded as essentially impossible of ever interacting
with knowing substance in any possible stage of its development such
regard is pure nonsense and utterly without any assignable meaning. There
is no occasion whatever for such an imputation, for the existence of
interaction actual or potential is fully adequate to explain all that
will ever present itself to be explained.
At this point let us instruct ourselves with an example of the reasonings
of a much and deservedly honored philosopher. He says:
“In the most general predicate which is determined Being
or existence—for all things in the universe are determined
beings—we have an evident two-foldness (a composite nature)
which allows of a further analysis into pure Being and
determination.”
We will parallel this analysis. For the sake of simplicity we will take
a limited right line. It has the determinations straight and long, not
length in the sense of measure, for length is ambiguous in its intent,
but length in its qualitative sense—its linearity so to speak. Now
separate from it first its straightness without however giving to it
any other determination, and then its quality of longness. We have then
a _pure_ line, that is neither straight, nor long, nor anything else.
Such is an example of “Pure Being.” _We_ say however that its very being
as a line is absolutely dependent on its determination as a long line;
that such a determination alone constitutes it a line, is at once its
determination and its being, that there is no two-foldness at all but
only two names, and that as one-fold its determination as long and its
being vanish together. What is true of a line is true of all relations
and compounds of relations whatever.
Thus not only all knowledge but all existence so far as that term can
ever have any meaning is relative; relative to all intents and for every
possible turn.
To those who accept the essentials of this account of relations it will
be easy to see what is the nature of an object and that of a concept
or notion. An object is a relation or some congeries of relations that
usually present themselves as a coherent whole to our sensibility or to
consciousness. This is primarily effected in virtue of some efficacy
which we cannot appropriate to ourselves, and so we distinguish our own
personality from that manifold that we call the objective world. It is
pure self-stultification after having made this most useful distinction
to try and abolish it. Nothing but an utter abolition of all useful
thought can result from so taking the data of experience.
X. NATURE OF A CONCEPT.
But objects are individual and generally found with various points of
distinction some of which are irrelevant to most of the turns of mental
life. We therefore neglect the irrelevant points and take many objects
as copies of one another. This process is _not_ the formation of the
concept or notion but it suggests and prompts that formation. We cannot
but regard it as an error to take a conception as a _sum_ of individuals.
It seems to us to be rather in the nature of a _locus_. A curve contains
an infinity of points and yet the curve is not any sum of points even
though it is often allowable to speak of it as the sum of all its points.
So any concept, say, man, is not all the men that now live nor yet all
the men that eternity both backwards and forwards has contained and will
contain. A concept is a manifold and strictly universal and infinite
in respect to the particulars it subsumes. We speak of the infinitive
mood of a verb because the meaning of the word as thus taken is not put
under any modification. In like manner the meaning of any concept though
subject to various limitations in its applications is as a concept merely
to be regarded as obtaining in a purely infinitive sense. Professor
Jevons found a difficulty in classifying what he called _material_
terms, such as stone, sand, water, etc. Other logicians have put such
terms as singular terms, while still others have classed them as general
terms. There is a great variety of such terms. Potatoes, wheat, butter,
ice, cattle, water, hydrogen, the names of all the elements, ether,
electricity, time, space, love, virtue, etc., are instances. It seems to
us that such terms are the normal types of general terms and that the
canonical forms of our universal propositions ought to be unquantified
not only as regards the predicates but also as regards the subjects. Why
not “man is animal” just as “lard is grease” or “man is mortal” just as
“butter is cheap”?
Moreover the distinction between a general concept and one that is called
singular is only one of degree and not of kind. Every so-called singular
term is potentially at least only an individual instance under a possible
general or universal concept. A striking example of this potentiality is
furnished by the modern generalisations of that formerly singular term,
space. If these observations are well founded, the universals of thought
even though arising out of the facts of experience and rigidly beholden
to experience for every last element out of which they are constructed,
form nevertheless a Formal-Thought-World, and the mind of man in virtue
of its powers of imaginative construction and generalisation has a
constitution that enables it to subsume the actual objective universe as
only one particular of a universality of a higher rank.
Under such a conception of the objective world and the world of thought
and their relations the old dispute of realism versus nominalism would
take a new aspect. _Universals in re_ even though they were admitted
to exist would become universals no longer in the higher universe of
thought. True universals would only subsist as universals of the world
of mind. The laws of Form and Formal Thought would thus become of chief
moment in philosophy and no one could be recognised as properly laying
claim to the title of philosopher without proficiency therein.
XI. FALLACY OF THE SPENCERIAN AXIOM.
Concerning the “axiom of symmetry” only a few examples of its fallacy are
needful. Mutual friendship is certainly a “symmetrical” relation, but _A_
and _C_ may be mutual friends and _B_ and _C_ mutual friends also, but it
in no wise follows that _A_ and _B_ are friends. They may be decidedly
unfriendly as we often see the case. Take a case of equilibrium the
cases of which seem to be favorite ones with M. Mouret. We suppose that
planets may be regarded as in a relation of equilibrium with the sun and
yet these mere equilibrations with the sun do not make any equilibrium
between them. They do not knock together it is true but this is due to
their own direct relations and not their relations of equilibrium with
the sun.
The distances of points from each other is a “symmetrical” relation and
yet point _A_ may be from point _C_ the very same distance that point _B_
is from _C_, but the distance of points _A_ and _B_ from one another may
vary from coincidence to double the distance _A C_-_B C_.
XII. NATURE OF ARITHMETICAL EQUALITY.
Concerning the relation of “mathematical equality” there is no single
relation that obtains throughout mathematics as such. There is numerical
equality upon which the equality in service in numeric algebra is
founded, and there is geometric equality, the equality of vectors, etc.,
all different from one another. M. Mouret seems to have only numeric
equality in view. He claims this relation to be not only of a very simple
nature but that it is the very foundation of the notions of magnitude and
quantity. He even declares that mathematics could not exist without this
relation. Did he lose sight of the usual proof of Fourier’s celebrated
theorem?
As we have explained, things that are distinguished are not really alike
but only for certain turns taken to be so. This assimilation of things is
of various grades. In arithmetic, meaning arithmetic in its most general
sense, the only logical comprehension that the various numbers possess
is respectively their greater or less partitionability; _m_ is the same
as _n_ means in arithmetic that whatever has the numerical rank of _m_
has also precisely the numerical rank of _n_ no matter what summations
or other numerical operations _m_ or _n_ may represent. Identity of
this sort is arithmetical equality. It seems a simple relation for the
reason that its intervention very decisively simplifies our arithmetical
comprehensions. It is however a coincidence of two relations that are
converse to one another. These relations are “not less than” and “not
greater than.” It is universally admitted that the more inclusive a
notion or concept is in extension, the more simple and primary it is than
any other notion or concept included as an instance under it. Now all
equality is “not less than” but not all “not less than” is necessarily
equality; hence, “not less than” is a wider and more primary notion than
equality. On the same considerations “not more than” is in the same
case. Equality is the limiting case between the variable and logically
more simple cases of “not less than” and “not more than.” The notion of
quantity emerges on comparison however vague between any two objects that
have size, independently of the notion of equality. If this were not true
how could we have the notions of infinitely large and infinitely small.
It is indeed true that without the notion of equality the theory of
numbers and the mathematical analysis could subsist in a rudimentary
state only, but to say that they would not exist at all is rash and
not maintainable. The relations “not less than” “not more than” would
still allow of some truly mathematical propositions, operations, and
calculations. In that essentially qualitative notation that is ordinary
language the relation that corresponds to equality is of very limited
range but a relation that is analogous to “not less than,” viz.,
supersumption, is very efficient.
With a theory of numbers and a mathematical analysis using only the
relations “not less than” “not more than” in lieu of the relation of
equality the fundamental operations, addition and substitution, would
find some scope of application and hence the derivative operations,
multiplication, powering, etc., and their inversions, subtraction,
division, etc., would obtain in some fashion and to some extent. This
can readily be seen by any one who is familiar with the way in which
expressions of inequality are used in modern mathematical analysis.
FRANCIS C. RUSSELL.
OBSERVATIONS ON SOME POINTS IN JAMES’S PSYCHOLOGY.
II. EMOTION.
Nothing in Professor James’s work will be likely to strike the average
reader as more paradoxical than his views on the subject of Emotion,
which he must be allowed to state in his own words. After premising that
he will limit his discussion, in the first instance, to what may be
called the coarser emotions, as fear, grief, rage, love, in which every
one recognises a strong organic reverberation, he goes on to say:
“Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is
that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental
affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of
mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the
contrary, _is that the bodily changes follow directly the
perception of the existing fact, and that our feeling of the
same changes, as they occur, is the emotion_. Common sense
says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear,
are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry
and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this
order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state
is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily
manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the
more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry,
angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not
that we strike, cry, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or
fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily state following
on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in
form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might
then see the bear and judge it best to run, receive the insult
and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually _feel_
afraid or angry.
“Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure
to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor
far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its
paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of
its truth.
“To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be
inclined to doubt the fact that _objects do excite bodily
changes_ by a preorganised mechanism, or the farther fact
_that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle
that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board_
which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make
reverberate....
“The next thing to be noticed is this, that _every one of
the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or
obscurely, the moment it occurs_....
“I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory,
which is this: _If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try
to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of
its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind_, no
‘mind-stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted, and
that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is
all that remains. It is true that, although most people when
asked say that their introspection verifies this statement,
some persist in saying that it does not. Many cannot be made
to understand the question. When you beg them to imagine away
every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their
consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to
tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like,
whether it be anything more than the perception that the object
belongs to the class ‘funny,’ they persist in replying that
the thing proposed is a physical impossibility and that they
always _must_ laugh if they see a funny object. Of course the
task proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous
object and annihilating one’s tendency to laugh. It is the
purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of
feeling from an emotional state supposed to exist in all its
fulness, and saying what the residual elements are. I cannot
help thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem
will agree with the proposition above laid down. What kind of
an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of
quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of
trembling lip nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor
of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible
for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture
no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no
dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no
impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles,
calm breathing and a placid face? The present writer, for one,
certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the
sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing
that can be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded
and dispassionate sentence, confined entirely to the judicial
realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit
chastisement for their sins. In like manner of grief: what
would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the
heart, its pang in the breast-bone? A feelingless recognition
that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing
more. Every passion in turn tells the same story. A purely
disembodied human emotion is a non-entity.” (P. 449 seq.)
It is, of course, impossible for me to give all the arguments by which
Professor James attempts to establish his position; the above quotations
will make it clear what it is—namely, that all our “feelings” are
sensations.
Before proceeding to consider some of the objections to this view of the
matter, it may be well to notice briefly what seems to be a gap in the
author’s treatment of it. In adult human beings, very few, comparatively,
of what are ordinarily recognised as emotions follow directly upon the
perception of their objects, in the ordinary sense of the word. His
theory might perhaps suffice, without further explanation for such cases
as the “spitting” of blind kittens at the smell of a dog, or the rage
of a bull at the sight of a red cloth, or the startled feeling that we
experience at a loud and unexpected sound, if the latter should be called
an emotion. But in the immense majority of instances the emotions of
which he treats arise in a very different way.
Some of his own illustrations will serve as well as any to show this. For
instance, neither running nor any other of the symptoms of fear which he
enumerates is the necessary result of seeing a bear. A chained or caged
bear may excite only feelings of curiosity, and a well armed hunter might
experience only pleasurable feelings at meeting one loose in the woods.
It is not, then, the perception of the bear that excites the movements
of fear. We do not run from the bear unless we suppose him capable of
doing us bodily injury. Why should the expectation of being eaten, for
instance, set the muscles of our legs in motion? “Common sense” would
be likely to say it was because we object to being eaten, but according
to Professor James, the reason we dislike to be eaten is because we run
away. So, again, striking is not a reflex act, following on the hearing
of an insult as sneezing does on taking snuff. Whether the muscular
movements or the emotions are the primary thing, what both shall be
depends on many things besides the words that are spoken. To be accused
of drunkenness or unchastity, for instance, would dispose some persons to
violence, but others might feel only the stirrings of pride at what they
would consider a tribute to their manhood. In those who considered such
a charge opprobrious, it might excite feelings of amusement, contempt,
pity, or grief towards the one making it, according to the estimation in
which he was held. To say that if it makes us strike we shall be angry,
if it makes us laugh we shall be amused, if it makes us weep we shall
be grieved, does not go to the bottom of the matter. According to the
theory, the thought of the estimation in which we are held by others
is, in itself, entirely indifferent to us, and only affects our feelings
through the muscular movements it excites.
In view of the variety of these movements in response to the same
physical stimulus in a case like this, the statement that objects excite
bodily changes by a preorganised mechanism explains nothing. We want to
know why in one case a given perception excites one set of movements,
and in another an entirely different set. Without attempting to decide
whether or not a satisfactory explanation can be given on Professor
James’s hypothesis, I will only say, that, so far as I can see, he
nowhere attempts it. In his section on “The Genesis of the Various
Emotions,” (pp. 477 seq.), he only discusses the question how the various
feelings come to be associated with their respective movements. How the
movements come to be associated with the perceptions, he does not discuss
at all.
Turning now to the considerations which Professor James urges in support
of his theory, quoted above, the first two—that objects excite bodily
changes and that these changes are more or less distinctly felt—may
pass unchallenged. I am disposed to go as far with him as to admit
that these feelings, in the cases which he describes, may properly
be considered components of the emotional state. But when he affirms
that there is nothing else—that if we subtract our consciousness of
peripheral sensations there would be no emotion left—it seems to me that
he is going very much too far. I should have no hesitation in saying
that such a statement of the case is contradicted by my consciousness,
but as that would be merely setting up my consciousness against his,
without the possibility of an umpire, I will call attention to some other
considerations which seem to me to render it improbable.
In the first place, it is to be noticed that the cases he instances in
illustration of his position are all of violent emotions. Admitting that
we cannot have these emotions, in such degree, without movements such as
he describes, nor even imagine how they would feel if such a thing were
possible, it does not follow because they cannot be separated that they
are identical. We do not reason in this way in regard to those feelings
which are not commonly called emotions. I can no more imagine myself in
intense bodily pain without a tendency to groan and writhe than deeply
grieved without a tendency to weep, and yet no one, probably, would say
that the pain consisted solely in my consciousness of the groaning and
writhing. If grief is a kind of pain, it is to be expected that, in a
high degree, it will produce bodily movements more or less similar to
those excited by other sorts of pain. All these emotions, however, are
capable of infinite gradations in intensity. The fear of losing one’s
pocket handkerchief is an emotion of the same kind as the fear of losing
one’s fortune. In Professor James’s description of fear, it is evident
that he has abject terror in mind; I hardly think it probable that he
has any such sensations, when he fears, for instance, that he will be
late to dinner, and yet he must be differently constituted from many of
his fellow-men if his state of mind in such a case is merely a cold,
intellectual cognition of the fact that such a state of affairs would be
undesirable.
The same is true of the other emotions he mentions. The feeling of the
ludicrous is, perhaps, the strongest case he cites, but in my own case
slight degrees of amusement do not excite laughter, or even any conscious
disposition to laugh. There is, at the most, in such cases, a tendency
to smile, which may be overpowered by some other emotion, without in the
least impairing my feeling of amusement. It seems to me certain that
slight degrees of all the emotions mentioned may be unaccompanied by any
distinct consciousness of reflex movements. In such cases it is only
by a pretty strong effort of attention that we are able, if at all, to
determine what the bodily changes are, although we are distinctly aware
of the emotion.
Again, it is to be noticed that many actions, similar in character to
those we have been considering, are not associated with what are commonly
called emotions. Laughing and sobbing, for instance, are spasmodic
movements of the muscles of respiration, not strikingly different from
hiccuping, and there seems no good reason why the consciousness of
the former two should usually be felt as strong emotional excitement,
while the latter is not. In some cases, movements identical with those
accompanying particular emotions may occur entirely independently of
them. Shivering from cold, for instance, is the same sort of a movement
as may occur in violent fright, but it does not make us feel frightened.
The laughter excited in children and sensitive persons by tickling of the
skin is not necessarily accompanied by any mirthful feelings. The act of
vomiting may be the accompaniment of the most extreme disgust, or it may
occur without a trace of such emotion. Professor James himself gives an
instance of this sort that can hardly be bettered:
“The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of
seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled. The
blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and if memory does
not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the
stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly
the world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz,
and he knew no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood
producing faintness or sickness, and he had little repugnance
to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger
from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he
could not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a
pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in him such formidable
bodily effects” (p. 457).
Here we have a condition such as is sometimes experienced in connection
with the most extreme degree of fear or grief unaccompanied by any
emotion except astonishment at its occurrence. I presume that if a person
should faint on hearing bad news, Professor James would consider that one
of the causes of his intense emotion. Why did it have no such effect in
this case?
Assuming that the emotions are the effects and not the causes of what
are usually reckoned as their “expression,” it seems evident that a
given movement or set of movements must uniformly, at least in the same
subject, give rise to the same feeling, and that in the case of opposite
emotions such as joy and grief, hope and fear, the more intense the
emotion, the more unlike must be the actions from which it arises.
Neither of these is the case. On the contrary, it would seem to be the
fact that the actions accompanying emotion tend to become more alike in
proportion to its intensity. It is not at all uncommon for people to
weep from excess of joy as well as of grief. Pallor and trembling are
frequent accompaniments of the extremes of hope as well as fear. The
naturalist Wallace gives an account of his feelings on capturing a rare
and beautiful butterfly, which is worth quoting in this connection:
“The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable,
and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement
I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out
of the net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to
beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt more
like fainting than I have done when in prospect of immediate
death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the
excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very
inadequate cause” (“Malay Archipelago,” p. 342).
Here it is evident that a feeling of intense exultation gave rise to
sensations very similar, to say the least, to those of extreme fear.
One other argument brought forward by the author deserves special notice
in this connection:
“The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is
a physical effect on the nerves is furnished by _those
pathological states in which the emotion is objectless_. One of
the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose, seems
to be that we can so easily formulate by its means pathological
cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In every
asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger,
melancholy, or conceit, and others of an equally unmotived
apathy, which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons
why it should give way. In the former cases we must suppose
the nervous machinery to be so ‘labile’ in some one emotional
direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate)
causes it to upset in that way, and to engender the particular
complex of feelings of which the psychic body of that emotion
consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to
draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar
epigastric change felt as ‘precordial anxiety,’ with an
irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching attitude and
to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral processes not now
known, all spontaneously occur together in a certain person;
his feeling of their combination is the emotion of dread, and
he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear” (p. 458).
Now, it is evident, of course, in such a case as this, that such a
combination of feelings as is here described is not a fortuitous
coincidence of so many independent sensations. They must have a common
starting-point, which cannot well be elsewhere than in the brain. But if
this is the case, it seems to me to be begging the question to assume
that the sensations and not the emotion are the primary thing. On the
assumption that fear, in the normal condition, is the cause of the
disturbances of respiration, circulation, and the like, which accompany
it, it is as easy to formulate normal and pathological cases under a
common scheme, by supposing it to be the cause of the like disturbances
in cases of morbid fear, as on the theory of Professor James.
It seems to me, then, that the theory does not satisfactorily account for
the facts, so far as the involuntary, reflex accompaniments of motion are
concerned.
The difficulty is greatly increased when we consider the relations of
emotion to voluntary action. We have seen that reflex acts, similar to,
or identical with those in which Professor James believes emotion to
consist, may occur independently of emotion, in the ordinary acceptation
of the term, at least. Strictly voluntary acts, on the contrary, are
always the concomitants of emotion of some sort. In the great majority
of the ordinary actions of life, they are the only motor phenomena of
which we are aware in this connection. Our whole daily conduct, in our
business and pleasure, our incomings and our outgoings, our downsittings
and uprisings, is inseparably associated with our likings and dislikings,
our hopes and fears. What is the nature of this association?
Under the theory we are considering, two relations of voluntary acts
to emotion are possible. They may, like the involuntary reactions,
constitute the emotion, or unlike them, result from it. Professor James
does not express himself on the general question, but some of his
illustrations seem to favor the former view. If the man who meets a bear
is frightened because he runs, or the one who is insulted, angry because
he strikes, the voluntary acts of running and striking must, in part, at
least, constitute the emotions of fear and anger in these cases. Let us,
then, consider this case first.
If I see a shower coming up, and run for a shelter, the emotion is
evidently of the same kind, though perhaps less in degree, as in the
case of the man who runs from the bear. According to Professor James, I
am afraid of getting wet because I run. But supposing that, instead of
running, I step into a shop and buy an umbrella. The emotion is still
the same. I am afraid of getting wet. Consequently, so far as I can see,
the fear, in this case, consists in buying the umbrella. Fear of hunger,
in like manner, might consist in laying in a store of provisions; fear
of poverty, in shoveling dirt at a dollar a day, and so on indefinitely.
Anger, again, may be associated with many other actions than striking.
Shylock’s anger at Antonio’s insults induced him to lend him money.
Did the anger, or revengefulness, or whatever we may call the passion,
consist in the act of lending the money? I hardly think it necessary
to multiply instances in illustration of the fact that the same act is
often associated with the most contradictory emotions, and acts which
are ordinarily indifferent with the most intense feeling; that, in fact,
there is no such uniformity in the associations of emotion with voluntary
conduct as the hypothesis would seem to require. I incline to think that
most people will believe, in the cases cited by Professor James, that the
running and the striking are the results, not the causes of the fear and
anger.
If we assume such to be the case, we are no better off under the
hypothesis we are considering. Excluding voluntary movements, there
is nothing left of the emotion, according to Professor James, but the
consciousness of involuntary, reflex acts resulting from perception. The
voluntary acts must, then, be directly caused by these. Now, in the
first place, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to tell what these
actions are. What are the involuntary muscular contractions that impel
a day-laborer to go to the place of his work, and keep his voluntary
muscular system in strenuous activity all day, enduring fatigue and all
the discomforts of the summer’s heat or winter’s cold? It would probably
puzzle him very much to tell, although he has a very clear idea of why he
does it. I doubt if, on his own hypothesis, Professor James himself would
find it easy to explain the constituents of the emotions which impel him
to go to the class-room at the appointed hour and conduct a recitation.
But even in cases in which we are distinctly conscious of involuntary
action, there seems to be no connection between it and the voluntary acts
accompanying the emotion. In the case of the man running from the bear,
for instance, trembling lips, weakened limbs, goose-flesh and visceral
stirrings have nothing to do with running, but, on the contrary, would
rather tend to prevent it. In fact, it may be said, in general, that
the two classes of emotional activities are mutually antagonistic. The
more involuntary the action, the less efficient the voluntary activity
is apt to be, as any one knows who has had an attack of the “buck ague.”
We should have, therefore, diminution of the effect with increase of the
cause.
It seems, then, on the hypothesis, impracticable to account for the
association of voluntary action with emotion either on the supposition
that the former is the cause or the result of the latter. A third
alternative—that there is no relation of cause and effect in the case,
and that the phenomena of emotion and action, although constantly
associated, are really independent, I will not discuss, as it does not
commend itself to my mind, and Professor James, elsewhere, expressly
repudiates it. It seems to me that the only reasonable conclusion is
that emotion is something different from either involuntary or voluntary
muscular activity, and which may be the cause of either or both.
Professor James, after admitting that the view of the subject which
he advocates is only a hypothesis, and that much is lacking to its
definitive proof, goes on to say:
“The only way coercively to _dis_prove it, however, would be to
take some emotion and then exhibit qualities of feeling in it
which should be _demonstrably_ additional to all those which
could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the time.
But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of
feeling would obviously be a task beyond human power....
“A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be
given, if we could find a subject absolutely anæsthetic inside
and out, but not paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring objects
might evoke the usual bodily expressions from him, but who,
on being consulted, should say that no subjective emotional
affection was felt. Such a man would be like one who, because
he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, but who afterwards
confesses that he had no appetite at all.” (P. 455.)
Whether the truth of the first of the above paragraphs is to be conceded
or not, depends, I suppose, on the strength of proof necessary for
coercion. The only way, for instance, coercively to disprove the once
prevalent theory that “lunacy” is due to the influence of the moon would
be to abolish the moon. Most intelligent people, however, at the present
day, accept the fact that there seems to be no coincidence between
the moon’s phases and the phenomena of insanity as sufficient proof
for practical purposes of the incorrectness of that theory. It seems
to me that the facts to which I have called attention show a somewhat
similar lack of correspondence in the case we have been considering. I
am, however, unable to see why a case of complete anæsthesia, such as
is supposed in the second paragraph, would not answer nearly as well
for one side of the question as the other, according to the presence or
absence of emotion. To suppose that cutaneous and visceral sensations are
preserved unimpaired for purposes of emotion, while absolutely abolished
for all other purposes, would be putting a pretty severe strain on the
faculty of belief.
Such cases, as Professor James says, are hard to find. He refers to one,
reported by Strümpell, in which a boy, anæsthetic within and without,
with the exception of one eye and one ear, was stated to have manifested
shame, grief, surprise, fear, and anger. He goes on, however, to say:
“In observing him, however, no such theory as the present one seems to
have been thought of; and it always remains possible that, just as he
satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold blood, with no
inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have been accompanied by
a quite cold heart.”
Since Professor James’s work was published, two cases have been reported
by Berkley,[57] which, although not, perhaps, conclusive, are of interest
in this connection. In the first, the patient, a woman of English
birth, age not stated, had complete loss of sense of pain, heat and
cold, pressure and equilibrium, of smell, taste, and sight. The sense
of touch, although not completely abolished, was very greatly impaired.
She recognised a hat, for instance, only after feeling of it for a long
time and then seemed doubtful about it. Her sense of the position of the
extremities was also very imperfect, although not entirely abolished; and
there was some deafness, although not enough to render her incapable of
conversation. With regard to her mental state, Dr. Berkley says:
“The psychical condition has undergone but slight change, she
is possibly a little apathetic, with some slight tendency
towards a melancholic tone, but when aroused and induced to
converse for some time, this in great measure passes away. The
memory is quite good.”
Dr. Berkley was kind enough to give me the following additional
information about this patient, who, at the time of writing, was still
under observation:
“Since the coming on of the dullness in hearing there has been
a considerable degree of apathy manifest. She is no longer
conscious of the smaller noises that occur around her, but is
very readily aroused by the voice, and then takes a lively
interest in what is said to her: for instance a few days ago
the resident physician remarked to her that he was going to
obtain a pair of crutches for her use; she laughed heartily
at the idea, and said she would fall and break her leg at the
first step.”
In response to further inquiries, he writes as follows:
“1) Visceral sensations. The clearest evidence of visceral
sensation I have noted in my article,” [warning of the
necessity of evacuating the bowels and bladder by a pricking
pain in the lower part of the abdomen,] “no others were
sufficiently definite to be described. For two years there has
been no feeling of hunger or thirst, and as the diet has only
been a few mouthfuls of milk at a time for nearly that period,
there has been no feeling of repletion.
“2) When the patient laughs at a joke, there is a slight
flushing of the face, besides the ordinary contraction of the
facial muscles; she is aware that she is laughing, but besides
acknowledging that she perceives no difference between the
act now, and some years ago, she is unable to describe the
sensation further.
“3) Anger. As I think I mentioned in my last letter, the
patient has been a person of unusually equal temper; an
outbreak of real passion has never been observed with her.
When annoyed or teased by some of the other women, there is
a distinct corrugation of the forehead, accompanied by an
exceedingly slight general movement as if of aversion, no
words, movement of the chest, clenching of the hands, etc. She
describes the sensation as one of repulsion.
“Like Strümpell’s case she shows definitely shame, grief,
surprise, fear, and substituting for anger, repulsion.
“My own impression derived from observation of the patient
is, that all mental emotional sensibilities are present and
only a little less vivid than in the unanæsthetic state; and
that emotions are approximately natural, and not at all coldly
dispassionate.”
In the second case, that of a Russian woman, aged thirty-five, there was
complete loss of cutaneous sensibility in all its qualities: the sense of
position (“muscular sense”) was almost completely abolished; the sense of
taste was absent in the anterior two-thirds of the tongue. Smell, sight,
and hearing were preserved. She had left the hospital before the article
was written. In regard to her case, Dr. Berkley writes:
“While in the most absolute state of anæsthesia (auditory
and visual excepted) there was no departure from a normal
psyche; the woman would sometimes be angered when she did not
understand a question, at others would smile or shake her head,
and would frequently laugh and talk with another Russian woman
in the same ward. There was never the slightest apathy manifest
after the first few days of febrile movement.”
I give these cases for what they are worth. In the first, it is evidently
impossible to entirely exclude the presence of sensations caused by the
reflex acts, and the second, not having, apparently, been examined with
special reference to the subjective side of her emotional manifestations,
may be open to the same objection which Professor James makes against
Strümpell’s case. To me it seems extremely unlikely that, if the theory
under discussion is correct, such an amount of anæsthesia as existed in
these cases would have produced no obvious effect on the emotions. The
fact that voluntary acts were performed by both these patients as well
as by Strümpell’s case, seems to me conclusive as to the existence of
emotions of some sort in all of them.
It seems clear to me, from the foregoing considerations, that there are
serious difficulties in the way of accepting Professor James’s theory as
an adequate explanation of all the phenomena of emotion. On the other
hand, I think it contains an important truth, and that, by calling
attention to it, he has rendered a real service to psychology. In order
to make it clear how far I agree with him, it will be necessary to
consider just what feelings are to be classed together under the head of
emotion.
If we touch our fingers to a live coal, we are conscious of a sensation
of heat, and also of pain. If we take quinine into our mouths, it tastes
bitter, and also disagreeable. So in regard to a very large proportion of
our sensations, we recognise two elements—one which has to do with the
qualities of the object, and, another consisting of the pleasurable or
painful way in which those qualities affect us. The former may be called
the objective element in sensation. We think of the heat as residing
in the coal, whether we are touching it or not, but it never occurs
to us to think of the coal as in pain. The pain is in us—an entirely
subjective feeling. Doubtless there is no more reason to think of heat,
as it is appreciated by our senses, as a property of the coal, than pain,
but that is the way in which we naturally think of it. That these two
elements are really distinct is evident from the fact that the different
senses furnish them in different proportions. Comparatively few sights,
for instance, give any such sensuous pain to the eye as the sensation
produced by getting a grain of sand under the lid, which gives us very
little information in regard to the qualities of the offending substance.
In fact, it is generally true that intensity of pleasurable or painful
sensation is a hindrance to exact knowledge of its object. It is further
evident from the fact that, in disease, one form of sensibility may be
abolished while the other is retained. A person may be able to feel the
slightest touch, and to recognise perfectly the size, shape, and texture
of the objects he handles, and yet feel no pain when cut, struck, nor
burned, or he may have even heightened sensibility to painful impressions
with loss of the power to recognise the sensible qualities of objects.
Now, although we are accustomed to distinguish between emotions and
purely sensuous pleasures and pains, there are some points, at least, at
which it is not easy to draw the line. My pleasure in the anticipation of
a good dinner is undoubtedly an emotion. Is not my pleasure in eating it
entitled to the same name, and does not the latter consist in the reality
of the sensations which in the former case were enjoyed in imagination?
Is not the enjoyment we feel in the smell of mignonette, the tone of a
sweet voice, the color and form of the rainbow, emotion? Yet it consists
largely, if not entirely, in the agreeableness of the sensations. Most
people would probably think it strange to hear hunger and thirst spoken
of as emotions but would readily agree that desire of food or drink
is as much an emotion as any other desire. Is the desire in this case
anything more than the hunger or thirst?
I am inclined to think that it is proper to call such pleasures and
pains as I have instanced above emotions, and if so, I see no reason
for denying the name to any sensuous pleasures and pains. If Professor
James’s view is that all feeling is sensation, I should say that all
feeling is emotion. Whether this view is correct or not, I do not see how
Professor James can consistently refuse to accept it. On his theory, the
emotions which he discusses must owe their pleasurable or painful quality
to the pleasurable or painful nature of the sensations in which they
consist. I can see no valid ground for saying that some such feelings are
emotions and others are not. But the essence of emotion is pleasure or
pain. Abstracting these qualities, it would be an indifferent emotion,
which, I think all would agree, is a contradiction in terms. Possibly he
might wish to limit the use of the term to those pleasurable and painful
feelings, which arise not directly, but in a reflex way. He might say,
for instance, that the disagreeableness to the ear of the creaking of an
ungreased axle is not, but the shudder which it gives a sensitive person
is, emotion. In that case, it must be admitted that a sneeze is emotion.
His contention is that we have no other pleasures or pains than those of
sensation. If this be true, a setting off of some sensations as emotions
is, if not an arbitrary, a comparatively useless procedure.
My own view, then, is that the elements of sensation which I have
spoken of as objective and subjective might, with equal propriety, be
characterised respectively as intellectual and emotional, and that in
this direction the theory under discussion, although true as far as it
goes, does not go far enough.
However this may be, the admission or denial that these feelings are
emotions does not necessarily affect the question whether or not this is
the only origin, of pleasure and pain. As has already been said, those
feelings to which no one will deny the name of emotions are not usually,
in adult human beings, at least, direct reactions on sensation. If it
be true that the start we give at the unexpected slamming of a door
is a sort of fright, it is a very rudimentary sort compared with that
which one feels when the cry of fire is raised in a crowded theatre. “A
burnt child dreads the fire.” It is not the sight of the fire, but the
thought of the burning, that arouses the emotion. When a man reads in the
newspaper of the death of a friend, or a rise in the value of property
in which he is interested, it is not the sight of the black marks on the
white paper, but the beliefs which, through a long and intricate series
of associations they call up, which move his feelings. If he could not
read, he would see the same announcement without any emotion. The usual
origin of the emotions _par excellence_ is by way of association.
Suppose that I have taken a nauseous dose, and made a wry face over
it. No one, I presume, would question that the disagreeableness lay in
the unpleasant taste, and not in the distortion of the countenance.
Now, suppose I have to repeat the dose, and my face takes on a
similar expression at the anticipation to that which it wore when I
took it originally. How does this come about? If I can trust my own
consciousness, it is because the vivid reproduction, in memory, of the
unpleasant taste is itself unpleasant. I do not see how it can well be
otherwise. Professor James says (p. 649) that “the first element of
memory is the revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original
event.” How can I have a copy in my mind of a pain if it is not painful?
Take away the painfulness of it and there would be nothing left. I might
remember the circumstances under which it occurred, and judge from
them that I must have suffered pain, but I could not, it seems to me,
remember the pain itself. Whether that is possible or not, I feel sure
that the fact, in my own case, is, that my memory of a pain resembles it
in the same way that my memory of the circumstances in which it occurred
resembles them. If this be the fact, what can be more natural than that
it should excite the same sort of associated movements that were excited
by the original sensation? I cannot make it seem any more credible, to
return to the example mentioned above, that my repugnance to a repetition
of the dose is due to my involuntary movements than that my discomfort in
taking it originally was due to the similar movements that occurred then.
Suppose that a child who has eaten and enjoyed an orange is offered
another. The sight of it calls up the recollection of the agreeable
taste, and the expectation of a repetition of the pleasant experience
excites expressions of pleasure. If the fruit is snatched away, the
disappointment at the loss of the expected pleasure is distressing, and
very probably may result in his weeping. I hardly think that any one who
will consult his own consciousness will say that the reason he likes the
taste of an orange is that it makes him laugh or smile to get it. He
likes it because it tastes good, and is sorry to lose it for the same
reason. The laughing or weeping is, I think, unquestionably the result of
the pleasure or grief, not of the mere perception of an object in itself
indifferent.
It is true that emotions of this sort do not always arise by way of
personal association. Young children are apt to be afraid of strangers,
of large animals, and of loud noises. I can remember being frightened
at my first sight of a locomotive. Here we come upon the questions
of inherited experience and natural selection, which can hardly be
discussed in an article like this. The objects of which young children
are instinctively afraid, as a rule, are either dangerous themselves, or
more or less similar to dangerous objects. I see no more difficulty in
supposing that mental pleasure and pain, on the sight of special objects,
may be a matter of organisation than in the case of the analogous
physical sensations.
My view of the matter, then, is that emotion in the sense in which
the word is commonly used bears the same relation to perceptions or
beliefs that feelings of physical pleasure or pain do to the objective
or intellectual quality of sensations. I am inclined to think it proper
to class all pleasurable and painful feelings together as emotions.
If this view is correct, it would, of course, include those feelings
to which Professor James would confine the term. I should not at all
hesitate to admit that the emotional state of a person who trembles and
turns pale with fear is different from that of one who preserves his
self-possession in the presence of a danger that he realises and dreads.
I think it is true that the voluntary actions prompted by an emotion
have some tendency to intensify it. But, so far as I can analyse my own
feelings, the pleasures and pains of memory and imagination seem to me
just as real as those of sensation, and not at all to be confounded with
them. When I try to subtract all motor reactions and resulting sensations
from the feeling of fear, for instance, there remains not merely the
intellectual perception that the event dreaded is not desirable, but the
perfectly distinct emotional consciousness that I do not desire it.
This view seems to be favored by the analogy between the relations of
sensation to reflex movement on the one hand, and of perception to
voluntary movement on the other, which will, I think, be found to be very
complete. We have reflex acts which are useful, such as breathing, the
beating of the heart, swallowing and coughing; and others, like groaning,
weeping, and trembling, which seem to be useless. In like manner,
emotions of hope or fear may give rise to voluntary acts calculated to
enable the subject of the emotion to secure or avoid its object. If I
burn my fingers, my hand is involuntarily snatched away. Such would not
be the case if the burn caused no pain. If I see that the house is on
fire, I try to escape, either by extinguishing the fire or by getting
out of the house. It seems to me evident that I should not do so if the
thought of being burned were not painful. Such emotions may also occasion
useless acts, more or less similar to those mentioned above. A person who
saw no way of escape from a burning house might tremble, weep, or groan
from fear.
On the evolutionary hypothesis, it seems easy to understand how the
reproduction, by memory or imagination, of certain feelings might bring
about movements like those excited by the original feelings. Professor
James would have us believe that this reproduction is always, in itself,
indifferent, that is, merely intellectual; but that it is, nevertheless,
capable of setting up the movements which, in the case of peripheral
stimuli, are the results of pleasure and pain, and that the consciousness
of these movements is, in such cases, the sole cause of the emotional
condition. Such a reversal of relations seems to me highly improbable.
Each one must decide for himself which view is more in accordance with
the facts of his own consciousness.
W. L. WORCESTER.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] _Two Cases of General Cutaneous and Sensory Anæsthesia, without
Marked Psychical Implication._ By Henry J. Berkley, M. D., Baltimore.
[Brain, Part IV. 1891.]
PROFESSOR ERNST MACH’S TERM SENSATION.
SUPPLEMENTARY TO HIS CONTROVERSY WITH THE EDITOR.
_The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 3, contains a controversy between Prof. Ernst
Mach and myself on some questions of psycho-physics in which Professor
Mach, having reference to an editorial article on “Feeling and Motion,”
regards sensations as the “elements of reality,” “while motion,” he says,
“is a mere mental auxiliary, an artificial expedient.” “Physicists,” we
are told, “have accustomed us to regard the motions of atoms as more real
than the green of trees. In the latter I see a (sensory) fact, in the
former a _Gedankending_, a thing of thought.”
In contradistinction to Professor Mach I maintained that our scientific
terms, although abstract concepts and things of thought, or noumena, are
after all descriptive of actual facts; they are symbols representing
features of reality. Motions, i. e., that which is meant by the term
motion, is a reality, and what the chemist calls atoms is a definite
quality of certain facts of experience. Atoms are not things in
themselves, as the name seems to suggest, but rather proportional
relations conveniently so expressed as if they were ultimate units or
concrete little bodies of a definite mass or weight. What atoms are,
aside from representing the proportions in which elements combine, we do
not know. We may define “atom” as the minimal weight in which an element
enters into chemical combinations, but such atoms have never been an
object of observation. For aught we know, they may as little be discrete
bodies as a curve consists of discrete straight lines, which, as such,
would be unobservable only because infinitesimally small. The infinitely
small straight line into which a curve is analysed by mathematicians is
a fiction, wisely devised for calculating the path of the curve. This
fiction is as Professor Mach says, an artifice only, not a reality, or
as I say, an allegoric expression to characterise not whole concrete
realities, but certain features of reality in their abstractness.
Scientific terms are comparable to myths that contain deep religious
truths. The fiction of the myth is only the vehicle of its meaning. The
naked meaning in its abstract purity may be difficult to grasp. Thus
our imagination steps in and completes the picture so as to render it
concrete and easily thinkable.
Now, when several months ago I met Professor Mach at Prague, our
conversation naturally touched upon the problems which had formed the
subject of our discussion. Professor Mach assented to my speaking of
scientific terms as abstracts. That, accordingly, must be considered
as the point of agreement. But when I proposed that the term sensation
also was according to my terminology an abstract term representing one
feature of reality only and excluding other features, Professor Mach took
exception to it, saying that he understands by sensation reality itself.
Very well then, this is the difference; and this difference is after
all a difference of terms only. I understand by sensation the psychical
feature of the data of experience only, to the exclusion of what may be
called its physical aspect. Sensation accordingly, as I use the term, is
not the whole of the given reality but only one of its qualities. If, as
Professor Mach uses the term, sensation is another name for reality, the
main difference between our views appears to be removed.
P. CARUS.
BOOK REVIEWS.
VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DIE MENSCHEN- UND THIERSEELE. By _Wilhelm Wundt_. Zweite
umgearbeitete Auflage. Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss. 1892.
The new edition of Wundt’s _Menschen- und Thierseele_ is one of the
best existing general introductions to psychology. It preserves nearly
the just mean between the purely introspective and abstract treatment
and the substitution of physiology for psychology with which recent
treatises have familiarised us. The author has completely rewritten
the edition of 1863, which he regards as a youthful indiscretion
(_Jugendsünde_)—retaining only such chapters as could be brought into
harmony with his maturer views and with the developed science of
psycho-physics that has taken the place of the _Zukunftsprogramm_ of
thirty years ago. He has wisely omitted all the superficial and diffuse
chapters on comparative psychology and ethnology which cumbered the
original work; has silently ignored the fantastic speculations as to
the identity of electricity and nerve-force (one of the worst of the
aforesaid youthful sins); and practically abandoned (perhaps as too
esoteric for popular exposition) the elaborate reduction of sensations
and perceptions to unconscious judgments and inferences.
The first thirteen or fourteen chapters offer a very clear and
interesting résumé of the chief doctrines of the _Physiologische
Psychologie_ in regard to sensations generally, their measurements and
qualities, Weber’s and Fechner’s laws, the special sensations of color,
hearing, and the muscular sense, and the problem of space perception.
Following the plan of the original work in these chapters, the author
aims less at completeness of statement than to present clearly the
distinctive doctrines of modern psychology. In the treatment of certain
themes, e. g. Fechner’s law, and the perception of space, he neglects,
for the sake of clearness, qualifications of detail which the special
student must look for in the larger work. The last sixteen chapters deal
with the feelings, the will, consciousness, attention, association and
apperception, conception, abnormal and animal psychology and instinct,
concluding with two notable lectures on the “Freedom of the Will” and
the “Immortality of the Soul.” It is to these chapters that we must look
for Wundt’s general psychological and philosophical system. Profiting
by recent criticisms he has here set forth his characteristic doctrines
in so clear and definite a final statement that further misconception
of them is hardly permissible. The remainder of this notice will be
devoted to what is perhaps the most interesting question thus suggested:
Wundt’s relation to the associationist psychology of Spencer on the one
side, and to the younger German school of experimental psychologists
on the other. Wundt ignores the Spencerian form of the associationist
psychology, and the young psychologists do injustice to Wundt, neither
side apparently condescending to read with attention the writings of
the other. The debate, so far as it is not merely verbal, springs
from two real differences of method: (1) Wundt in his psychological
analysis habitually takes account of the problems of the theory of
knowledge (_Erkenntnisstheorie_), or ultimate metaphysics, which the
young psychologists endeavor (not always with success) systematically
to exclude. (2) Wundt, gifted with superior powers of introspection,
is more aware than the young psychologists of the infinite complexity
and subtlety of mental states. He prefers, therefore, to a schematic
simplification of the phenomena a terminology and descriptive analysis
that reflect in some measure their manifold diversity. And thus while
Wundt finds the pure associationist psychology barren and tautologous,
the young psychologists see in Wundt’s complicated terminology only a
shamefaced reversion to the discarded psychology of a substantial soul
endowed with autonomous “faculties.” But the analysis of our mental
states which Wundt gives by means of this terminology is really only
a subtler restatement of the analysis of Mill, Spencer, and Taine, to
which the new psychology has not been able to add anything of moment.
It is true that he proclaims the inadequacy of association, even when
translated into the diagrams of a hypothetical cerebral anatomy, to
“explain” fully our conscious active mental life. But in this he is at
one with Spencer (ultimate scientific ideas), J. S. Mill (Examination of
Hamilton), and Schopenhauer (_Epiphilosophie_). It is gross injustice
to stigmatise as an abandonment of the scientific attitude of mind this
occasional passing recognition of the seeming ultimate inexplicability
of things. In no single concrete instance can it be shown that Wundt now
sacrifices the recognised methods and postulates of modern scientific
investigation to the psychological hypostisations which his opponents
detect in his terminology.
In confirmation of these statements I will give a brief summary of
Wundt’s doctrine of association and apperception with an occasional
indication of its relation to the psychology of Spencer. Wundt
distinguishes the totality of mental states which are perceived from
the presentation at the focus of consciousness which is apperceived. In
this way (substituting everywhere _dunkel bewusst_ for _unbewusst_) he
avoids the metaphysics of the unconscious, while getting the benefit
of the entire analysis of its advocates. I do not think the ultimate
difficulty can be evaded in this way, but will not stop to argue the
point. A further advantage of this distinction is that it makes possible
a dynamic treatment of mental states as “events” in place of the crude
psychology that deals with the conditions of any mental state as so many
ready-made parts externally dovetailed into the completed product. The
active side of consciousness is taken into account from the outset. The
mental state at any moment is described by indicating the presentation
which is then at the focus of consciousness (apperceived) and the
accompanying faintly conscious presentations that qualify its tone and
total effect. The given mental state is “explained” by tracing out the
dynamic readjustments that brought this particular presentation to the
focus, and grouped the faintly conscious presentations about it. Now the
bringing of a presentation to the focus of conscious attention is the
primitive psychical activity, the elementary act of will,[58] and since
Wundt places this at the beginning he rejects all evolution of will or
instinct from reflex action, and thus, it will be said, here at least
puts himself in distinct opposition to advanced scientific thought.
Let us distinguish. So far as we are dealing with the developed minds
we know, Wundt’s distinction is merely the expression of an observed
psychological fact. External volition does go back to internal voluntary
attention and this to a focussing of consciousness for which apperception
is as good a term as another. Such focussing of the attention is for us
now the primary reaction of the “self” on its received impressions. Out
of a given group of presentations I apperceive by preference one and you
another, because at the time my “self,” my mind, differs from yours.
This self may be only a convenient shorthand expression for a passive
product of external forces. The feeling of the reaction of the self may
be an illusion, and its activity may be merely the mechanical action of
a relatively coherent group of presentations when a new presentation is
introduced among them, and the whole process may be explicable in terms
of associations. But the feeling exists, and Wundt has described and
analysed it better than any of his critics.
On the other hand, if the question is of the hypothetical origin of
mind, we are at once brought face to face with an ultimate metaphysical
problem which the new psychology impatiently ignores, which Spencer
grudgingly acknowledges, but which Wundt and Kantians like Riehl find
confronting them at every stage of their analysis. Conscious mind cannot
conceive of its own origin, and therefore all psychological theories of
development must postulate in some form the elements of consciousness
and will. Nothing that I could add to the dialectics of this question
would influence those who feel no difficulty here. They require a long
course of Kantian criticism or its equivalent. At any rate it is not fair
polemic to class a thinker as unscientific merely because he recognises
this difficulty and gives it expression in his psychology, instead of
contemptuously relegating it to metaphysics.
After thus laying the foundations in the doctrine of apperception for the
psychology both of cognition and of the will, Wundt proceeds to restate
the associationist analysis of Mill and Spencer in a more elaborate
terminology but in substantial agreement with Spencer till he reaches
the “concept,” when the introduction of apperception gives rise to a
seeming difference. Spencer distinguishes simultaneous from successive
association as carefully as Wundt. What Wundt, after Herbart calls
“complications,” namely the joint reference to one object of a number
of disparate presentations of sense, is clearly described by Spencer
(“Principles of Psychology,” §§ 315-355); and Wundt’s “assimilations” do
not differ appreciably from Spencer’s “still less conscious” processes
of “organic classification” (“Principles of Psychology,” § 320). Into
the metaphysics of the ultimate relations of contiguity and similarity
as laws of association I cannot enter here. Similarity will always be
recognised as ultimate by those who, like Spencer, approach the problem
first from the psychical side, while a purely materialistic treatment in
terms of nervous currents, such as we find in James, will endeavor to
do away altogether with similarity, which simply cannot be expressed in
terms of nerve-structure without reasoning in a circle. Wundt retains
similarity but endeavors to coördinate it with contiguity. The problem is
really identical with the final question of the relations of “mind” and
“body,” and cannot be profitably discussed apart from that question.
Coming now to the concept and the judgment, we find Wundt affirming
that the different forms of simultaneous and successive association (as
he has defined them) are not an exhaustive classification of mental
processes—that they do not include the concept. Well, he is at liberty
to define his own terms, and before we accuse him of hypostasising a
new faculty to account for the concept, let us scrutinise his meaning.
We shall find that he merely repeats, in a subtler terminology of his
own, the analysis of Berkeley, Mill, Taine, Spencer, and Romanes.
These writers treat the concept as a complicated associational group
held together by the word. Now Wundt, while conceding the theoretic
admissibility of this form of statement, holds that such groups present
so many distinct characteristics that all delicacy of psychological
discrimination is sacrificed by confounding them under one denomination
with other associational complexes. He does not, like Professor James,
bid introspective psychology “throw up the sponge” here, but wishes
to carry his analysis into recesses which the instruments of the
associationists are too clumsy to explore. In the interests of this
analysis he limits the term association to combinations mediated by a
limited number of elements. The (apperceived) concept, on the other
hand, is the product of the reaction of the total mind. This distinction
(whatever we may think of its absolute validity) expresses a finely
observed psychological truth. The distinctive quality of a concept
consists, Wundt says, “_in dem begleitenden Bewusstsein, dass die
einzelne Vorstellung einen bloss stellvertretenden Werth besitze_.”
This feeling he calls the _Begriffsgefühl_, meaning thereby exactly
what Professor James means when he says that “the thoughts by which we
know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed
from each other,” and that “a polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a
feeling of ‘Hollo! thingumbob again!’ ever flitted through its mind.”
Only, instead of “throwing up the sponge,” Wundt goes on to give a very
interesting account of this feeling in its various degrees of clearness
between the conceptual polyp and the conceiving man. Apperception is
invoked only to name and emphasise the feeling of activity of the self
that enters into the _Begriffsgefühl_, distinguishing it as a reaction of
the total consciousness from the relatively passive associations of what
Romanes would call “recepts.” Psychologists, however, will continue their
fruitless debates on questions of terminology and will still imagine that
Wundt is a belated reactionist.
PAUL SHOREY.
BEITRÄGE ZUR EXPERIMENTELLEN PSYCHOLOGIE. By _Hugo Münsterberg_. Heft 4.
Freiburg i. B. 1892.
Münsterberg’s fourth _Heft_ begins with studies in association. If _a_
and _b_ have been independently associated with _m_, can _a_ call up
_b_ without the appearance in consciousness of _m_? The affirmative
answer of common experience was confirmed by Scripture’s experiments.
Associating five Japanese symbols with two series of five German words,
he found that a word of one series tended (without conscious recollection
of the Japanese symbol) to revive the particular word in the other
series that had been associated with the same symbol. Münsterberg, after
repeating and varying the experiment in a number of fields, denies that
any such relation can be observed. He may very well be right on the
question of facts. It is _a priori_ improbable that a transitory and
arbitrary association of a meaningless symbol could modify appreciably
the independent and accidental associative attractions of familiar
words and presentations. The philosophic interpretation is another
question. For our real knowledge it is a matter of indifference whether
we fill out “missing links” with “_dunkel bewusst_,” “_unbewusst_,” or
“cerebral processes that have no psychical correlates.” And yet how much
of contemporary psychologising is a logomachy raging around just this
question.
Münsterberg’s second series of experiments show clearly the part played
by such missing links in perception. A word is called out just before a
complicated picture is exhibited to the subject. He will usually perceive
first in the picture some object naturally associated with the word, even
though the word has aroused no conscious associations.
Similarly (III) a hastily seen misprinted word will be interpreted
variously according to the associations of another word called out to the
subject in advance.
Another series of experiments has for result that even the most commonly
associated word-couples, as table and chair, have no fixed, unconditional
associative attraction for each other in the same or in different minds,
but that the unit of attraction is the “associative constellation.”
This is only common sense, and artificial experiments will never reveal
anything in this field that we cannot learn quite as well in the class
room. “Table” will suggest “logarithm” if the boy is fresh from the class
in trigonometry.
“The difference between men is in their principle of association” said
Emerson long ago. Münsterberg, who has in his archives records of
fifty thousand experiments in verbal associations, presents a table of
the comparative frequency with which substantives are associated with
superior (more general) or inferior class names, with adjectives or with
verbs to which they stand in the relation of subject or of object. His
chief result is that minds which associate a noun with its higher class
name (_Ueberordner_) think of it as the subject of a verb and do not
associate it with an adjective. The _Unterordner_ thinks of the noun as
object of a verb and associates it with an adjective. The adjective,
then, is not the higher class to which the substantive belongs, but a
limitation of the substantive. The French, if they please, may use this
conclusion to refute Spencer’s contention that “white horse” is a more
natural order than _cheval blanc_.
The first topic in “memory studies” is the persistence in the
psycho-physical mechanism of the disposition to an acquired automatic
movement, even after the memory of the nerve has been seemingly displaced
by the habit of its contrary. The experiments were trivial, such as
shifting the position of an inkstand from right to left in alternate
months, or wearing a watch alternately in the right or left fob. The
result, a progressive diminution of the mistakes made after every change,
may plausibly be explained by the stimulated attention and consequent
care of the experimenter. The second topic treats of the effect of a time
interval on the exactness of our memory of sensations of movement in eyes
and limbs. The section on “chain reactions” is a methodological study of
the various applications of this experimental method. “The influence of
nervous stimulants on psychic activities” is rather interesting reading,
but yields no important results. Alcohol depresses, tea and coffee
heighten the powers of memory and perception for an hour or two after
absorption. But the harmful effect of the alcohol sometimes passes away
after the first hour. _Grössenschätzung_ is a study of our estimates
of distances on a surface, made by passing the hand over it at arm’s
length, at half arm’s length, etc. From experiments as to the estimate
of absolute tone-distances (as distinguished from musical intervals)
Münsterberg concludes that pure measurements are not possible with three
tones only. Experiments with four tones do not, he says, confirm the law
that distances corresponding to equal differences of vibration are felt
as equal.
Physiologists have assumed that the symmetrical movement of the limbs
as in swimming or rowing is the natural one; and the alternating or
independent movements, as in walking or writing, are an acquisition
involving inhibitions of the natural innervations. “Even in adult life,”
says Professor James, “there is an instinctive tendency to revert to
the bilateral movements of childhood.” Professor Münsterberg was led to
doubt this view by observing the unsymmetrical motions of a baby in a
warm bath, and experiment has confirmed his scepticism. Complicated joint
motions of both hands (tracing circles or other geometrical figures on a
surface) do not exhibit any tendency, when the attention is distracted,
to assume the symmetrical form. They rather tend to compensate each other
in such a way as to preserve equilibrium with the minimum strain on the
other muscles of the body, and this law leads as often to alternating as
to symmetrical movements of the arms or legs. The case is different of
course with the muscles of the trunk, and may be different in birds, as
it would in us if we spent our lives in swimming or rowing.
A new method of attacking the problem of localisation is to observe
the effect of altering the circulation in different parts of the
brain. Tentative experiments on one subject seem to show that verbal
associations are readiest when the victim lies on his left side, which
is a happy coincidence with the localisation of the speech centres in
the left frontal convolutions. If these statistics can be trusted, it is
inadvisable to undertake hard mental labor with the head hanging back
over the edge of a chair!
In the last chapter, certain simple experiments in our estimates of
voluntary movements in varying conditions of mind and body are made the
basis of a far-reaching theory of pleasure, pain, and judgment, the
elements of which can be found in Aristotle, Herbert Spencer, and James.
Münsterberg found by repeated experiments that the accuracy of attempted
reproduction of a fixed and familiar amount of centripetal or centrifugal
movement of finger and thumb along a rod perpendicular to his waistcoat
varied with his condition of fatigue, pleasure, or pain. In a pleasurable
state of consciousness the centrifugal movement was exaggerated while the
centripetal fell short. In pain the reverse relation obtained. Hence he
infers a connection between pain and muscular flexion and pleasure and
muscular extension, or rather, he distinguishes the mere sensation of
pain (_Schmerz_) and pleasure (_Lust_) which may depend on integrations
and disintegrations in the nerve-tissue, from the accompanying feelings
of agreeableness (_Wollust_) or disagreeableness (_Unlust_) which are
due to sensations aroused at the centres by movements of flexion and
extension throughout the body. He thus attaches his special theory of
pleasure and pain to Lange’s and James’s theory of the identity of the
emotions with their bodily concomitants—though he protests against the
metaphysical implications of the doctrine. The origin of the existing
coördination of muscular flexions and extensions with pleasure and pain,
he explains teleologically on the principles of the Spencerian psychology
of evolution. He then proceeds, after Sigwart and Brentano, to revive
the old idea of Aristotle (whom he does not mention) that the judgment
(affirmative or negative) is rather the assumption of an attitude toward
a presentation (_Stellungsnehmende Akte_) than a mere conjunction of
presentations. The affirmative judgment is a faint incipient represented
movement of the self towards a suggested conjunction of presentations.
The negative judgment is a similar movement in the opposite direction.
Ontogenetically these inchoate movements are later than the movements
of acceptance or rejection called forth by a painful or pleasurable
stimulus, and must therefore be treated as derivative phenomena. But the
Kantians may derive some comfort from Münsterberg’s final assurance that
he too believes that “_Erkenntnisstheoretisch das Urtheil primär ist_.”
PAUL SHOREY.
THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. By _Josiah Royce_, Ph. D. Boston and New
York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
We are told by Professor Royce in the preface to this book, that we are
indebted for it to the lady friend to whom it is gracefully dedicated,
who asked him “for some account of the more significant spiritual
possessions of a few prominent modern thinkers,” to be related “in
comparatively brief and untechnical fashion.” The larger portion of the
work is taken up with that subject, exhibiting the general growth of
modern philosophical thought beginning with Spinozism, and terminating
with Monism as the outcome of the doctrine of Evolution. The author’s
purpose is constructive, however, as well as expository. He has his own
philosophical creed, suggested by what he knows of the progress and
outcome of modern thought, and the second portion of the work is the
expression of his thoughts on the world-conception which he regards as
embodying the true spirit of modern philosophy. Professor Royce justly
lays stress on the fact that the theory of evolution is the product
of a genuine and continuous growth. He dwells particularly, moreover,
on the distinction between the _epistemological_ sense of idealism,
which “involves a theory of the nature of our human knowledge,” and
its _metaphysical_ sense, in which it is “a theory as to the nature
of the real world, however we may come to know that nature.” It is in
accord with the latter sense that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their
allies, as believing matter to be an expression of the world-spirit, are
referred to as the idealistic school; and it is in the metaphysical and
not the epistemological sense that the term idealism has been used since
Hegel. The opposite of a metaphysical idealist is “one who maintains
the ultimate existence of wholly unspiritual realities at the basis
of experience and as the genuine truth of the world—such unspiritual
realities for instance as an absolute ‘Unknowable,’ or, again, as what
Hobbes meant by ‘Body.’” This is not, however, the view of the author,
who thinks that the metaphysical idealist alone is in possession of a
successful solution for the epistemological problem.
Professor Royce divides modern philosophy into three great periods, of
which the first was one of pure and simple naturalism. The supernatural
had then only a secondary interest, and thought was governed by three
ideas—“that nature is a mechanism, that human reason is competent to
grasp the truth of nature, and that, since nature’s truth is essentially
mathematical, geometry is the model science, whose precision and
necessity philosophy, too, must imitate.” During the second period of
modern philosophy there was a gradual change of thought objectivity.
Reason was still the instrument, but it was employed on the mind itself.
It came to be recognised that if man is part of nature’s mechanism,
he is a knowing mechanism. The age was, however, more than one of
self-analysis. Rousseau introduced a sentimental tendency from which came
“a revival of passion, of poetry, and of enthusiasm, whose influence
we shall never outgrow.” To it is traceable the French Revolution
which overthrew all the mechanical restraints of civilisation, and
“demonstrated afresh to the world’s outer sense the central importance of
passion in the whole life of humanity.”
The period of modern philosophy, which still continues, began with the
publication of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the essential doctrine
of which is that man’s nature is the real creator of man’s world, that
visible nature is the expression of the human spirit, the inner structure
of which is therefore the deepest truth for us. This idea is “as old as
deeper spiritual faith itself,” and yet it is the very soul of all our
modern life because it is “the essentially humane view of reality.” For
fifty years Kant’s ideas ruled philosophic thought, and then, through the
progress of science, the doctrine of evolution received formulation, and
confirmation and “external nature has once more gained for us an imposing
authority which makes us in many ways sympathise afresh with the pure
naturalism of the seventeenth century.” We are compelled to omit any
account of the author’s study of the philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and
Berkeley, or the philosophic systems of Kant and his successors of the
German School of Idealists. Nor can we say anything as to the doctrine of
Evolution, which Professor Royce rightly regards as having had its rise
long before Darwin or Herbert Spencer. Before proceeding to state his
own views, the author takes a cursory glance at modern empirical monism
which he affirms to be rather a suggestion than a philosophy. It is not
surprising, therefore, that he is not content with it although he makes
use of its ideas.
Let us now see what are the “Suggestions” which Professor Royce offers
as his contribution towards the formation of a world-conception. These
occupy the last four chapters of the work, which are supplemented by a
general summary in the appendix, to the book. For the sake of conciseness
we will make use of this summary, according to which there are two
phases of idealistic doctrine, the Analytic Idealism of Berkeley and the
Synthetic Idealism of Kant and his successors. The former shows that if
the world is to be knowable at all, it must be, in its deepest nature, a
world of ideas, that is, it exists “only in so far as beings with minds
actually _know it to be_.” The objection that nobody can _know_ any
reality beyond his own self, is met by the synthetic phase of idealism
which shows us that “there is but one self in the world, the logos or
world-mind. The _finite_ self knows truth beyond its own limitations,
just because it is an organic part of the complete Self.” What are the
demands of idealism as thus stated? They have relation, first, to the
interpretation of the facts of experience, which must be in terms of
the doctrine of the world-mind, and, secondly, to experience itself,
on which we depend “for the revelation of that truth which, for us
finite beings, must remain a fast ‘outer’ truth, just because it is the
content of other mind than our own bits of selfhood, and is universally
true for all intelligences.” The philosophy of experience having to do
with facts and with the interpretation of facts, it is necessary to
distinguish between what is really “outer” and what is “inner” about our
finite experience. The former embraces the world of facts, and a fact
is something which must be describable in some sort of universal terms.
The principle of ordinary realism, “that you must not be sentimental or
otherwise emotional in your account of the truth of things, but rather
_exact in your descriptions of what things are_,” has a thoroughly
idealistic justification. Not appreciation, but description gives us
outer truth, and this is the characteristic presupposition of all natural
science, which is concerned with the universal aspects of things, as
opposed to momentary and transient aspects. That presupposition involves
the assumption that the world is _essentially describable_. But as only
the well-knit, the orderly, that which conforms to law, can be described
science assumes the universality and rigidity of the laws of nature.
It assumes further, since the most exact descriptions are possible only
in the case of processes in Space and Time, of a mechanical type, that
everything including man himself, is a part of nature’s mechanism. A
closer analysis, however, shows that, as one can only describe what has
been first appreciated, there must be universal types of appreciation,
and therefore, that “Ideals must be deeper than Mechanism, so that, in
order to be relatively describable, nature must embody purposes, and so
be possessed of worth.” The author’s conclusion is that the natural order
is also a moral order, and that therefore “the world of absolute self
must appear to us as having two aspects, one a temporal, the other an
eternal aspect, one of law and one of worth. Man then turns out to be at
once a part of nature’s mechanism, and a part of the moral order; at once
temporally determined and morally free.”
The final lecture presents the author’s views as to the solution of the
problem of evil. Professor Royce believes that all evil is part of a good
order, and hence he agrees with Hegel, who declared that life, however
good, will always be restless, longing, suffering, and who gloried
in the paradox as the very essence of spirituality; rather than with
Schopenhauer, whose recognition, in another light, of the universality
of the same truth led him to abandon all hope in life. The justification
of the existence of an evil impulse comes just at the instant when it is
hated and condemned. Thus “condemning and conquering the evil will, makes
it part of a good will”; as pain and suffering have their compensation in
their chastening effect on the spirit. But to the enlightened soul it is
not so much the painfulness as “the blind irrationality of fortune that
seems to drive God out of our thoughts when we look at our world.” It is
the capriciousness of life, arising from human stupidity, that really
makes it seem like an evil dream. What is the explanation of this caprice
given by the author? It is to be found in the creed of his idealism,
“This world is the world of the Logos.” It is “the suffering God, who is
just our own true self, who actually and in our flesh bears the sins of
the world, and whose natural body is pierced by the capricious wounds
that hateful fools inflict upon him.” And as our defeats are his, so his
triumph and his eternal peace are ours also.
Prof. Royce in making “only one more effort to define a ‘double-aspect’
theory of the relations of the physical and the moral and æsthetic
worlds,” affirms that our philosophic insight teaches us that the world
of matter in motion is simply an external aspect of the appreciable
world, that is, of the world of the Logos. Of this, it is such an aspect
“as can be expressed by finite consciousness in terms of the space and
time forms, and of the categories of empirical science.... Consequently
all its laws, all its necessity, its causation, its uniformity, belong,
not to its inner nature as such, but to the external show of this
nature.” That which actually appears to us is matter in motion, which
furnishes the fact of the double aspect, the inner intelligibility of
which fact is problematical to us, but not so for the Logos, who is our
true Self, and who “completes the insight that for us is so fragmentary.”
This true Self, the Logos, is the only Self, and with it the deeper self
of man is identical. That this deeper self is “the self that knows in
unity all truth,” is declared to be no hypothesis, and therefore the
existence of the Infinite Self is perfectly sure. This Self “infinitely
and reflectively transcends our consciousness, and therefore, since
it includes us, it is at the very least a person, and more definitely
conscious than we are; for what it possesses is self-reflecting
knowledge.” Finally, the true world, that is the world of appreciation,
is the system of the thoughts of the Logos, whose unity we know, just so
far as we ourselves consciously and rationally enter into it and form
part of it. Therefore “in so far as we have inner unity of thinking,
in so far as we commune with our fellows, and in so far as we rightly
see significance in the outer universe, we are in and of the world of
appreciation that embodies the thought of the Logos.”
Ingenious as this theory is, and notwithstanding the elements of truth it
possesses, we cannot accept it as conclusive. Its weakness is revealed
in the last line of the paragraph just quoted. If only the world of
appreciation embodies the thought of the Logos, what becomes of the world
of fact? The latter is said to be the outer aspect of the former, a
notion which is apparently derived from the association with man of body
and mind. But the existence of mind, which we must understand by the term
Logos, in nature, although declared by Professor Royce to be the only
thing certain, is a mere inference, and even if the analogy of the human
organism justifies such an inference; it would require that if priority
has to be given to mind or matter in the universe it must be allowed to
the latter. At birth a human being has no mind, properly so-called, since
it is the result of the activity after birth of the organism, through
the agency of the brain. It is true that the human body possesses from
the first the elements of the mind, or rather of the feeling which thus
exhibits itself; or, better still, the organic structure of which feeling
is the general function. The utmost that can be properly asserted of the
universe, therefore, is that it possesses a certain organic arrangement
of its parts, and therewith such a condition of feeling, or, what in
this relation would be a better term, sensitiveness, as is required by
its organic character. In relation to such a state of things the terms
thought, consciousness, reflection, have no meaning so far as we can
judge. That organic aspect of the universe, moreover, leaves no room for
duality. Just as the human organism constitutes a perfect unity, although
it is made up of various organs and exhibits the properties attributed
to both mind and matter, so must the universe be such a perfect unity
whatever its nature and attributes. The human organism may, however, be
strictly described as matter under organic conditions, a description
which is equally applicable to the universe, without determining what
those conditions are. Professor Royce objects to the Unknowable of
Herbert Spencer, but there is very little practical difference between it
and his own true Self, which, as the Absolute, is unknowable, although
he is known in the inner self of man, as Spencer’s Unknowable is known
in the human consciousness. Both Absolute and Unknowable are, however,
merely names for Organic Nature, which is seen in all things visible and
is known by all her operations. These are governed by the laws of her
very existence, and it is the uniformity of which those laws are the
expression which constitutes the moral law of the universe, the breach
of whose eternal order, whether this is established in the world of
matter or in the human mind, must be attended with consequences that are
designated by man as evil. We find only a world of description, which is
nevertheless one of moral order.
Widely as we disagree on the grounds stated with the conclusions of
Professor Royce’s work, it is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the
discussion of the world-problem. Its description of the characteristics
of the philosophy of Kant and of the German idealists is clear, though
not intended to do more than exhibit the spirit of their teaching, and
it is written in a style which renders it easy reading. It is a pity,
therefore, that it is disfigured with such colloquialisms as _you’ll_,
_isn’t_, _can’t_, _don’t_, words which neither sound well, nor look well
in print.
Ω.
DIE ARISTOTELISCHE AUFFASSUNG VOM VERHÄLTNISSE GOTTES ZUR WELT UND ZUM
MENSCHEN. By _Dr. Eugen Rolfes_. Berlin: Mayer & Müller. 1892.
This book is a scholastic “survival.” The author believes that Zeller’s
interpretation of Aristotle is wrong, and in five formal theses he
endeavors to prove _secundum artem_ that the philosopher was a theist who
taught the creation of the world from nothing, and the immortality of
the soul. In the defence of his theses he manifests some ingenuity and
industry, but no criticism. The work has no scientific significance.
P. S.
MAX STIRNER UND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. Erscheinungen des modernen Geistes
und das Wesen des Menschen. By _Robert Schellwien_. Leipsic: C. E. M.
Pfeffer, 1892. Price 2 m 60 pf.
Individualism is the spirit of the age, and among all the champions
of individualism the most original, the most consistent, the boldest,
are perhaps Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Robert Schellwien, in
sketching their views in great outlines, partly admires these courageous
thinkers who dare to draw the consequences of their principles to the
very last even though they will appear absurd to the world, partly
censures the rashness with which they arrive at, and the superciliousness
with which they sometimes state, their opinions. Upon the whole the
author succeeds in impressing the reader that there is in these two
peculiar geniuses a gigantic strength, and that their views of truth,
morality, and justice deserve a greater attention than they have
received. The reviewer is no admirer of either Stirner or Nietzsche; he
believes nevertheless that a careful analysis of their erratic minds and
lives will be very instructive. It will be first of pathological and
then even of more than pathological interest. The actual objective value
of the ideals truth, morality, and justice, will be best illustrated by
showing all the consequences of a consistent individualism. We hope that
this pamphlet will grow into a more comprehensive work; and in that case
we should advise the author to add short biographies of his heroes.
κρς.
THE SOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT OF KANT’S TELEOLOGY. By _James Hayden Tufts_.
Chicago: University Press. 1892.
This little tract is an inaugural dissertation presented by Mr. Tufts
to the University of Freiburg for the attainment of the doctorate of
philosophy. It is written in English. Mr. Tuft’s dissertation is wholly
historical. He simply seeks to expound Kant’s true views. In this respect
the work bears the marks of much research and of a thorough exploitation
of Kant’s works. Mr. Tuft’s concluding words are that “with every new
discovery of science, every advance in the ideals of art and of the
conduct of life, every development in religious faiths, comes anew the
task for philosophy to criticise, and through criticism to make a fresh
attempt to interpret from the unity of reason the manifold of life.”
μκρκ.
DISTINCTION AND THE CRITICISM OF BELIEFS. By _Alfred Sidgwick_. London:
Longmans, Green, & Co. 1892.
This work might be described as an inquiry into the conflict between
philosophy and common sense, and its central idea as the continuity
of nature. What bearing this idea has on the inquiry is shown by the
statement, that the distinction between philosophy and common sense is
only one of degree. And yet, regarded as methods, or attempts to follow
ideals, they may be sharply contrasted. This implies the existence
of distinctions, and hence arises the question how far distinction
is consistent with continuity in nature. The recognition of such a
continuity requires the admission of the unreality of distinctness, but
this fact is not inconsistent with the use of rough distinctions, which
give rise to what the author terms effective ambiguity. Here we have the
field of the operation of common sense, which exhibits itself as tact in
the use of rough distinctions, while, on the other hand, philosophy may
be said to be concerned with the continuity which, from a superficial
glance, might be supposed to stand in opposition to distinction.
The ultimate result which Mr. Sidgwick has in view is the reconciliation
of philosophy and common sense, although it is incidental to his main
purpose, which is the discussion of the best way of dealing with
ambiguity, that is, of using rough distinctions. The improvement
suggested is the substitution of “reasoned discrimination” for “haphazard
tact,” and it is based on the doctrine that “the validity of all
distinctions is relative to the purpose for which they are used at the
time.” This cannot mean that distinction is merely relative, as it is
said that there is no distinction which is quite safe against being
broken down. The implication is that a safe distinction is possible,
although difficult to find, and consistently with that view, the doctrine
has the double aim of repressing excessive belief in distinctions
which are, at least for the moment, invalid, and, on the other hand,
of “enabling us to justify for a passing purpose, distinctions which
are faulty on the whole.” The justification here arises from the use,
and not from the distinctions themselves, although it is evident there
must be some basis for them, or they would be invalid. The element of
truth is derived from the continuity of nature, with which philosophy is
concerned, and hence the improvement in the method of common sense is to
be effected through its regulation by the method of philosophy.
The justice of this view may be tested by its consequences, which are
stated by the author in reviewing the chief incidental aims of his
book, as being those which have to do with controversy, the faults of
language, and the conflict between the rival ideals, faith and doubt.
“Philosophy,” we are told, “is doubt, just as science is knowledge,” (a
description which like many other things in this book we cannot endorse,)
and the true centre of philosophical interest in regard to rival ideals
is “to harmonise the dispute by seeking how to limit each ideal by its
opposite.” This is the aim of all real philosophy, which recognises that
every ideal has an element of truth. Philosophy is thus explanation,
and Mr. Sidgwick avers one of the great dividing forces in philosophy
has always been “the rivalry between two opposite methods of general
explanation—that which explains small things by great ones, the part by
the whole, the many by the one (e. g. all earthly facts as related to
their one cause and substance); and that which explains great things by
small ones, the whole by its parts, the one by the many (e. g. the system
of nature as a ‘concourse of atoms’).” Thus regarded, the distinction
between philosophy and common sense is simply one of method; and it may
be said to consist in the use by the former of rational doubt based on
scientific knowledge, as distinguished from the belief founded on popular
wisdom which distinguishes the latter. Both alike, however, are the fruit
of observation, pushed further, nevertheless, in the one case than in the
other, which is practically the view expressed by the author.
In considering the nature of philosophy, we have given the gist of Mr.
Sidgwick’s reflections on controversy, which is treated as the opposition
of ideals. This conflict is kept alive chiefly by doubt as to how
abstract notions should be applied in concrete cases, and largely owing
to “the absence of that kind of sharp distinction which is applicable,
not only to the notions themselves, but to the actual facts to which they
pretend to refer.” This view is ably enforced, as well as the necessity
of applying to the conflict between ideals the rule laid down as to the
purposive validity of distinctions. The operation of this rule would be
attended with concession instead of assumption, there being, however, the
admission, which is equivalent to an assumption, that neither side of
any ideal dispute is devoid of some truth as well as some error. This is
really required, if not by the continuity of nature, yet by continuity in
our interpretation of nature. This is continuity in thought, and hence
arises the difficulties connected with language which it is one of the
author’s incidental aims to point out. He supposes that language acts as
a drag on the progress of knowledge, owing to the _clumsiness_ of words
arising from the fact that “things spoken of are always more full of
change and movement than the words we can use in speaking of them.”
Mr. Sidgwick insists upon continuity, yet change itself may be evidence
of at least partial discontinuity. Our author remarks, in an appendix
note on the continuity of nature, that every change, as such, is a
_saltus_, however small it may be, and that the same is true of any gap
between the two extremes of nature and the intermediate region. That such
an intermediate region exists, is required by the continuity of nature,
which again is evidence of change, on the principle that every chain
is made up of a series of links. But as in the chain there is no real
gap between the links, so there is no actual discontinuity consequent
on change in nature. The two extremes may be regarded as prolongations
of the intermediate region, and the changes to which such prolongation
is due may so occur that there may be discontinuity between certain
parts, as between the fibres of which a hempen rope is made, and yet
there be a perfectly continuous whole. We have an example of such a
discontinuous _continuum_ in a beam of ordinary light, which presents not
the slightest gap, and which yet is made up of numberless undulations
in different ratios representing the six spectrum colors, each of which
is, moreover, spread throughout the whole of the beam. Here we see that
continuity is quite consistent with distinction. The latter may be
regarded as discrimination of the various phases of the former, and the
distinction remains valid or otherwise according to the accuracy of the
discrimination or not. But constant change of distinction is required by
progress in knowledge which may be regarded as a thought representation,
by discontinuous steps, of the continuity of nature.
As to the conflict between faith and doubt, the author considers the
function of scepticism as the search for grounds of belief, and thus
doubt is said to be “rather a friend than an enemy to those who remember
that there is still some truth, on any subject, for fallible men to
learn,” as well as to those who are more interested in the discovery of
truth than in supporting their own beliefs.
Ω.
VORLESUNGEN ÜBER GEOMETRIE, unter besonderer Benutzung der Vorträge von
Alfred Clebsch. By _Dr. Ferdinand Lindemann_. Leipsic: B. G. Teubner.
1891.
This first part of the second volume of Alfred Clebsch’s Lectures has
been arranged and treated by Professor Lindemann in the same way as
the first, except perhaps that the editor has extended his independent
investigations rather further than before, owing mainly to the fact that
he had in addition to his own notes when attending Professor Clebsch’s
lectures in 1871-1872, only five folio pages of the late master’s
manuscript at his disposal. The present volume is divided into three
parts. I. The Point, Plane, and Straight Line. II. Surfaces of the Second
Order and of the Second Class. III. Fundamental Conceptions of Projective
and Metrical Geometry. Historical notices and references are added in
foot-notes. Considering the prominence of the editor as a mathematician,
it would be a presumption on our part to praise his work.
κρς.
AN INTRODUCTION TO GENERAL LOGIC. By _E. E. Constance Jones_. London:
Longmans, Green, & Co. 1892.
This work is another witness of the great interest now being taken in all
that pertains to the methods of knowledge.
Miss Jones, the author, is lecturer on logic at Girton College,
Cambridge. During an experience of several years in teaching, certain
difficulties have very forcibly pressed themselves upon her attention.
She hopes by her book to aid in removing these difficulties.
It is certainly a good augury for women when their intellectual
representatives begin to show the disposition to turn towards the “dry
light.” Logic and mathematics are “dry” to be sure; that is, they are
very apt to be _found_ dry, very dry, by beginners, and always by those
who lack that real intellectual robustness which is alone fit to meddle
with fundamental problems. Hence these sober and severe disciplines find
little favor among those who seek merely for “showy” attainments, those
to whom whatever is “uninteresting” is intolerable, and those who regard
obscurity as inseparable from profundity. When then we find scholarly
women manifesting a real relish for this “dry light,” it gives promise of
a coming day when the intellectual appetite will rise above the level of
mere entertainment, the level of the playhouse and the circus, and take
kindly, and perhaps zealously, to real edification.
Miss Jones makes but very modest claims on behalf of her treatise. She
has not undertaken to innovate to any great extent upon the regular
scheme. If in her changes there is that which might especially provoke
criticism, it is perhaps in the nomenclature which she adopts. The
traditional logic forms a system which has its own proper merits and
defects. It is of great historical interest, and its regular terminology
is almost indispensable for the proper illustration of its doctrines.
We think also that the author fails to state the case in all its
amplitude, when, she lays it down as one of the most absolute and
ultimate of all logical principles that the self-evident ought to be
believed. The truth is, as we conceive it, that the self-evident is sure
to be believed, and that in the face of any proposition that truly bears
its own justification along with it, any doctrine of logic is either
useless or impertinent.
ρσλ.
HYPNOTISMUS UND SUGGESTION. By _W. Wundt_. Leipsic: Wilhelm Engelmann.
1892.
A Greek student translates κλεινός ‘small’; “You are thinking of the
German _klein_,” says the teacher quickly. Another renders ἡμείς γὰρ
ἁγνοί, ‘we are lambs,’ misled by a chance cross association with the
Latin _agni_. Every careful self-observer knows that there is no
combination of memories, images, and resultant incipient acts too absurd
for some moments of confusion and mental fatigue. We account for such
confusions of thought by citing parallel cases and adding generally
that normal associations are liable to disintegration and abnormal
recombination in fatigued or excited conditions of the brain. If we
seek a causal scientific explanation, two methods are open to us: (1)
we may attempt to map out in detail and describe for all similar cases
the pathways of association, or (2) we may endeavor to define their
physiological conditions and accompaniments in the nervous system. The
first leads us at once into the metaphysics of the unconscious. The
second method, when we attempt to pass from a general to a specific
correspondence, leads to a hypothetical restatement of the observed
psychological facts in terms of the latest cerebral anatomy and
physiology Now all serious scientific thinkers are fast coming to the
conclusion (on which Wundt’s book is based) that the phenomena of dreams
and of hypnotism are to be explained by the general laws of association
as revealed especially in the confused and obstructed associations of the
normal state. The critical and destructive part of Wundt’s sensible and
timely work has two aims: (1) to discriminate the attested phenomena of
hypnotism from the alleged phenomena of thought-transference, telepathy,
and “possession” on which no serious student will waste his words; and
(2) to point out the confusions of thought in current explanations of
hypnotic phenomena, which either confine themselves to restatements of
the observed facts in terms of a hypothetical anatomy, or at any rate
in Wundt’s opinion base their physiological hypotheses on an inadequate
psychological analysis. His own constructive work is an attempt to
supply the missing analysis and accompany it with the most plausible
physiological theory that our imperfect science allows. Dreams and the
illusions of the hypnotic subject are doubtless explicable generally
as derangements of the associative machinery. But they are specific
forms of abnormal association, the special characteristics of which we
wish to define. Suggestion, Wundt says (with James), is association
accompanied by a “limitation of consciousness to the images aroused by
the association.” The scientific problem is: _Wie entsteht die Einengung
des Bewusstseins?_ This narrowing of consciousness manifests itself in
a diminished sensibility to all impressions outside of the suggestions.
Dreams show the same features, accidental impressions of sense or changes
in the nutritive processes here taking the place of direct suggestions
from without. But in sleep and dreams the limitation of consciousness is
conditioned by general fatigue of the nervous system. In the hypnotic
state it results not from fatigue, but from neuro-dynamic and vaso-motor
changes in the distribution of tensions in the brain. Hence the superior
intensity and vividness of the presentations that are allowed to develop
themselves. This altered equilibrium of the forces of the brain is
brought about by the suggestions of the operator, which are generally
guided by him to a more or less definite end. The resulting derangements
of normal associations are consequently less lawless than is the case in
dreams. On these principles Wundt explains the chief facts of hypnotism
as follows: Automatic obedience to the commands of the operator results
simply from the fact that every idea tends to realise itself in action,
is an incipient act; and in the narrowed consciousness of the hypnotic
subject the idea suggested by the operator finds no competitors in the
struggle for existence as a reality. This explanation (which is really as
old as Spinoza) accounts also for positive hallucinations—there are no
reductors, as Taine would say. Negative hallucinations (the non-existence
of an existing door) may be explained sometimes by a contradictory
positive hallucination (as of a curtain covering the door) more often
in the same way as hypnotic analgesia by the familiar analogy of our
insensibility to the toothache when the attention is elsewhere strongly
engaged. This is favored by the generally diminished sensibility of the
hypnotic subject. Post-hypnotic suggestions are associations depending
on partial memories, such as we have in the normal state when we merely
recall an image or an object without time-and-circumstance localisation.
The subject who is to execute a post-hypnotic suggestion at 7 o’clock
is reminded by the striking of the clock of an image of a thing to be
done which the original command of the operator associated with the
stroke of seven. All else is forgotten. When the time limit is not thus
definitely marked, the process must be analogous to that whereby some
persons are able to waken at a predetermined hour in the morning. A
latent association is aroused into full activity by naturally recurring
conditions of internal physiological processes or external surroundings.
Courtesy or prudence are perhaps all that prevent the best explanation of
certain extreme cases being the old one: “the boy lied.” Wundt rejects
the claim that suggestion is the experimental method in psychology
_par excellence_, for the very sufficient reason that the phenomena
experimented with are only very partially in the control of the operator
and are furthermore mainly pathological. He is far from disputing the
practical efficacy of hypnotic therapeutics in functional disorders,
but he regards the hypnotic sleep as a dangerous remedy, the employment
of which should be limited to trained practitioners. The subjection
of the hypnotic subject to the will of the hypnotiser is _a priori_
an immoral relation to obtain between man and man unless justified by
superior medical necessities, but, quite apart from _a priori_ ethics,
indiscriminate hypnotisation is to be discouraged as a direct cause of
nervous degeneration. The book closes as it began With a dignified but
severe reprobation of those thinkers who in the interests of occultism
magnify the psychological significance of hypnotism and disseminate
superstition in the name of science.
PAUL SHOREY.
DER HYPNOTISMUS IN GEMEINFASSLICHER DARSTELLUNG. By _Dr. Hans
Schmidkunz_. Stuttgart: A. Zimmer (E. Mohrmann). 1892.
This book (266 pp.) is a popular compendium of hypnotism. The author,
beginning (I) with the hypnosis of common life, goes over the whole field
as follows: (II) the phenomena of hypnosis, (III) its application, (IV)
the “beyond” of hypnotism, (V) the conceptions of hypnotism, and (VI) its
dangers. The seventh and last chapter is a short history of the subject.
Dr. Schmidkunz, Docent of philosophy at the University of Munich, is one
of the few who believe that there is a “beyond” in hypnotism. He says
on p. 65: “A hypnotised person was led through a room while sleeping.
The experimenter made a few passes over his head and then violently
whirled his arm around in a vertical direction before his subject. When
the subject approached the marked place, he recoiled from it crying with
pain.” Our author asks, “what is this magnetic wall to be regarded as? As
a charm, as an obstacle of occult power, from which the body recoils as
from a wall of stone? If not, was it the subject’s soul that recoiled?
Was it the hypnotised person’s belief which created the wall?” etc.
The two interpretations, the one attributing the effect to a magnetic
power, the other to suggestion are typical. The former is bolder: he goes
“beyond” hypnotism.
Our author is one of those who go beyond hypnotism, and is not satisfied
with the theory that suggestion explains all. We may add that he regards
telepathy as a sufficiently established fact. Telepathy finds little
support among scientists in Germany, and Dr. Schmidkunz complains, in
a circular letter to “Professor Wundt’s and other Savants’ Critical
Saltomortales” of the cool and depreciative treatment which his book
_Psychologie der Suggestion_ received at the hands of men of science.
κρς.
L’HYPNOTISME DEVANT LES CHAMBRES LEGISLATIVES BELGES. Par _J. Delbœuf_.
Paris: Félix Alcan. Pp. 80.
In a recent number of _The Monist_ Prof. J. Delbœuf gave the reasons
which have induced him to come to the conclusion that “persons in an
hypnotic condition preserve at least a sufficient portion of their
intelligence, their reason, together with freedom of action, to prevent
them from committing deeds that neither their conscience nor their habits
approve of.” This opinion is entertained by many other hypnotists, but
the more general opinion is that “suggestion” may be made use of for
criminal purposes: Such is the case especially in France and in Belgium;
and acting on that supposition the medical faculty of the latter country
promoted in the legislative Chamber a law interdicting public hypnotic
séances, and reserving the practice of hypnotism as a therapeutic measure
exclusively to medical men, as well as the treatment of insane persons
and those under twenty-one years of age. Professor Delbœuf, who is not a
medical man, naturally objects when those who but a few years ago would
have classed him and his fellow hypnotists as charlatans, seek without
reason to reserve for themselves the promising field of labor opened up
by the researches of others. He maintains that men are born hypnotisers
as they are born artists, and therefore to exclude all but medical men
from the application of the hypnotic power will often prevent its use
for curative purposes. Moreover it is a serious question for those who
possess this natural gift. They might perform the most praiseworthy
actions and yet be subjected to a legal penalty. Professor Delbœuf states
that by hypnotism he cured a youth eighteen years of age of a mania for
stealing (_la manie du vol_), and thus saved him from unmerited dishonor.
On another occasion he had charge of a young wife who was possessed with
the idea of murdering her children, and after all other means had failed
he was able to remove the idea by suggestion extending over a period of
eight days. He properly asks whether the performance of such actions
ought to be treated as criminal.
The real question to be considered, however, is whether the practice
of hypnotism is likely to be made use of for criminal purposes if it
is permitted to every one. We much doubt whether any actual case of
such an abuse has been legally established, or whether suggestion
could lead to the perpetration of a criminal act unless there was a
predisposition in that direction. Professor Delbœuf makes use, however,
of an apparent paradox which would seem to render abortive any such law
of prevention as that above referred to. It is that there is in reality
no such thing as hypnotism. M. Bernheim writes in a letter given in the
present work, “for my part, in the thousands of hypnotisations I have
practised, I have never seen the least inconvenience result. Undoubtedly
very impressionable subjects can, under the emotional influence of
auto-suggestion, present certain nervous troubles; but these a prudent
operator can always calm by suggestion.” Professor Delbœuf relates
several cases of this kind within his own experience, which shows that
severe nervous pain can be removed by simple assertion that it does not
exist. He affirms that “the so-called hypnotic sleep is only a sign
of suggestibility, and that it is not at all necessary to suggestive
therapeutics.”
We may conclude this notice of a very interesting contribution to the
discussion as to the true nature and operation of hypnotism, by quoting
the conclusions arrived at by the author as to the proper mode of
regulating its practice. He suggests that representations of hypnotism
should be permitted subject to the measures which regulate public
spectacles; that any one should be allowed to become a hypnotiser, as he
can become a shampooer or a truss-maker; that the hypnotist who gives
remedies should be punishable, since he exercises the art of curing
without a diploma; that he should not be allowed to hypnotise minors
without the consent of the family; and that he should be forbidden to
treat a sick person without the written authorisation of a medical
man and under his direction. This rule Professor Delbœuf, although he
disapproves of the law which forbids the practice of medicine to those
who have not a diploma, has always acted on. He thinks that if medical
men then studied hypnotism and practised it themselves, hypnotisers who
had no diplomas would soon have nothing to do. This spirited defence
by Professor Delbœuf of his views will be widely read. Not the least
interesting portion of it is the criticism, with which it ends, of “the
affair of the brothers Vandevoir,” where we read that he is designated by
his opponent M. Masoin “_doux et bon vieillard_” and “_l’homme cheveu_”!
Ω.
UEBER DEN HAUTSINN. By _Dr. phil. et med. Max Dessoir_, Privatdocenten
an der Universität zu Berlin. Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und
Physiologie. Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892.
This pamphlet, a reprint from the _Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie_
of 1892, is an elaborate and careful investigation into the _modus
operandi_ of skin sensations. The first part is a discussion of the
theory of sensation in general containing (1) an analysis of the ideas
_Gefühl_, _Empfindung_, and _Wahrnehmung_, (2) a critique of Johannes
Müller’s doctrine of specific energies, (3) an exposition of the
objectification of sensations. Feeling (_Empfindung_), according to
the author, is, no magnitude, its main feature is intensity, quality
becomes important only in sensation (_Wahrnehmung_). For the psychology
of skin-sensations, we have to note the great influence of accompanying
feelings (_Mitempfindungen_). The second part is devoted to the author’s
investigations of the sense of temperature. Dr. Dessoir rejects Blix’s
point theory; he regards the idea of two different end-apparatuses for
warm and cold sensations as an unfounded assumption, and claims that the
temperature sense is one mode of sensation possessing two qualities. The
intensity of temperature sensations depends not only upon the _vis viva_
of the heat in the stimulus; but also upon five other factors (1) the
size of the surface affected, (2) the duration of the affect, (3) the
thickness of the epidermis, (4) its conductibility, and (5), last not
least, its temperature.
κρς.
RECHERCHES D’OPTIQUE PHYSIOLOGIQUE ET PHYSIQUE. By _Clémence Royer_.
Brussels Imprimerie Veuve Monnom. 1892.
The first part of this brochure consists chiefly of an examination of
the theories of M. M. Hirth and Chauveau on chromatic sensation. The
talented authoress disagrees with the view entertained by M. Chauveau,
that the sensations of contrast which are fused cerebrally, so as to
give, when viewed with both eyes, a white image, are subjective in an
intellectual sense. The result is purely physico-physiological, as it is
even assuming the intervention of M. Hirth’s _interior eye_. Mad. Royer
regards the eyes organised so as to effect a fusion of the colors and
forms depicted on the two retinas, and she accepts the conclusion of M.
Hirth, that they lessen the real polychromism of objects, the inability
to perceive the infra-red and the ultra-violet rays concealing from us a
considerable part “of the palette of nature and of its chromatic scale.”
The authoress refers with approval to the theory of M. Charpentier that
the complementary colors correspond to inverse undulatory phases, which
are destroyed by interference in the field of vision.
The second part of Mad. Royer’s pamphlet is devoted to a consideration of
the photography of colors, and the theory of light. It points out that
the photography of colors, which has been effected to some extent by M.
Lippmann, must be a physical and not a chemical process. It is the result
of the periodic compressions of the sensitised silver-surface, due to
the shocks it receives from the light undulations of the ether, which
so modify the surfaces of the silver atoms that they reflect colored
rays identical with those received from the object photographed. With
reference to the propagation of light, the authoress affirms that the
atoms of matter, as well as those of the ether, which differs from matter
only in being imponderable and without inertia, are centres of emanation
of a continuous and impenetrable fluid, which is however indefinitely
expansible or compressible. The size and form of atoms will thus depend
on the compressions they receive, and they will be able to accommodate
themselves to the spaces to which they are confined by the resistance
of the atomic groups by which they are surrounded. But the world may be
regarded as consisting of three sorts of atoms: (1) those of the ether
which possess their primordial unity of expansive force and are endowed
with perfect elasticity; (2) those of ponderable matter, which have lost
a portion of their expansive force and elasticity; (3) those which are
called vitaliferous, because they have regained their expansive force,
and are thus capable of autonomous movements necessary to resist the
compressions of the ether and to oppose the inertia of matter. They thus
answer to the cell-souls of Haeckel.
Ω.
DIE BEWEGUNG DER LEBENDIGEN SUBSTANZ. Eine vergleichend-physiologische
Untersuchung der Contractionserscheinungen. By _Max Verworn_, Dr. med.,
Privatdocent der Physiologie an der Universität Jena. Mit 19 Abbildungen.
Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1892.
The mechanism of muscle contraction and expansion and the motions of
amœboid substance have been recognised as one and the same problem; and
several naturalists, foremost among them Hofmeister, Engelmann, and
Edmund Montgomery have investigated it, fully aware of the enormous
importance of the subject. The present pamphlet is small, it contains
only 103 pages, but it contains the statement of the problem, a
description of the author’s experiments, and his solution so lucidly that
one cannot read it without great satisfaction. Both processes, expansion
as well as contraction, are, according to Verworn, spontaneous motions,
and both are to be explained by chemotropy. Expansion, i. e., in amœba
the protrusion of pseudopodia, is due to the plasma’s hunger for the
oxygen, which is contained in the surrounding medium. Every irritation
(electric shocks, concussions, injuries etc.) causes a chemical
decomposition of the oxygenised plasma; it loses carbon, hydrogen,
oxygen, and nitrogen, (as we know from the waste products, carbonic
acid, creatine, lactic acid,) and these substances are exactly those
which are most prominent in building up living substance. Irritations
without exception cause the plasma to return to the nucleus. The chemical
change in the plasma makes it hungry for the nuclear substances. The
vital process, accordingly, is an interaction between the nucleus, the
plasma, and the medium, so that in the constant exchange of materials the
old structure is preserved; and the fundamental features of the vital
process are first the plasma’s chemotropy for oxygen, causing centrifugal
motions, and then its chemotropy for nuclear substance, causing
centripetal motions. The plasma saturated with nuclear substances, shows
a chemotropy for the oxygen of the medium; it moves in a centrifugal
direction, and the oxygenised plasma has become so unstable that it
breaks down on the slightest provocation. The decomposed plasma exhibits
a chemotropy for nuclear substance and thus returns in contripetal
motions to the centre. Without entering into details we may mention that
this accounts also for the fact that dying protoplasm always assumes a
globular shape, until it crumbles to pieces. The _rigor mortis_ is the
last vital action of living substance. The plasma seeks once more the
nuclear substance, but not finding sufficient material for being built up
again into a substance endowed with a chemotropy for oxygen remains rigid
until it decays.
The author finds his theory to hold good for the actions of the striated
and nonstriated muscles, and also of ciliated tissues. Having shown
that the vital functions are due to the same forces that are observable
in the retort of the chemist, he adds: “The savage accordingly was not
quite wrong when he drew no distinct line, considering everything moving
as alive. Life is motion. That old poetical view of all nature being
animated with life throughout was in possession of a germ of truth,
and our proud civilisation has actually made a retrogressive step in
abandoning this view.”
κρς.
GRABER’S LEITFADEN DER ZOOLOGIE FÜR DIE OBEREN CLASSEN DER MITTELSCHULEN.
Vienna and Prague: F. Tempsky. 1892. Price 1 fl. 60 kr.
We had occasion in a recent number of _The Monist_ to review an
excellent text-book of physics published by this same house. The present
work on zoology is in its second edition, and is intended, like the
above-mentioned work of Professor Mach’s, for high-school instruction.
Professor Graber, its author, died before the completion of the second
edition, and the work was finished by J. Mik.
Graber’s Zoology is unique in its class; it covers, within the
restricted limits of two hundred and sixty-one pages, the whole field
of elementary biology, human physiology, and zoology, as it is usually
exploited in such books, and thus combines in a single volume what
is usually contained in two or three. The human organism (Part 1) is
made the starting-point of study in the work, and the explication of
the physiological and mechanical functions of animals are thus all
grouped about this central figure. In a concise form (55 pages) this
book contains about all of human anatomy and physiology that is usually
learned in high-schools. Part 1 also contains, at the end of the
discussions, brief dietetic suggestions. “Systematic Zoology” is taken
up in the Second Part. This part is well analysed and arranged. The cuts
are also excellent. Attached to the book is a “Picture-Atlas.” This atlas
contains a number of colored plates, which depict various physiological
and anatomical organs, and also four beautiful representations of scenes
from the Naples Aquarium. Although this book will not be used by English
school-students, it may be recommended to students of scientific German
who wish a good introduction into the technical vocabulary of German
biology and zoology, which to the foreigner is very difficult.
μκρκ.
L’ANTHROPOLOGIE DU BENGALE. By _Paul Topinard_. Extracted from
_L’Anthropologie_ for May-June, 1892. Paris: G. Masson.
The present contribution to the science of Anthropology by the Editor
of _L’Anthropologie_, is based on the anthropometric inquiries of Mr.
H. H. Risley made under instructions from the government of Bengal. The
conclusions deduced by Dr. Topinard from the large mass of material
brought together by Mr. Risley, and which relates to members of all
the castes to be met with in Bengal, are of great interest. He finds
that the populations are much mixed, but that they may be divided into
three types, one tall and dolichocephalic, that of the Aryans; another
short and brachycephalic, derived from northern Asiatics; and the third
short and dolichocephalic, or that of the native blacks. India is a
world by itself, and most of its inhabitants belong to races of which
there is no specimen in Europe. Dr. Topinard naturally attaches more
importance to physical than to ethnographical characters as evidence of
anthropological descent, and he is justified by Mr. Risley’s researches,
of which he speaks very highly; although he thinks they would have been
more fruitful if the anthropometrical instructions prepared by the French
Anthropologist had been more strictly adhered to. That they were not so
is the more surprising as Mr. Risley’s work is dedicated to Dr. Topinard
himself.
Ω.
UEBER SITTLICHE DISPOSITIONEN. By _Dr. Anton Oelzelt-Newin_, Privatdocent
an der Universität in Bern. Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky. 1892. Price Mk. 2
70 Pf.
The main idea of this book is to prove that there are certain innate
dispositions forming the elements of morality. The elements of morality
are according to Dr. Oelzelt-Newin the attitudes of fear, anger, love,
sympathy, shame, and pride. Conscience is a complex which has developed
from these six dispositions. Having stated sufficient evidences for the
heredity of moral dispositions and illustrated the parallel phenomena of
bodily states in their reference to moral alienation, the author treats
the six elements of morality in single chapters, explaining their causes
and the influence of conditions under which they develop either into
virtues or crimes. The essay (92 pp.) is a contribution to that ethical
determinism which regards evil as the necessary result of given factors.
“Religious people should say: Not Only the stone which falls from the
roof and kills a just man, but also the will of a criminal and the
punishment of the judge are inscrutable ordinances of God. That alone is
a true theodicy.” As an optimist the author trusts that the evil of the
world will be conquered with legal means and enjoins priests to revise
in this sense their creed, jurists their law, and all men their love of
mankind.
κρς.
THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE. And the Wonders of the World We live in. By Sir
_John Lubbock_. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1892. 429 pages. Price $1.50.
NATUR UND KUNST. Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kunst. By _Carus
Sterne_. Berlin: Verein für deutsche Literatur. 1892.
The first of these two books is a delightful compilation by Sir John
Lubbock. It is another addition to that series of popular works which
this well-known naturalist is now giving to English-speaking peoples. It
makes no pretension of being scientific: it simply takes the world which
science has revealed and shows us its wonders and its beauties. Yet it
insinuates many a scientific fact and inculcates many a moral lesson.
No one will regret the few hours that can be spent in its perusal, and
the stimulus derived from it will heighten the pleasure which every
religiously-minded heart takes in the contemplation of natural grandeur
and truth. In the main, it is intended for unscientific readers. It
requires hardly any preparatory knowledge to be understood; yet it
sometimes touches on a truth that even great thinkers overlook. Thus, _à
propos_ of the capacity for intact divisibility which some life-forms
possess, Sir John remarks that these considerations introduce “much
difficulty into our conception of the idea of an Individual.” “In fact,”
he says, “the realisation of the idea of an individual gradually becomes
more and more difficult, and the continuity of existence, even among
the highest animals, gradually forces itself upon us. I believe that
as we become more rational, as we realise more fully the conditions of
existence, this consideration is likely to have important moral results.”
The work is divided into the following chapters: “Animal Life,” “Plant
Life;” “Woods and Fields,” “Mountains,” “Water,” “Rivers and Lakes,” “The
Sea,” “The Starry Heavens.”
The second of the two books that head this review is by Carus Sterne.
Few men possess the wide technical knowledge and the same command of the
historical literature of his subject, that this investigator and writer
possesses. Carus Sterne unites with a rigorous scientific training the
rare qualities of philosophical insight and sound erudition. He possesses
the scientific facts on which to base valid judgments, and he deduces
from these facts the inferences that affect the most important problems
of life—its culture and morality. We have had occasion before, to refer
to these phases of Carus Sterne’s activity as an author.
In the present work the author of _Werden und Vergehen_ discusses the
relations which obtain between nature and art. Here is not the place to
give even a synopsis of the great wealth of material which this book of
395 pages contains; we are allowed simply to hint at its purport and
methods. Carus Sterne defines the artistic impulse in man to be a longing
of the mind to rise above the ordinary routine of physical existence.
It is a lifting ourselves out of our every-day life. This cannot be
accomplished by the simple reproduction of the things of nature; such
reproductions have not in themselves an elevating effect. Art is not
imitative, art is creative. It uses color, form, space, merely as a means
to give “local habitation” to an idea. The imitation of actually existing
things is the beginning of art; but it is its lowest stage. Nature must
be our guide, our norm, not our model. Here the middle road is taken
between the old and the new idea of art. That was ultra-idealistic,
this is ultra-realistic. The author then proceeds to discuss the notion
of beauty in art and nature (Part I) and finally takes up generally
(Part II) the subject of the artistic contemplation and reproduction of
the world. All these topics, with their many subdivisions, are treated
in Carus Sterne’s best and most fascinating style. The work is well
illustrated, and all interested in the natural history of art will find
in it a storehouse of valuable material.
μκρκ.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] Cf. Ward, _Encyclopædia Britannica_, Vol. XX, p. 44.
PERIODICALS.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
CONTENTS: Vol. IV. No. 3.
UEBER DIE SOGENANNTE CONSCIENCE MUSCULAIRE (DUCHENNE). By _A.
Pick_.
EINE NEUE THEORIE DER LICHTEMPFINDUNGEN. By _Christine
Ladd-Franklin_.
LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin (a contributor to this number of _The
Monist_) is one of those few women who have actually won a well deserved
reputation as a thinker and scientific worker. She is an American by
birth and the wife of an American savant. It is pleasant to find her
name in a German periodical among whose editorial writers are men so
prominent as Ebbinghaus, König, Exner, Helmholtz, Hering, Kries, Lipps,
G. E. Müller, Pelman, Preyer, and Stumpf. Mrs. Ladd criticises Helmholtz
and Hering, and thinks that the theories of Donders (in Gräfe’s “Archiv,”
1884) and Göller (in Du Bois-Reymond’s “Archiv,” 1888) have not received
sufficient attention. In accord with their propositions, she sets forth
an exceedingly simple hypothesis which attempts an explanation of the
three main colors by atomic motions in the three different dimensions of
space.
PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE.
CONTENTS: Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 9 and 10.
UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG.
Psychologische Studie. (Concluded.) By _M. Offner_.
DER BEGRIFF DER VERSCHMELZUNG UND DAMIT ZUSAMMENHÄNGENDES IN
STUMPF’S “TONPSYCHOLOGIE,” BAND II. By _Th. Lipps_.
WERKE ZUR PHILOSOPHIE DER GESCHICHTE UND DES SOCIALEN LEBENS
(Third Article: _J. S. Mackenzie_, An Introduction to Social
Philosophy; _J. H. Ferguson_, The Philosophy of Civilisation;
_W. A. Macdonald_, Humanitism). By _F. Tönnies_.
CONTENTS: Vol. XXIX. No. 1 and 2.
DIE MODERNE ENERGETIK IN IHRER BEDEUTUNG FÜR DIE
ERKENNTNISSKRITIK. By _K. Lasswitz_.
DIE SITTLICHE FRAGE EINE SOCIALE FRAGE (I). By _F. Staudinger_.
RELIGIONSPHILOSOPHISCHE THESEN. By _E. von Hartmann_.
LITTERATURBERICHT. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 101. No. 1.
CONTENTS:
PSYCHOLOGISCHE APHORISMEN. By _Otto Liebmann_.
UNTERHALB UND OBERHALB VON GUT UND BÖSE. By _Eduard von
Hartmann_.
JAHRESBERICHT ÜBER ERSCHEINUNGEN DER ANGLO-AMERIKANISCHEN
LITTERATUR AUS DER ZEIT VON 1890-1891. By _Friedrich Jodl_.
ZUR BEGRÜSSUNG DES ZWEITEN HUNDERTS DER BÄNDE DIESER
ZEITSCHRIFT. By _Prof. Dr. Rud. Seydel_.
RECENSIONEN. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. October, 1892. Vol. V. No. 1.
CONTENTS:
DISTURBANCE OF THE ATTENTION DURING SIMPLE MENTAL PROCESSES. By
_Edgar James Swift_.
PSEUDO-CHROMESTHESIA, OR THE ASSOCIATION OF COLORS WITH WORDS,
LETTERS, AND SOUNDS. By _William O. Krohn_, Ph. D.
REPORT ON AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS. (Part
II.) By _Benjamin Ives Gilman_.
The present investigation made by Mr. Edgar James Swift shows that
a disturbance of the attention through sight is more effective in
lengthening the reaction time than when the disturbance comes through the
sense of hearing; but whenever the reaction follows a slight sensation,
the time of choice is less affected by disturbances of the attention
than if the excitation is a sound. Dr. William O. Krohn concludes, after
carefully studying several hundred cases of pseudo-chromesthesia, that a
greater per cent. of them arise from some sort of cerebral work due to
the close relation of the cortical centres. Mr. Gilman concludes from
experiments made with various persons, that musical expressiveness has
been overestimated, and that on the emotional theory of its nature the
importance of the art has also been overestimated. (Worcester: J. H.
Orpha.)
MIND. New Series. No. 4. October, 1892.
CONTENTS:
THE FIELD OF ÆSTHETICS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED, II. By
_Henry Rutgers Marshall_.
LOTZE’S ANTITHESIS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND THINGS, II. By _A.
Eastwood_.
THE STUDY OF CRIME. By _Rev. W. D. Morrison_.
ON THE PROPERTIES OF A ONE-DIMENSIONAL MANIFOLD. By _Benj. Ives
Gilman_.
In his present article Mr. H. R. Marshall finds a basis for the
differentiation of Æsthetics from Hedonics, in “pleasure permanency
in revival” as belonging particularly to the former. Mr. Eastwood
criticises Lotze’s antithesis between thoughts and things which is
closely connected with his erroneous opinion that time is a property of
things in themselves. The study of crime by Mr. W. D. Morrison discusses
crime under the three heads of the movement of crime, its causes, and
its repression, of which the last deals with the theory, the methods,
and the efficacy of punishment. In his discussion of the properties of a
one-dimensional manifold, examples of which are time, the straight line,
quantity, intensity, number, and pitch, Mr. B. I. Gilman, who was a pupil
of Mr. C. S. Peirce, seeks to give a formulation of one-dimensionality in
which the general notion of relation and converse relation is substituted
for that of greater and less difference. This number of _Mind_ contains a
voluminous note on the blind deaf-mute child, Helen Keller, by Prof G. C.
Robertson, the late editor, whose death is announced in the same number.
(London: Williams & Norgate.)
Ω.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. October, 1892. Vol. III. No. 1.
CONTENTS:
THE NATIONAL TRAITS OF THE GERMANS AS SEEN IN THEIR RELIGION.
By _Prof. Otto Pfleiderer_, D. D., University of Berlin.
PHILANTHROPY AND MORALITY. By _Father Huntington_.
INTERNATIONAL QUARRELS AND THEIR SETTLEMENT. By _Leonard H.
West_, LL. D., London University.
1792.—YEAR 1. By _David G. Ritchie_, Jesus College. Oxford.
UTILITARIANISM. By _A. L. Hodder_.
BOOK REVIEWS.
(Philadelphia: _International Journal of Ethics_, 118 S.
Twelfth Street.)
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 5.
PSYCHOGENESIS. By _President David J. Hill_.
THE PROBLEM OF EPISTEMOLOGY. By _Professor Andrew Seth_.
THE ORIGIN OF PLEASURE AND PAIN, (II.) By _Dr. Herbert Nichols_.
DISCUSSIONS: REALITY AND “IDEALISM.” By _F. C. S. Schiller_.
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 6.
GREEN’S THEORY OF THE MORAL MOTIVE. By _Prof. John Dewey_.
THOUGHT BEFORE LANGUAGE. By _Prof. William James_.
PLEASURE-PAIN, AND SENSATION. By _Henry Rutgers Marshall_.
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
(Boston. New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)
THE NEW WORLD. December, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.
CONTENTS:
THE BRAHMO SOMAJ. By _Protap Chunder Mozoomdar_.
THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY. By _William M. Salter_.
PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY. By _Egbert C. Smyth_.
MICHAEL SERVETUS. By _Joseph Henry Allen_.
THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. By _G.
Santayana_.
THE CHURCH IN GERMANY AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION. By _John Graham
Brooks_.
A WORLD OUTSIDE OF SCIENCE. By _Thomas Wentworth Higginson_.
THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS. By _Albert Réville_.
THE MONISTIC THEORY OF THE SOUL. By _James T. Bixby_.
The last article is a criticism to the point, discriminating and fair.
The author takes special notice of Dr. Carus’s position, whose views are
recapitulated with accuracy, but not accepted as convincing. (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.)
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
CONTENTS: September, 1892. No. 201.
LA PERSONNALITÉ DANS LES RÊVES. By _J.-.M. Guardia_.
HISTOIRE ET PHILOSOPHIE RELIGIEUSES. By _M. Vernes_.
SUR LA TERMINOLOGIE PHILOSOPHIQUE. By _Durand (de Gros)_.
COMPTES RENDUS ET NOTICES BIBLIOGRAPHIQUES.
CONTENTS: October, 1892. No. 202.
DU TROUBLE DES FACULTÉS MUSICALES DANS L’APHASIE. By _Dr.
Brazier_.
LE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. (Concluded.) By _A. Fouillée_.
LE MOUVEMENT PÉDAGOGIQUE. By _E. Blum_.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
REVUES DES PÉRIODIQUES ÉTRANGERS.
CONTENTS: November, 1892. No. 203.
LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES. By _L. Marillier_.
DE L’UNITÉ DE LA SCIENCE: LES GRANDES SYNTHÈSES DU SAVOIR. By
_E. de Roberty_.
SUR LES DIVERSES FORMES DU CARACTÈRE. By _Th. Ribot_.
VARIÉTÉS.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
REVUE DES PÉRIODIQUES ÉTRANGERS. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH. Vol. V. No. 4.
CONTENTS:
DIE NEUESTE PHASE DES SCHOPENHAUERIANISMUS. (Concluded.)
_Bäumker._
DIE SPECULATIVEN GRUNDLAGEN DER OPTISCHEN WELLENTHEORIE.
(Concluded.) _S. J. Linsmeier._
RELIGION UND ENTWICKELUNGSTHEORIE. (Concluded.) _Schanz._
DER SUBSTANZBEGRIFF BEI CARTESIUS IM ZUSAMMENHANG MIT DER
SCHOLASTISCHEN UND NEUEREN PHILOSOPHIE. (Continued.) _S. J.
(C.) Ludewig._
RECENSIONEN UND REFERATE. (Fulda: Fuldaer Actien-Druckerei.)
VOL. III. APRIL, 1893. NO. 3.
THE MONIST.
RELIGION AND MODERN SCIENCE.
I.
The ancient conflict between religion and science is now, at the close
of the nineteenth century, more animated than ever before. This conflict
has formed the intellectual pivot of civilisation ever since Christianity
first afforded the western peoples of Europe the inconsistent spectacle
of a religion which made abundant use in its dogmatic constructions
of the theories of contemporary science, and yet assumed a hostile
attitude towards the fundamental principle of all science, the spirit
of research and unbiassed judgment generally. Rightly has one of the
acutest modern critics of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach,[59] maintained,
that the Christian sophistic philosophy is the necessary outcome of this
inconsistency, which proclaims as absolute truth a definite, historical
revelation, such as is found in the Bible, and simply assigns to the
reason the subordinate and improper office of harmonising and defending
what is there laid down.
There are, it is true, a great number of people, who are not disposed to
see the bitterness of the conflict now raging. It has become customary
for us to look upon the nineteenth century as an age of the comprehension
of religion, and to distinguish it from the eighteenth century, which
is regarded as a period of mere religious criticism. We boast of
having rediscovered religion, and of having secured to it a permanent
province in the dominion of the mind. But the facts of our public life
stand in curious contradiction to these assertions. In all civilised
nations, in literature, in parliamentary procedures, in all questions
that relate to religious and moral life or to education, the attentive
observer will find that a profound chasm divides humanity. Every one
feels the desirableness of bridging over this chasm, that the members of
society may be united in common labor; but again and again we are made
to experience how irreconcilable the respective claims of the opposed
parties are. He who has studied the bulls and encyclical letters of the
last two popes, Pius IX. and Leo XIII., and the commentaries on these
utterances in the _Civiltà Cattolica_, the official organ of the curia;
he who is acquainted with the polemical diatribes of the French Catholics
against the positivists and freethinkers, and against the school and
church legislation of the third republic; he who has any knowledge of
that mass of controversial literature, which the proclamation of the
doctrine of papal infallibility in the year 1870 evoked; he who has
followed the eventful and varied history of the so-called “Culturkampf”
in the German Empire, from the era of the minister Falk, down to the
recent bill for a new School-law in Prussia, defeated amidst the greatest
excitement in all parts of Germany; he who is the least bit at home in
the literary feuds which are being fought out in the domain of historical
theology concerning the validity and credibility of the original sources
of Christianity; he, finally, who will place the writings of Cardinal
Newman or of the Jesuits Pesch and Cathrein by the side of those of
Huxley and Spencer, by the side of those of Du Bois-Reymond, Strauss,
and Dühring: he, I say, who has gone through with a critical spirit all
that I have cited in the preceding sentences, will surely not be apt
to contradict this assertion of mine that civilised humanity to-day is
separated into two groups which no longer understand each other, which do
not speak the same language, and which live in totally different worlds
of thought and sentiment—at least so far as this one critical point is
concerned of man’s relation to religion.
“_Wie Ja und Nein sind sie,_
_Wie Sturm und Regenbogen._”
Have we, then, learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the days of
rationalism? The tremendous labors which our own century has devoted
to the investigation of religion in all its forms, to the unfolding of
its connection with racial mind and sentiment, and of its relation to
civilisation generally, and finally to the elucidation of the origin and
development of the great forms of religion: has all this had no other
result than that we, after a century of the most laborious research,
again find ourselves in the same attitude of unintelligent hostility
towards religion and Christianity in which the eighteenth century
revelled, and out of which we have only fought our way by the united
efforts of a host of profoundly enlightened minds?
This argument has been advanced in opposition to the leaders of the
rationalistic movement and to the work of the eighteenth century in
varying forms, by the party which seeks to ally the science of the
present and the religion of the past. It is seriously said and enjoined
that only they who are far behind the science of the times and hold aloof
from the true spirit of the age can still assume the repugnant attitude
toward religion which was characteristic of the mind of the eighteenth
century.
It is high time to point out the crude confusion of ideas which lies at
the basis of this argument. It confounds the historical understanding
of a thing with the philosophical approval of it. But these are two
totally distinct things. We understand a phenomenon historically, when
we are clear in our minds concerning the external conditions and habits
of thought of humanity from which it sprung; when its main-springs of
action and its purposes, as well as the effects which have proceeded
from it, are distinctly traceable. The more closely our mental pictures
of these things correspond to the facts as they actually were at the
origin, and the more they conduct us from the mere surface of phenomena
into the secrets of their psychological and sociological connection, and
teach us to understand these things as products of mind and of society,
the higher will our historical knowledge of them be rated. In this sense
the knowledge which the eighteenth century had of religious phenomena
was undoubtedly very imperfect. True, even here great advances beyond
the age which preceded, are noticeable. People had ceased to regard
the origin of the Jewish and Christian religion as a supernatural event
and as the immediate work of God; all religions were placed upon the
same footing, as species of the same kind; and efforts were made to
discover their common characteristics and the law of their origin. But
the people of that period were not yet able to arrive at the true essence
of religious ideas and sentiments. They were hardly in a position to
describe them properly, let alone to explain them. Of the hypotheses
devised to throw some light into the darkness that hung over the
beginnings of religions, not one proved itself competent to supply what
was hoped for. All that they could derive from these fictions was that
notable caricature of religion which their age had directly before its
eyes, and to free themselves from which they strained every nerve. With
the keen vision of hate they uncovered all the infirmities of religion,
all the terrors and iniquities which have followed in its train, all
the injurious effects to civilisation which have proceeded from it.
They created a negative picture of religion, which has lost nothing of
its partial historical truth by the fact that many of its features are
farther withdrawn from our immediate experience than they were from that
of the times in question.
But it was the nineteenth century that first worked out the true
psychology of religious man, and again came into possession of that
spirit of congeniality which is absolutely necessary to our entering into
the mental life of far-distant times. To the men of the rationalistic
age the history of religion was simply the history of the obscuration
of the pure, natural religion, which was supposed to be constituted of
a rational idea of God and a system of humane ethics, and which was
indistinctly conceived at times as the logical, and at times as the
historical, antecedent of the concrete religions. The latter appeared as
the corruption of the natural and simple order of things—a corruption
produced by superstition, by the wily exploitation of human credulity and
human needs, by the scheming machinations of the founders of religions
and of priests, by human delight in the marvellous, by the falsification
of the natural moral sentiments, and by the stirring into life of
fanatical passions. We know to-day that this so-called natural religion
is nothing more than a product of late abstraction and reflection; that
the motives and selfish interests above cited have been abundantly
at work in religious history, but are nevertheless unable to explain
the internal motive force and tremendous vitality of these spiritual
products. We know to-day that religions spring with the same necessity
and in conformity with similar laws from the depths of the human mind
as language and art, and that they form an integral constituent part of
the structure of civilisation and an important weapon of humanity in
the struggle for existence. In symbolical form they embody the highest
treasures and highest ideals of national existence; in its gods humanity
beholds the imaginative perfection and explanation of its view of the
world; and in its religious practices, in its worship, in prayer, it
strives to realise the wishes and aspirations which seem to lie beyond
the reach of its powers.
Many a riddle still remains to be solved, as is natural in a domain
that extends into the most hidden recesses of the human soul, and whose
obscurity is augmented by the fact that in the majority of cases the
most important and significant elements must be collected with infinite
pains from the rubbish of fantastic traditions. But upon the whole the
active labors of a century which calls itself with pride “the historical
century,” have borne their fruits. With respect to the intrinsic
character and the significance of religion for civilisation, there is now
every reason why a unity of opinion should prevail among all who take
their stand on the common ground of modern scientific research, whether
they be friends or opponents of religion.
But how does a knowledge of what religion has been in the past affect
our estimate of it in the present? Do we approve of an institution or
phenomenon, because we understand how it was once possible, nay, must
have existed, and what it signified? We understand to-day the Roman
law, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the scholastic philosophy, feudalism, and
absolute monarchy, thoroughly; we know the conditions which gave rise
to them, the necessity of their appearance, and the measure of their
performances; but does it occur to us, for these reasons, to perpetuate
and make them immortal because they had once an historical significance?
What an institution in its essence is, what in past times it has
accomplished, is an inquiry that must be conducted with quite different
means from that whether it is applicable to a definite present set of
relations and necessities. The historian can render this task more easy
by teaching us to understand the general laws and necessities of national
life from the analogies of the past; but as a prophet he will always
be one that looks backwards, and it is ever to be feared that he, too,
will see the present in the light of the past. For to him alone does the
past lift its obscuring veil, who, forgetful of self and unmindful of
sacrifices, can listen to the voices of remote times and peoples, who
with a mind of Protean cast has the power to transform his intellectual
being into that to which, solely by description, he seeks to give new
life and form. The past becomes a part of him; he loves it, he admires
it. And from the reanimation of the past in historical pictures to the
attempt of a renewal of it in life is but a single step.
Innumerable are those who have succumbed to this temptation. The entire
religious tendency of the nineteenth century exhibits this process on a
grand scale. This tendency is based on profound antiquarian studies of
the past—on that newly awakened historical interest, which aims not only
to criticise but to understand religion and ecclesiastical institutions.
Much that in the previous century seemed dead or destined to perish,
had been restored to life by it. The whole historical structure of the
Christian religion, which at the close of the age of rationalism only
existed, it would seem, as an artificially preserved ruin, has received,
through the instrumentality of these methods of thought, new supports,
and has again been made habitable for the human mind. Unmindful of the
complaints of churchmen, the future historian of civilisation will have
to characterise the second half of the nineteenth century as a period
of religious renaissance. And it is no accident, but a symptom of deep
import, that this century has completed almost all the great cathedrals
which were left unfinished and in partial ruins by the middle ages,
and placed them in their colossal grandeur before the world as lasting
monuments of its habits and tendencies of thought.
Yet the spirit of science has also not been inactive. Political progress
has freed it from the despotic police supervision which even in the
eighteenth century heavily oppressed it. In principle at least, freedom
of thought and inquiry are to-day acknowledged by all governments, with
the single exception of the Roman curia, although in practice there are
by no means few efforts made, by influencing its representatives, to have
that proclaimed which it is desired should be proclaimed. Infinitely
great has the number of workers grown, the instruments of inquiry, the
confidence of the human mind in itself, and our power generally. And if
formerly people could conceive of no other science than such as stood in
the service of the church, to-day science claims it most emphatically
and confidently as its privilege and duty to search and test the logical
truth of the most sacred traditions, and thus to base the thought of
future generations, not on the naïve faith of their fathers, but on the
demonstrable truths of actual present knowledge.
II.
Between the two groups of modern humanity, of which the one seeks to
retain the Christian religion in its historical form as the precious,
heritage of the past, and the other to supplant it by a new Idealism
formed in harmony with the spirit of science, a third class stands, which
plays the part of a mediator. This class concedes that the traditional
forms of religion are in great part unadapted to the modern mind, and
that historical Christianity is in need of improvement, but contends
that religion is an ineradicable constituent of all higher civilisation,
and must remain so, and, particularly, that Christianity is the absolute
religion, that is to say, that in Christianity as rightly understood and
naturally developed all the necessary elements of the true religion of
the future are contained.
I should like, in the following pages, to subject the contentions of this
mediatory group to a critical examination, and to discuss the question
whether it is at all possible for one who resolutely takes his stand on
the ground of modern scientific thought, logically to have religion in
the historical sense at all.
In effecting a mediation between the religious and scientific views
of the world,—views which appear to be separated from each other by
a profound intellectual abyss,—two ways may, generally speaking, be
pursued. Both have been frequently trodden since the days of rationalism.
I shall discuss each separately.
The attempt may be made to resume, in a form more adapted to modern
times, the work of the reformers of the sixteenth century; to go back
even more thoroughly than they did to the original and simplest forms
of Christianity, to remove _in toto_ the superstructure which has been
reared upon it in the course of time, and to exhibit to humanity “the
pure doctrine of Christ” as the source from which to-day, as a thousand
years ago, true comfort may proceed, as the simplest, purest, and most
exalted expression of the divine and human that has ever yet been
discovered. Many of the most erudite workers in the field of critical
theology which this century can show have placed themselves in the
service of this idea, which is preached with particular enthusiasm by the
so-called “free-religious” and Unitarian confessions, and which at times
has also exhibited a noble and conciliatory activity in the homiletical
work of some mild-minded and liberal clergymen in the evangelical
churches. But our special inquiry here must be concerning the logical
and scientific foundation of this modernised primitive Christianity, and
on this point it must be frankly stated that the more faithfully such a
Christianity reflects the biblical character, the remoter it is from our
modern thought, and the more it is dominated by modern ways of thinking,
the more unhistorical and hence the more unchristian it becomes.
The “pure doctrine of Christ,” the genuine, primitive form of
Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism. What we actually
possess, in the form of historical documents, is that conception of the
doctrines and life of Christ which was put in writing several generations
after his death, and which, from amid a much greater number of
contemporaneous attempts, met by preference with the approbation of the
church. It is a hopeless task to attempt from these late records, which
betray the most various intellectual influences, to derive the authentic
doctrines of the oldest form of Christianity. No method, subjective
prepossession only, can here render a verdict. The things that appear
especially consistent and homogeneous to individual theologians and
critics are stamped as the genuine utterances of the Master. As every
time has done, so ours also constructs its picture of Christ to conform
with its wishes and wants.
But granting even that there is nothing objectionable in this, and that
this procedure is perfectly justified, a number of difficulties still
stand in the way of this movement which have stamped the procedure of
even the most ingenious of its representatives as the outcome of pure
subjective caprice. All the written sources which we possess of the
life and teachings of Christ contain much that is in the highest degree
repugnant to the modern mind. I refer particularly to the miracles. The
difficulties which they present may be disposed of in various ways; as,
to give an example, by the method of the early rationalistic thinkers,
who accepted the miracles as facts, but sought to give them a rational
explanation, or by that of Strauss, who held that they were the mythical
and poetical raiment of religious ideas and sentiments. Yet no art of
interpretation will banish from the world that fact which the poet
expressed in the words:
“_Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind._”
The fact that the entire cast of thought and sentiment of early
Christianity is saturated with the belief in the marvellous, and with
the expectations, nay, with the actual need of miracles, and that this
is not an adscititious ornament which can be doffed at pleasure, like a
dress which we have outgrown, but is of the very essence of Christianity.
Here is rooted that childlike and simple belief in the limitless and
God-coercing power of prayer, for which no natural laws nor force of
necessity exists, which is omnipotent as the Godhead itself, and as
all-powerful as desire. Here is rooted that ardent conviction of the near
collapse of the entire world, of the coming kingdom of perfection which
shall proceed, not from deeds and thought, but from faith and grace, and
shall crown all human desires with glory. And intimately connected with
all this stands the idea, visible in the background of all the moral
prescripts of the gospels, and painted in the strongest colors, of a
system of punishments and rewards in the world beyond; which makes of a
God of love, a pitiless, infuriate God of vengeance.
These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes of thought of
the synoptic writers that it is impossible to separate them therefrom
without doing violence to the internal connection of their doctrines.
They who seek after a more spiritual conception may, it is true, find
it in the gospel of John. But this book is so completely dominated by
the metaphysical-religious speculation of the second century, and by the
effort to bring the history of the life and doctrines of the Nazarene in
the service of the Logos idea, that the modern mind can only with great
difficulty find a common ground of understanding with it.
The task of the modern reformers is, for these reasons, a very difficult
one. They cannot but concede that Christianity, even in its purely
evangelical form, contains much that is foreign to us, and that the
elements of which it is composed must in part be excised and in part
improved by criticism and interpretation.
But the more the critical sense which is brought to bear upon this
task is developed in the spirit of modern scientific thought, the more
will historical Christianity shrink to the form of a mere colorless
abstraction, and ultimately nothing remains of its exuberant yet
visionary mental world but the picture of a philanthropic life joined
to a strongly developed consciousness of God, which proclaims a
popular morality in commandments and parables. But even this latter is
inevitably exposed to the same fate as the other ideas. It is dominated
throughout by the extremest notions of rewards and punishments, which
the expectation of the doom of the world places in the very immediate
future. It is impossible to take the system as a whole, and it must be
made the subject of violent interpretation to acquire any fitness for
the needs of modern life. Its principles are systematically turned and
twisted till they have acquired in some direction practical utility. And
who at this day can forget, that this system of morality, wherever and
whenever attempts have been made literally and faithfully to imitate it
in practical life, has led only to wretched caricatures? Moreover, it is
again and again freely remodelled in the spirit of modern ethics, its
offensive elements charitably cloaked, its useful ones developed to
the utmost, and finally here too a complete set of wholly modern ideas
consecrated by the borrowed authority of a venerable antiquity.
And therefore I repeat my contention, that the modern reformation, this
modern, pure, and scriptural Christianity, will, the honester it is,
all the more surely lead its adherents away from Scripture and from
Christianity and ultimately bring them to the adoption of a popularly
expounded, but philosophically established, ethical system.
I shall now take up the second of the two methods above mentioned.
That which we have just considered was known and affected even by the
eighteenth century. The discovery of the second is a merit of the present
time. The honor belongs in a pre-eminent degree to the speculative
philosophy of Germany, and to the intimate relations with theology which
this philosophy, especially in the school of Hegel and Schleiermacher,
entered into in the first half of the century. (Kant’s philosophy was not
put to similar use until later.) All these movements, whose rich literary
ramifications and development may be followed to the present day in Otto
Pfleiderer’s excellent and erudite work, “The History of Protestant
Theology in Germany Since Kant,”[60] have also begun in recent times,
through Green, Caird, A. Seth, J. Martineau, R. Flint, and F. Robertson,
to exert an influence on Anglo-American intellectual life.
The common fundamental feature of this second movement is, that it
proposes to accept as pure Christianity, not only the most ancient forms
of Christian doctrine accessible to us, but also the entire system
of dogmatic thoughts which in the course of the centuries primitive
Christianity has produced. Christianity, these men say, has historically
existed and acted in these maturer notions. It is not permissible
arbitrarily to separate them from it, and to reverse by any authoritative
edicts the real historical development. On the contrary, we now may and
must continue the process which, by the tenor of dogmatic history, is the
process which has continued for centuries, and give to the dogmas the
form which best accords with modern spiritual needs. To-day as in the
days of incipient Christianity, we see by the side of the naïve literal
belief, which takes no offence at incomprehensible things if they only
suit the needs of its heart, a gnosis arise which strives to reconcile
faith and knowledge, religion and intellectual culture; a gnosis which to
the unbelieving sceptic quotes the words of the poet:
“_Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;_
_Dein Sinn ist zu; dein Herz ist todt!_
_Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen_
_Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenroth!_”
It is perhaps even more difficult to give a succinct and comprehensive
notion of the ideas of this speculative theology, than of the results of
the New Testament exegesis of which we spoke above. All gradations are
here represented, from tender, conservative regard for the traditional
beliefs of the sects and the needs of the pious heart to the boldest
speculative interpretations and critical restrictions of dogma, which
utterly discard the historical form and hold fast only to a central
germinal truth. The present inquiry will restrict itself to those
representatives of this gnosis, who as a matter of principle grant
the greatest field of action to the rational development of dogma,
and represent its philosophical elaboration in its finest and most
complicated form. I shall attempt to signalise the ideas which may to-day
be designated as the most spiritualised expression of the Christian view
of the world.
And first let us hear a greater mind speak. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s essays
on the nature of religion and Christianity the following sentences occur:
“The Christian religion is the revealed inwardness, the objectively
expressed self of man; the contents of his highest aspirations; the
essence of man purified and freed from the limitations of individuality;
yet all subjectivised, that is intuited, known, and worshipped as a
separate, independent entity, wholly distinct from himself. Religion
is essentially dramatical. God himself is a dramatical creation, that
is to say, a personal being opposed to man. He who takes from religion
this idea, takes from it the gist of its being, and holds but the _caput
mortuum_ in his hands.”
These sentences of Feuerbach express with the greatest generality and
precision the innermost nature of the Christian view of the world. They
characterise excellently the point that cannot be given up without
destroying the religious view as such. What I refer to is dualism, the
dualism of the divine and the human, of the world beyond, and the world
that is, of holiness and sin; dualism conceived not merely as a mode of
view and of conceptual distinction, as a working contrariety in things
that by their nature are one, but as a metaphysical difference, an actual
contraposition of two worlds, of two kingdoms of existence, which are
totally separate, no matter how extensive the relations of the one to
the other may be. Only on such a supposition is that possible which
Feuerbach, with inimitable aptness, called “the dramatic element” of
religion. The history of humanity, the history of its religious life
particularly, is no monologue of humanity with itself into which life
and advancement enter solely through the multitude of the ideas created
by individuals within the race itself. It is an action or process in a
higher sense, an interactivity between two worlds, in which, it is true,
humanity, to a certain extent, shapes its own fortunes and destiny, but
at the same time is also constantly exposed to the interferences of a
power which stands beyond and above it and to which it has to accommodate
itself. And whatever artifices and care many of the representatives of
the modern gnosis may employ to conceal this fundamental assumption, and
to substitute for it the point of view of the immanence of this power
in the world, still any radical breach with it is impossible without
endangering the very foundations of the religious sense of humanity
itself.
The indispensability of this dualistic opposition and separation is
equally well exhibited whether we take as our starting-point the
existence of the world at large or the individual consciousness of man.
The religious mode of view knows of no other way of asserting the rights
and activity of the mind in the All than by making all existence assume
a personal life in an infinite, self-conscious, and ethically perfect
being. The emotions and experiences of one’s heart, its vacillations
between humility and exaltation, remorse at the consciousness of one’s
own imperfections, the inspired flight of the soul to higher realms of
existence, appear as the intercourse of man with some extraneous power,
allied to man and yet above him, in which the sum of all excellence to
which thought and experience have ever led man, has its eternal source.
These ideas constitute the point of view which is decisive of the history
of humanity, particularly in what concerns religion. The history of
religion is, in accordance with these ideas, conceived as a continuous
self-revelation of God in the world of man. True, this view seems to be
contradicted by the fact that the self-revelation of this infinitely good
power is effected in the case of by far the greater part of mankind in a
very insufficient manner—in the form, namely, of crude and superstitious
notions which stand in need of constant purification by reason. But the
explanation of this fact is sought in the idea of a divine pedagogical
training of the human race, and in the theory that religion is not an
immediate self-revelation of the absolute, but passes through the medium
of the human mind and consequently must be conditioned by its character.
Christianity, now, especially appears as the highest form of this
self-revelation of God in humanity, that is to say as the absolute
religion, which, in its historical forms, it is true, is as little
free from adscititious ornaments and transient obscurations as other
religions, yet in its essence can be as little improved as it can be
discarded. This innermost essence of Christianity the majority of the
representatives of this modern gnosis declare to be the conviction that
all men are from the beginning children of God. In this idea two things
are contained: submission to the will of God who is conceived as a
kind parent and who in pity and love does everything for the best; and
the imitation in our own thought and conduct of the ethical perfection
conceived incarnate in God. The entering of man into this relation is
designated the kingdom of God—a notion which constitutes the ideal goal
of history. The condition of mind on which the kingdom of God rests is
prefigured in a typical manner in the founder of the Christian religion.
His person and his life are a guarantee of the possibility of this ideal,
and exhibit at the same time the means of its accomplishment: namely, the
helping love of God, which has infused into this one individual the whole
plenitude of its being, so far as this is at all possible with human
capacities, that humanity may have in it a direct living picture of the
highest fulfilment of its religious and moral destiny. The historical
Christ is the ideal of humanity, supported and ensouled by the spirit of
God.
The modern gnosis here goes back to the Paulinian interpretation of the
Christ-idea. The consideration of the speculative difficulties of the
idea of the Trinity is thus rendered superfluous for it. This notion
is treated by the majority of its representatives simply as a dogmatic
antiquity; its place is taken by the modern ideas of a distinction
between the person of Jesus and the principle or spirit of Christianity,
which is synonymous with the contrast of the idea and its revelation,
the eternal and the temporal, of the inward essence and its historical
realisation. That it employs the notions of idea, principle, and essence
wholly in a Platonic sense, as the highest metaphysical realities, is
self-evident.
More distant still is the attitude which this speculative theology
assumes towards another idea which proceeded from the Rabbinical school
of thought of Paul: the notion of salvation or redemption in its
connection with the expiatory death of Christ. From these conceptions
of punitive suffering, of a vicarious atonement of God in his own
person—conceptions of such juristical refinement as to be wholly
unacceptable to modern modes of thought—the modern gnosis has upon the
whole resolutely turned away and taken refuge in that more spiritual
and more profound idea which in early Christian times the author of the
gospel of St. John promulgated. The death of Christ is redemptive only in
the sense in which Christ’s total history is redemptive, as the direct
and prefigurative incarnation of the true religious relation between God
and man. This is, it is true, applicable in a quite special sense to the
Death; for it was by this that the eternal truth was manifested, that not
only does all salvation accrue to man from the sacrifice of his own self
in duteous and patient love, but that all the life of God is an emanation
of this self-surrendering excellence, of this bliss of self-sacrifice.
Still, there is one thing that is common to all the representatives of
this movement as distinguished from the former, and that is this: they
do not content themselves with picturing the activity of Jesus Christ
in general outlines solely as one which is blessed and significant by
example and doctrine for humanity, but they assume a continuous and
active presence of the Christian principle in humanity, by means of
which the moral discord in individuals is overcome, and in the personal
spiritual life of individuals divine and human nature are united. This
is the most speculative interpretation we have of the old dogmatic
notion of redemption, which from its original character as a single
isolated phenomenon of history has here become the constant activity of a
Christian principle, and an ever-living precedent of Christian life.
It would be a prolix and wearisome task to go through in this way the
whole dogmatism of this speculative theology. The fundamental ideas which
we have discussed will suffice to show the manner in which, on the one
hand, it spiritualised the allegorical notions of popular Christianity,
but on the other left untouched the gist of the religious view and the
dramatical or dualistic opposition of the divine and human. The notions
of grace and sanctification, the notion of the church as a living,
organised instrument of salvation, spring directly and logically from
these fundamental ideas.
In the province of ethics this movement has a much easier task than the
churches based on the New Testament. As it seeks to establish, not a
primitive Christianity, but a modernised Christianity developed in the
spirit of recent times, there is no necessity of its being incommoded
by the ethical crudenesses of early Christianity, but it is in the
same position to work these crudenesses over critically as it did the
asperities of the old dogmas. It can assimilate most of what it needs
from modern philosophical ethics, and content itself with giving to what
it has thus borrowed a metaphysically religious background derived from
dogmatic traditions.
That this modern gnosis is in a constant state of vacillation with
respect to the practical things of life, is a necessary consequence of
its fundamental assumptions and of its position towards the doctrines
of the church. Its foremost representatives acknowledge without any
reserve that the true source from which religious emotions and sentiments
flow is the symbolic or imaginative faculty of man. The grandly simple
pictures in which the ancient Christian faith found satisfaction are
now in the course of time inevitably disintegrated by the critical
reason. The speculative theology itself proclaims that its vocation is
one of coöperation towards this end. But it maintains nevertheless that
the fruits of this work, the speculative interpretation of the dogmas,
their exaltation into the sphere of the Idea, are fit only for initiated
minds, and are caviare for the general. The general, the people, want
and will use religion in the form which its fancy has created, and it
cannot be revealed to it in any other. Progressive in its theories,
this gnosis is in its ecclesiastical practice thoroughly conservative.
It thinks two kinds of thought, and speaks two kinds of languages,
according as it finds itself in the pulpit or in the professorial chair.
And it is in just this procedure that it assumes a position which it is
very difficult to attack. He, who working for a sound and progressive
popular enlightenment on the ground of a unitary view of the world,
opposes the further use of the antiquated and effete allegories of the
old religions, is told that he is behind the times, and that religion,
nurtured by the spirit of modern science, has become something different
from what it formerly was. In very strict ecclesiastical quarters this
gnosis is looked at askance, and accused of insincerity, nay, of secret
alliance with unbelief; but the movement never allowed itself to be led
astray by these accusations, and has never failed to assert its right
of coöperation in the common work of the Christian church. For though
it pretends to be in the hands of the thinking theologian a means of
bringing into harmony the faith which he must confess and the thought
which he cannot abandon, it yet admits, that with the majority of mankind
the allegory will always remain an essential element of religion, and
that therefore the task of scientific theology can never be to destroy
these vessels of religion, but only to exercise a watchful care, that
with the form the spirit also may not be lost.
III.
The question now arises,—and this brings us back to the considerations
of the first part of this essay,—Does this rationalised Christianity of
to-day really meet the demands of science, and if it does not, is it in
the power of the modern scientific world-conception to furnish from its
own resources some substitute for the religious views of the past?
My answer to this question will be short and concise; for the existence
of _The Monist_, the fundamental idea of its management, and the
total character of the efforts which it has hitherto made, speak with
sufficient emphasis. And we may, therefore, with the greatest respect
for the scientific zeal and the personal ability of many of the
representatives of this mediatory theology, say, without further ado:
This rationalised Christianity of yours also is myth and symbol; it still
adheres to that “dramatic” division of the world which our imaginations
produced, and to the metaphysical dualism of God and man; it cannot
lift itself to a rigorous conception of the All in One, for which God
is in the same sense a simple function of human thought as thought is a
function of the human organism. The God on whom all depends in religion,
the God whose name is “Father,” the God of love and goodness, the God
from whom all great thoughts and all grand resolves spring, the God who
sanctifies us and lifts us above the earth—to displace this God from
the world in which he has no place, into the inward being of humanity
seems at this day so strange, nay, inconceivable, only because we have
accustomed ourselves (and down to the times of Mill and Feuerbach, even
strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza fell victims to this illusion) to
mingle together in the idea of God two wholly distinct ideas—the ideas,
namely, of nature and of an ethical ideal. To preserve this latter
inviolate, and to secure it from all encroachments of human caprice,
one thing alone seemed to the naïve dramatic modes of thought of early
times a competent safeguard: the ideal must in some locality be real; the
highest to which human thought and aspiration can exalt itself must be
sought and must exist in some superhuman reality. And what reality could
be better adapted to this than one on which even nature was conceived to
be dependent? The entire history of the development of the idea of God in
the Græco-Roman and Hebrew worlds, the confluence of these two streams
of thought in Christian speculation, exhibit in the clearest possible
manner these motives, which here I can only lightly touch upon.
But this combination of the law of nature and the law of ethics in the
idea of God, although solving some of the difficulties of humanity, has
plunged it into incomparably greater ones. Through all the centuries
of Christian thought a succession of desperate attempts may be traced
to establish a theodicy, that is to say, attempts to demonstrate the
existence in nature and in history of a God which harmonises with the
ethical ideal. Even Kant could undertake to demonstrate the “necessary
failure of all attempts at a theodicy,” and whoever might still have
entertained any doubt as to the correctness of this demonstration, such a
one must surely have been convinced of it by the scientific development
of the past century. That which was indissolubly welded together in
the Christian idea of God is to-day disintegrated into its component
elements. The Lord _above_ nature, the Spirit _behind_ nature, have been
rendered inconceivable by the modern notions of the conformity to law of
all natural occurrences and of the unity of all existence. The spirit
immanent in the All no thinker will deny, for this spirit manifests
itself in an indisputable manner in the fact that this All is a cosmos,
not a chaos, that not only the caprice of chance but also the laws of
necessity rule in it, and that the personal self-conscious mind springs
from its midst. But from this recognition of mind in the All, there is no
bridge that leads to the old idea of God. We cannot worship the All as a
moral ideal. We involve ourselves in absurd complications when we attempt
to derive the actions of natural events and their conformity to law from
ethical categories, and it is no less a desperate undertaking to imagine
that we can draw impulses for our moral thought and conduct from nature.
The adaptation of means to ends, the teleology, that rules in the All, is
veiled for us in the deepest obscurity. All that we can unravel of it has
no resemblance to that which, according to our notions, is ethical:
“_Denn unfühlend ist die Natur_,”
she does not know what love or mercy is; she knows only the omnipotent
power of universal laws; she knows only the rights of the whole, to
which she sacrifices with unconcern the individual; she revels in the
double pleasure of unceasing creation and unceasing destruction; she arms
unpityingly the strong against the weak; in crises of annihilation she
restores the disturbed equilibrium of things; but the palm of peace no
one has ever seen in her hand. And we? We stand amazed at her might and
greatness, at the plentitude of her powers of creation, at her myriad
play of forces, at the inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which
she binds being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and the same!
But our prototype, our God, she can never be. To him we must look up;
but on nature, despite her might, despite her stupendous grandeur, we
look down. She did not whisper in our ears that in us which is best and
highest. That did not come to us from heaven; _we ourselves_ won it
by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed discipline. It is
not _of_ nature; it is _above_ nature. Through _us_ something has come
into the world that before us did not exist—something that the most
exuberant creative magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical dreams, could
never replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his weaker
fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine, but thy will be
done; I will give up my desires that thou also mayst be glad”; the day
on which man first lifted up his head and said, “Let us make the world
_good_ in the likeness of the picture that has become living in us, just
as it should be”; this is the great and sanctified day in the history of
our race on earth, the Christmas day on which God was born. But not as
the religious fancy has expressed it, the day on which God became man,
but the day on which man began to become God, that is the day on which he
began to feel spiritual powers in his breast that transcended his animal
impulses—powers to which the majority of humanity was still as remote as
heaven from earth.
This strict anthropological conception of God as the ideal which is
always newly creating itself in the struggles of humanity, which is no
Being but a Becoming, solves the innumerable difficulties which the idea
of God has hitherto placed in the way of rigorous scientific knowledge
and the construction of a unitary conception of the world. This God has
nothing to do with the All. We need not seek him in the All or behind the
All, and need not fear that any progress of our knowledge will make his
existence a matter of doubt with us. Concerning the real validity of this
idea we need not bother ourselves with more or less weak and insufficient
demonstrations: the whole history of humanity is evidence of it if we
but know how to rightly interpret it, and the stumbling block of the old
theological idea of God has become the corner-stone upon which the new
scientific conception is built.
Nature and human history the work of an omnipotent and all-kind being
that is mediately and immediately active in all events, nay, sacrificed
himself in his own person that he might realise in this world his
purposes! Compare the principle, the active force of this world-drama,
pictured by the religious fancy as the highest power, the highest wisdom,
and all-merciful love, with the real spectacle of the world! Is there
anywhere a more pronounced contradiction, an obscurer riddle, a more
inconceivable contrast between purpose and accomplishment? This world
of cruelty and woe, in which one creature feeds on the heart-blood of
another, in which here and there from seas of mud and dirt a form of
light springs up, in which every nobler production must be bought with
torrents of blood and tears; this revelation and self-manifestation of
God in humanity, which everywhere appears joined to definite historical
suppositions, which lacks all the conditions of true universality and of
indisputable evidence, so that instead of forming a means of union it
has become the source of dreadful contentions; this work of salvation
and sanctification which is so restricted in its effects that “the
kingdom of God” is still a dreamy vision of humanity, so restricted
that we still see the majority of men, despite the most extraordinary
supernatural dispositions, still remain far behind the simple ideals
of natural ethical commandments, that hate and dissension, cruelty and
selfishness, perform their unhallowed work—is this the work of infinite
power and infinite wisdom? What claims theodicy makes on human thought!
And how different the picture is, the moment we abandon the false
theocentric point of view and assume the anthropocentric! Instead of a
belief which all facts contradict—an idea which elucidates them all.
No one can say how we are to interpret facts as the work of a holy and
absolutely perfect being; but it can be shown, step by step, how in this,
our human world, more perfect things spring from imperfect things, moral
and mental laws from the blind play of natural forces and powers, the
conscious energy of will from blind and unreasonable impulse, law and
love of man from the selfishness and warring of all against all, and the
notion of the unity of the race from infinite disruption and disunion.
We must not allow ourselves to be led astray or discouraged here by the
changing undulations and tremendous crises of this battle for the good.
The ideal springs out of a dark abyss. The roots of our being are deep
laid in nature, yet we struggle to exalt ourselves above it. No wonder,
therefore, that time and again it draws us back.
The greatest and sublimest spectacle! A tragical one, one filled with
struggle and suffering, and yet one infinitely full of hope. For it shows
us the inexhaustible grandeur of the human mind; it shows us the good,
the ideal, as a tremendous real power, a power eternally becoming, surely
forming itself out of an infinitude of individual deeds, a power fully
incarnate in no one person, yet active and living in humanity. Not a
tangible activity, and yet one of the realest of facts. A supersensuous,
nay, if you will, a supernatural realm of thought; not the faded
reflection or shadow of a grandeur and power beyond us, but the fruit
of the noblest activities and powers of this given, existing world,
antagonised in life, but grand and powerful in thought; imperfect even in
its boldest flights, but bearing within it the germ of greater things to
come.
Here is the true point of union for Christian dogma and science. Here is
the God in which science also may, nay, must, believe. Not humanity in
its empirical reality, but the ideal world developed within the human
realm of things—the spirit of humanity. This is the only true object
of worship. Before it we are humiliated, and by it we feel ourselves
exalted. From it we receive all the good that life bestows upon us; it
gives us light and peace and lucid thought. And what higher, nobler thing
can a life produce than the feeling that it has not been unworthy of this
great ancestry, that it has helped to keep alive this holy fire, that it
has helped, perhaps, to fan by its own life this living flame to greater
heights?
Here is the true source of the ideas of accountability and of salvation.
We are not responsible to a being outside and above us, but to our own
selves and to humanity, from which we have received the best that it had
to give, and for which we must return what we ourselves have produced.
This consciousness of being thrown utterly on the resources of one’s own
self, on one’s own powers, was first created in the human mind by science
and the technical arts, (as that most venerable and most sacred of all
myths, the legend of Prometheus, so profoundly indicates,) and this
consciousness will, by the progress of knowledge and power, be made more
and more the dominating one of humanity. This is not a consciousness of
omnipotence; it does not exclude the subjection of man to the inexorable
laws of the universe; but it demands the enlistment of all the powers
of the race: for nature does not give us more than we wrest from her by
arduous toil.
And as humanity is accountable only to itself, so do the means of its
salvation lie only in itself. Not in any one individual, but in the
spirit in it which ever works onward and upward. Yet this spirit is
not an unpersonal existence; it must be possessed again and ever again
by living men. And no one can serve humanity or augment its spiritual
treasures or reincarnate in himself its holiest possessions without first
having and feeling within himself the blessing of what he has done.
And thus the profoundest significance of human life on earth may be
formulated and embraced in that saying of the poet which was throughout
conceived in the spirit of our times, and would have been wholly
incomprehensible to the mind of those who gave us our faith—in the words:
“_Erlösung dem Erlöser._”
F. JODL.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] _Wesen des Christenthums._ First edition. 1841. Pp. 288-289.
[60] Translation published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1891.
THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE.
Are religion and science indeed as contrary as they are often represented
to be, and is the proposition to reconcile them a hopeless and futile
undertaking? Professor Jodl, in his article “Religion and Modern
Science,” (pp. 329-351 of this number,) says:
“That civilised humanity to-day is separated into two groups
which no longer understand each other, which do not speak the
same language, and which live in totally different worlds of
thought and sentiment.”
There are those who cling to the old religions and those who supplant it
by a new idealism. Between both, he adds:
“A third class stands which plays the part of a mediator.”
Professor Jodl does not approve of reconciling the historical forms of
religion with science. He rightly says:
“The ‘pure doctrine of Christ,’ the genuine, primitive form of
Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism.”
We heartily agree with him in his remarks concerning the part which the
miraculous and supernatural play in the Gospels:
“These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes
of thought of the synoptic writers that it is impossible to
separate them therefrom without doing violence to the internal
connection of their doctrines.”
We also concur upon the whole with Professor Jodl in his criticism of
the methods of Speculative Theology. No compromising with traditional
errors, no covering or extenuating of the results of historical criticism
is allowable merely for the love of tradition and for the preservation of
errors that have become dear to a large number of people.
We do not condemn the work of any mediator; on the contrary, we rather
encourage it. We observe with pleasure in the latest phases of the
religious evolution of Speculative Theology the prevalence of a more
modern spirit, and we follow with a keen interest also the progress of
biblical critique in its truly valuable labors: but we do not expect that
either the one or the other will accomplish any regeneration of religion.
Professor Jodl knows very well that the editors of _The Monist_ and
_The Open Court_ have not undertaken any work of compromising between
the errors of the past and the ideal of the future. Our idea of a
reconciliation between religion and science is of a different nature. We
are not blind to the errors of the old religions, and we do not mean to
gloss them over, or to make old-fashioned views acceptable by presenting
them in a new garment. We do not even stop to bury the dead, for we
have better things to do than to trouble with problems that have been
definitely settled. We keep our hands to the plough to accomplish the
work needed to-day.
While we are not blind to the errors of the old religions, we recognise
at the same time that they contain in the language of parables some great
truths which will remain forever. These truths constitute the backbone of
religion, and we regard it as a very important duty of ours to preserve
them. These truths must be preserved, not because they were believed in
by our fathers, nor from any respect for tradition, nor from any regard
for our sentiments, but simply because they are truths, because they can
be proved to be true according to the methods of scientific inquiry.
What is religion? Religion consists of all those ideas which regulate
our conduct. In the savage these ideas are very crude and superstitious,
and often self-contradictory. The higher a man rises, the clearer, the
more scientific and consistent do these ideas become, until they develop
into a systematic world-conception. Every scientific idea that changes
our world-conception will change also our religion and with it our rules
of conduct. Thus, for example, the idea of evolution has become to us an
eminently religious idea.
In order to indicate that the criterion of truth for religion is the very
same thing as the criterion of truth for science, we have proposed to
call the religion we advocate, “The Religion of Science.” (For details
see the editorial of Vol. VII, No. 1, of _The Open Court_.)
Our procedure appears to many as an annihilation of religion in favor of
science. But it is not. And why not?
We have learned many truths first from religion, long before science
could ever think of proving them. In several respects science took the
lead, and religion remained at a long distance behind, awkwardly, very
slowly, and unwillingly limping onward on the road of progress. Instances
are, the acceptance of the Copernican system and of the evolution theory.
But in other respects religion took the lead, and science was unable to
follow its ingenious flight. As instances of this we cite such moral
truths as the love of enemies, which were not preached by scientists
as scientific truths, but by religious teachers, by Confucius, Buddha,
and Christ. There are scientists even to-day who regard what we would
call “moral truths” as maxims that are contrary to the established views
of science. Professor Huxley, for instance, is very emphatic in his
declaration that the facts of nature do not teach morality.[61]
This leads us to a point in which we disagree with Professor Jodl. He
speaks of the illusion “of mingling together in the idea of God two
wholly distinct ideas—the ideas namely of nature and of an ethical
ideal”—an illusion to which “even strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza
fell victims.”
Professor Jodl’s position reminds us of John Stuart Mill’s “Essay on
Nature,” in which he exposes the old doctrine _naturam sequi_ in all its
absurd meanings and carefully avoids a discussion of the only rational
conception of the precept. Thus his tirades appear most convincing, and
to be sure they are quite correct—so far as they go. Says Mill:
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or
imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every-day
performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by
human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives....
“Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them
to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes
them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them
with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick
or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other
hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a
Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed.”
Mill must indeed have felt the need of beginning these sentences with the
words “In sober truth”; otherwise he might be suspected of humor.
Similarly comical is Mill’s proposition to regard every voluntary action
of man as a direct infringement upon nature. Man’s reason in that case
would be the most unnatural phenomenon in the world, and the term
“nature” would be confined to the lowest realms of existence exclusively.
If the usage of reason were indeed an infringement upon nature, man’s
appearance upon earth would mark the beginning of a supernatural realm;
and Professor Jodl seems to accept this consequence when he says:
“It is not _of_ nature, it is _above_ nature.”
If man’s rationality and his ethics were not born of nature, if their
conditions were not founded in the very existence of nature, if they were
not the natural product of evolution, then indeed I see no escape from a
dualistic world-conception, in which a supernatural God introduces the
spark of divinity which appears in the soul of man from spheres beyond.
We have devoted to these vagaries of John Stuart Mill an elaborate
discussion in another place and do not feel the need of repeating our
arguments in this connection.[62]
We agree with Professor Jodl that no rationalising of old dogmas will
help us in the establishment of “a new idealism, formed in harmony
with the spirit of science.” We must build our religion anew (as every
generation had to build its religion anew) out of the best materials
which are furnished by the maturest and most reliable knowledge of
to-day. Says Professor Jodl:
“Through _us_ something has come into the world that before
us did not exist—something that the most exuberant creative
magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical dreams, could never
replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his
weaker fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine,
but thy will be done; I will give up my desires that thou also
mayst be glad”; the day upon which man first lifted up his head
and said, “Let us make the world _good_ in the likeness of the
picture that has become living in us, just as it should be”;
this is the great and sanctified day in the history of our race
on earth, the Christmas day on which God was born.”
Certainly the origin of man on earth, and again the evolution of the
moral man, is something quite new, which before did not exist. But did
humanity originate out of nothing, as sometimes the imaginations of
a poet are supposed to be created, or is there a prototype in whose
image man has been created? Man’s reason, his ethics, and his humanity
are something that did not exist before, but there is a feature in
existence which makes it possible that rational and moral beings develop.
Should there be sentient beings on other planets, and we have little
reason to doubt it, we can be sure that they also will develop rational
minds, and that they also will learn, perhaps as we did, through many
bitter experiences, the same truths which constitute our main maxims of
morality,[63] including such precepts as the love of enemies. And why are
we sure that on other planets not only reason, but also the fundamental
rules of ethics will be the same as with us here on earth? Simply because
we know that there is a certain feature in reality which creates rational
beings and moral beings as naturally as it creates rocks and seas on the
surface of planets. Man’s reason and also man’s morality are not original
inventions of his, but the result of many experiences which he had to
learn. And the world in which he lives is such that he can acquire reason
and morality, and if a being should acquire a wrong kind of reason or a
wrong kind of morality, it will by and by be blotted out of existence.
Accordingly there is a prototype of reason and of morality, and this
prototype of the humanity of man is exactly that which in the language of
the old religions has received the name “God.”
We must make a distinction between ideals and dreams. Those creations
of our fancy which are woven without any regard to reality are dreams.
They have no value beyond whiling away a leisure hour or pleasing our
imagination. But those creations of our mind which construct realisable
formations such as machines or clocks or higher conditions of human
society, are not mere dreams, they are ideals. What, then, is the
difference between a dream and an ideal? A dream is a useless ebullition
of an idle brain composed of ideas to which there is no correspondent
reality; but an ideal is a potent factor in the living presence to shape
the future: it is a combination of ideas which are correct descriptions
of actual realities. The moral aspirations of mankind are not empty
dreams, they are true and veritable ideals. There are certain qualities
in nature which make their realisation possible and these qualities
constitute the Divinity of nature.
Professor Jodl speaks of the origin of morality as of the birth of God on
earth. Truly that is the meaning of Christianity. But this birth of God
into the world of human evolution as “the Son of Man” is possible only
because of the existence of the God in nature whom Christian mythology so
beautifully calls God the Father. The appearance of the Son of Man upon
earth, the birth of morality, is a revelation of the divinity of nature.
True enough, as Professor Jodl says, that we ourselves won the best and
highest we have by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed
discipline. As Prometheus says:
“_Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,_
_Heilig glühend Herz!_”
That, too, is part of the divinity of nature, that every creature has
to work out its very being itself, and that man must search for the way
of salvation with great anxiety, under bitter tribulations and through
extreme afflictions. But he cannot invent a new way of salvation, he has
to find it, and there is but one that is the right one. The nature of
morality is such as it is, and no other morality could be invented to
replace it. And this feature of existence which makes morality quite a
determined thing is a real presence in the world, it is an actual quality
of the universe.
Some of our liberal friends, foremost among them Professor Haeckel, deny
the existence of a personal God and then proceed to declare that the God
of science is nothing but matter and energy. We agree with Professor
Haeckel in his rejection of anthropotheism; God is no supernatural being
nor is he a huge world-ego. But we cannot accept his view of God as being
only matter and energy. The idea of God is and always has been a moral
idea. Thus we have come to regard all those features of nature as divine
which condition the origin and existence of morality and we define God
as the authority of moral conduct. This authority is not a person, not
a sentient being, let alone a sentimental philanthropist; but it is,
nevertheless, a reality, and, indeed, a stern reality.
Such is the God of science. God is that quality of existence through
which we originated as feeling, thinking, and aspiring beings. He is the
prototype of the human soul, and the condition under which develop man’s
reason and morality. Obedience to him is indispensable for a continued
existence, for further progress and a higher evolution of the human
soul. That these features of reality can by a great number of keen and
fearless modern thinkers be supposed to be a non-entity is difficult
to understand. This negation of the reality of qualities of existence
which are not individual things but intrinsically inherent in all the
individual things, it appears to us, is an old heirloom of nominalism.
The nominalistic philosophy represented by Roscellinus was suppressed
at the council at Soissons 1092, only to rise more powerfully in the
fourteenth century in William of Occam, and finally to exterminate
realism with all its rubbish of errors together with the truth contained
in these errors. Kant marks in many respects the culmination of the
victorious movement of nominalism. With all the benefits modern thought
derived from the philosophical work of nominalism, a reaction is needed
against its purely negative spirit. There is a truth in the old realism
which cannot be neglected with impunity.[64]
God (viz., the name of God) is, as Kant said, a noumenon, a thing of
thought, an abstraction. God is not a thing, a concrete object, or an
individual person. All the views of God which regard him as an individual
being of some kind, or as a person only of infinite dimensions, are,
closely considered, pagan notions which belittle God. But the name of
God as a noumenon, a thought, an abstract idea, has a meaning. Abstract
ideas are not nonentities, they represent some real features, some actual
qualities, or properties, or relations; otherwise they would not be
ideas, but unmeaning sounds.
Some of our abstract ideas are of a very delicate fibre, so that the
coarse mental vision of the average Philistine is unable to see them in
their reality and potency. But it so happens that exactly they are of a
more important, more powerful, and inevitable presence than the simple
generalisations of things that visibly and corporeally surround us.
This, their peculiar nature, makes such ideas mysterious to those who
instinctively feel their reality without being able to point it out and
understand it. And the most subtle, imponderous, and sublimated of all
ideas is the idea of God.
We have defined God as the ultimate authority of conduct, as the
condition of our existence as rational and moral beings, as the
all-power that enforces obedience, etc.; but we cannot in any one of our
definitions exhaust the significance of the idea. We would by no means
exclude from the idea of God anything without which reality would cease
to be real. The qualities of matter and energy constitute that element
in the God-idea which justify the old religions in speaking of him as
omnipotent and everlasting. Thus they ought not to be excluded. But these
qualities alone are insufficient to characterise his being. The sum-total
of matter and energy as such and as such alone does not constitute any
moral authority. Nature in her immeasurable greatness and oppressive
vastness affects us with awe; but, after all, we look down upon her
massive sublimity. Man is more than the biggest heap of crude matter and
unintelligently operating energy. Says Professor Jodl:
“We stand amazed at her might and greatness, at the plentitude
of her powers of creation, at her myriad play of forces, at the
inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which she binds
being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and
the same! But our prototype, our God, she can never be.”
This grandeur of nature is part of her divinity, but it alone does not
constitute the character of God. Yet, observe that throughout nature
there is an imponderable quality present which makes every atom move in
a definite way, so that the whirl of gaseous masses, apparently a chaos,
will be recognised as a cosmic whole developing in a certain way and
describable in what is generally called natural laws. This subtle quality
is the condition of the regularities which are found in all the infinite
varieties and innumerable particularities, and all these regularities
conceived in their systematic unity are called the order of the universe.
Man exists as a thinking being only because the immeasurable universe
of which he is a part possesses this quality of order, and his reason
is closely considered only a copy of it. Man’s reason was shaped into
the image of the cosmic order, and suppose—a supposition which is very
difficult to make and regarded by many as impossible or inconceivable—yet
suppose that the world-order were radically different from what it
actually is, man’s reason would accordingly be different too. Further,
suppose that the whole frame and fundamental interrelations of the
particles of reality were different from what they are, would not
correspondingly the basic rules of conduct be changed too?
The author of this article, in the eyes of the so-called orthodox
Christian, is most certainly an atheist. And if theism means the belief
in a personal or extramundane God he is an atheist indeed. If there is
any opprobrium in the name atheism we are willing to accept it; and
certainly, we do not reject the label of atheism in order to escape any
odium attached to that name. We do reject atheism simply because we
see a great and potent truth in the idea of God which is but too often
disregarded.
With Professor Haeckel and Professor Jodl we reject the conception of
an anthropomorphic Deity. The anthropomorphic idol is doomed before the
tribunal of science. But we see a deeper meaning in the idea of God which
has formed through millenniums the very centre of the greatest religions
on earth. Science has to recognise the reality of an all-presence in
existence which is analogous to that which in a religious language is
called God.
Considering the fact that humanity owes many great truths to religion,
let us not be hasty in condemning the religions of the past as pure
superstition. There are valuable seeds in the chaff. If we discard the
wheat together with the tares, we shall have to rediscover them, for it
is little probable that humanity can for any length of time be satisfied
with beautiful phrases or live in its moral aspirations in a realm of
mere dreams.
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] For a discussion of this point see _Fundamental Problems_, pp.
219-226.
[62] See the article in Nos. 239, 241, and 242 of _The Open Court: Nature
and Morality_. An Examination of the Ethical Views of John Stuart Mill.
I. The Meaning of Basing Ethics Upon Nature. II. The Ethics Taught by
Nature. III. Intelligent Action and Moral Action. IV. The Anthropomorphic
Standpoint of Mill.
[63] I purposely do not say _all_ maxims of conduct, because we can very
well imagine that different conditions may produce some very important
variations in the rules of conduct; but the main foundation of morality
would be the same.
[64] There are two men at present who boldly fly the flag of the old
realism again, both having our full sympathy in their aspirations,
although we cannot agree with many of their teachings. The one is Mr.
Charles S. Peirce, the other Dr. Francis E. Abbot.
THE SUPERSTITION OF NECESSITY.[65]
Lest my title give such offense as to prejudice unduly my contention, I
may say that I use the term in the way indicated by its etymology: as
a standing-still on the part of thought; a clinging to old ideas after
those ideas have lost their use, and hence, like all superstitions,
have become obstructions. For I shall try to show that the doctrine
of necessity is a survival; that it holds over from an earlier and
undeveloped period of knowledge; that as a means of getting out of and
beyond that stage it had a certain value, but, having done its work,
loses its significance. Halting judgment may, indeed, at one time have
helped itself out of the slough of uncertainty, vagueness, and inadequacy
on to ground of more solid and complete fact, by the use of necessity as
a crutch; once upon the ground, the crutch makes progress slower and,
preventing the full exercise of the natural means of locomotion, tends
to paralyse science. The former support has become a burden, almost an
intolerable one.
The beginning of wisdom in the matter of necessity is, I conceive, in
realising that it is a term which has bearing or relevancy only with
reference to the development of judgment, not with reference to objective
things or events. I do not mean by this that necessity refers to the
compelling force with which we are driven to make a given affirmation:
I mean that it refers to the content of that affirmation, expressing
the degree of coherence between its constituent factors. When we say
something or other _must_ be so and so, the “must” does not indicate
anything in the nature of the fact itself, but a trait in our _judgment_
of that fact; it indicates the degree with which we have succeeded in
making a whole out of the various elements which have to be taken into
account in forming the judgment. More specifically, it indicates a
half-way stage. At one extreme we have two separate judgments, which, so
far as consciousness is concerned, have nothing to do with each other;
and at the other extreme we have one judgment into which the contents
of the two former judgments have been so thoroughly organised as to
lose all semblance of separateness. Necessity, as the middle term, is
the midwife which, from the dying isolation of judgments, delivers the
unified judgment just coming into life—it being understood that the
separateness of the original judgments is not as yet quite negated,
nor the unity of the coming judgment quite attained. The judgment of
necessity, in other words, is exactly and solely the transition in our
knowledge from unconnected judgments to a more comprehensive synthesis.
Its value is just the value of this transition; as negating the old
partial and isolated judgments—in its backward look—necessity has
meaning; in its forward look—with reference to the resulting completely
organised subject-matter—it is itself as false as the isolated judgments
which it replaces. Its value is in what it rids judgment of. When it has
succeeded, its value is nil. Like any go-between, its service consists in
rendering itself uncalled for.
All science can ultimately do is to report or describe, to completely
state, the reality. So far as we reach this standpoint regarding any fact
or group of facts, we do not say that the fact _must_ be such and such,
but simply that it _is_ such and such. There is no necessity attaching
to the fact either as whole or as parts. _Qua_ whole, the fact simply is
what it is; while the parts, instead of being necessitated either by one
another or by the whole, are the analysed factors constituting, in their
complete circuit, the whole. In stating the whole, we, as of course,
state all that enters into it; if we speak of the various elements as
_making_ the whole, it is only in the sense of making it _up_, not
of causing it. The fallacy of the necessitarian theory consists in
transforming the determinate in the sense of the wholly defined, into the
determined in the sense of something externally made to be what it is.
The whole, although first in the order of reality, is last in the order
of knowledge. The complete statement of the whole is the goal, not the
beginning of wisdom. We begin, therefore, with fragments, which are
taken for wholes; and it is only by piecing together these fragments,
and by the transformation of them involved in this combination, that we
arrive at the real fact. There comes a stage at which the recognition
of the unity begins to dawn upon us, and yet, the tradition of the many
distinct wholes survives; judgment has to combine these two contradictory
conceptions; it does so by the theory that the dawning unity is an effect
necessarily produced by the interaction of the former wholes. Only as the
consciousness of the unity grows still more is it seen that instead of
a group of independent facts, held together by “necessary” ties, there
is one reality, of which we have been apprehending various fragments in
succession and attributing to them a spurious wholeness and independence.
We learn (but only at the end) that instead of discovering and then
connecting together a number of separate realities, we have been engaged
in the progressive definition of one fact.
There are certain points upon which there is now _practical_ agreement
among all schools. What one school has got at by a logical analysis of
science, another school has arrived at by the road of a psychological
analysis of experience. What one school calls the unity of thought
and reality, another school calls the relativity of knowledge. The
metaphysical interpretation further given to these respective statements
may be quite different, but, so far as they go, they come to the same
thing: that objects, _as known_, are not independent of the process
of knowing, but are the content of our judgments. One school, indeed,
may conceive of judgment as a mere associative or habitual grouping of
sensations, the other as the correlative diversification and synthesis of
the self; but the practical outcome, that the “object” (anyway as known)
is a form of judgment, is the same. This point being held in common,
both schools must agree that _the progress of judgment is equivalent
to a change in the value of objects_—that objects as they are for us,
as known, change with the development of our judgments. If this be so,
truth, however it be metaphysically defined, must attach to late rather
than to early judgments.
I am fortunate in being able to quote from authors, who may be taken as
typical of the two schools. Says Professor Caird in his article upon
“Metaphysic,” (lately reprinted, “Essays in Philosophy and Literature,”):
“Our first consciousness of things is not an immovable
foundation upon which science may build, but rather a
hypothetical and self-contradictory starting-point of
investigation, which becomes changed and transformed as we
advance.” (“Essays,” Vol. II, p. 398.)
On the other hand, Mr. Venn writes (in the first chapter of his
“Empirical Logic”):
“Select what object we please—the most apparently simple in
itself, and the most definitely parted off from others that we
can discover—yet we shall find ourselves constrained to admit
that a considerable mental process has been passed through
before that object could be recognised as being an object, that
is, as possessing some degree of unity and as requiring to be
distinguished from other such unities.”
He goes on to illustrate by such an apparently fixed and given object
as the sun, pointing out how its unity as a persistent thing involves
a continued synthesis of elements very diverse in time and space, and
an analysis, a selection, from other elements in very close physical
juxtaposition. He goes on to raise the question whether a dog, for
example, may be said to “see” a rainbow at all, because of the complex
analysis and synthesis involved in such an object. The “mental whole” (to
use Mr. Venn’s words, the “ideal unity” as others might term it) is so
extensive and intricate that
“One might almost as reasonably expect the dog to ‘see’ the
progress of democracy in the place where he lives, of which
course of events the ultimate sensible constituents are
accessible to his observation precisely as they are to ours.”
As Mr. Venn is not discussing just the same point which I have raised,
he does not refer to the partial and tentative character of our first
judgments—our first objects. It is clear enough, however, that there
will be all degrees between total failure to analyse and combine (as,
say, in the case of the dog and rainbow) and fairly adequate grouping.
The difference between the savage whose synthesis is so limited in scope
that he sets up a new sun every day and the scientific man whose object
is a unity comprehending differences through thousands of years of time
and interactions going on through millions of miles of space is a case
in point. The distinction between the respective objects is not simply
a superimposition of new qualities upon an old object, that old object
remaining the same; it is not getting new objects; it is a continual
qualitative reconstruction of the object itself. This fact, which is the
matter under consideration, is well stated by Mr. Venn, when he goes on
to say:
“The act of predication, in its two-fold aspect of affirmation
and denial, really is a process by which we are not only
enabled to add to our information _about_ objects, _but is also
the process by the continued performance of which the objects
had been originally acquired, or rather produced_” (italics are
mine).
This statement cannot be admitted at all without recognising that the
first judgments do not make the object once for all, but that the
continued process of judging is a continued process of “producing” the
object.
Of course the confused and hypothetical character of our first objects
does not force itself upon us when we are still engaged in constructing
them. On the contrary, it is only when the original subject-matter has
been overloaded with various and opposing predicates that we think of
doubting the correctness of our first judgments, of putting our first
objects under suspicion. At the start, these objects assert themselves
as the baldest and solidest of hard facts. The dogmatic and naïve
quality of the original judgment is in exact proportion to its crudeness
and inadequacy. The objects which are the content of these judgments
thus come to be identified with reality _par excellence_; they are
_facts_, however doubtful everything else. They hang on obstinately.
New judgments, instead of being regarded as better definitions of
the actual fact and hence as displacing the prior object, are tacked
on to the old as best they may be. Unless the contradiction is too
flagrant, the new predicates are set side by side with the old as simply
additional information; they do not react into the former qualities. If
the contradiction is too obvious to be overlooked the new predicate
is used, if possible, to constitute another object, independent of the
former. So the savage, having to deal with the apparently incompatible
predicates of light and darkness, makes two objects; two suns, for two
successive days. Once the Ptolemaic conception is well rooted, cycles and
epicycles, almost without end, are superadded, rather than reconstruct
the original object. Here, then, is our starting point: when qualities
arise so incompatible with the object already formed that they cannot be
referred to that object, it is easier to form a new object on their basis
than it is to doubt the correctness of the old, involving as that does
the surrender of the _object_ (the fact, seemingly) and the formation of
another object.
It is easier, I say, for there is no doubt that the reluctance of the
mind to give up an object once made lies deep in its economies. I shall
have occasion hereafter to point out the teleological character of the
notions of necessity and chance, but I wish here to call attention to the
fact that the forming of a number of distinct objects has its origin in
practical needs of our nature. The analysis and synthesis which is first
made is that of most practical importance; what is abstracted from the
complex net-work of reality is some net outcome, some result which is of
value for life. As Venn says:
“What the savage mostly wants to do is to produce something
or to avert something, not to account for a thing which has
already happened. What interests him is to know how to kill
somebody, not to know how somebody has been killed.” (P. 62 of
“Empirical Logic.”)
And again:
“What not only the savage, but also the practical man mostly
wants, is a _general_ result, say the death of his enemy. It
does not matter whether the symptoms, i. e., the qualifying
circumstances, are those attendant on poison, or a blow from a
club, or on incantation, provided the death is brought about.
But they do desire _certainty_ in respect of this general
result.” (P. 64.)
Now it is this “general result,” the net outcome for practical purposes,
which is _the_ fact, _the_ object at first. Anything else is useless
subtlety. That the man is dead—that is the fact; anything further is
at most external circumstances which happen to accompany the fact.
That the death is only a bare fraction of a fact; that the attendant
“circumstances” are as much constituent factors of the real fact as
the mere “death” itself (probably more so from the scientific point of
view)—all this is foreign to conception. We pluck the fruit, and that
fruit is the fact. Only when practical experience forces upon us the
recognition that we cannot get the fruit without heeding certain other
“conditions” do we consent to return upon our assumed object, put it
under suspicion and question whether it is really what we took it to be.
It is, we may presume, the savage who in order to get his living, has
to regulate his conduct for long periods, through changes of seasons,
in some continuous mode, who first makes the synthesis of one sun going
through a recurring cycle of changes—the year.
As time goes on, the series of independent and isolated objects passes
through a gradual change. Just as the recognition of incompatible
qualities has led to setting up of separate things, so the growing
recognition of similar qualities in these disparate objects begins to
pull them together again. Some relation between the two objects is
perceived; it is seen that neither object is just what it is in its
isolation, but owes some of its meaning to the other objects. While in
reality, (as I hope later to point out,) this “relationship” and mutual
dependence means membership in a common whole, contribution to one and
the same activity, a midway stage intervenes before this one fact,
including as parts of itself the hitherto separate objects, comes to
consciousness. The tradition of isolation is too strong to give way at
the first suggestion of community. This passage-way from isolation to
unity, denying the former but not admitting the latter, is necessity or
determinism. The wall of partition between the two separate “objects”
cannot be broken at one attack; they have to be worn away by the
attrition arising from their slow movement into one another. It is the
“necessary” influence which one exerts upon the other that finally rubs
away the separateness and leaves them revealed as elements of one unified
whole. This done, the determining influence has gone too.
The process may be symbolised as follows: _M_ is the object, the original
synthesis of the elements seen to be of practical importance; _a_, _b_,
_c_, etc., to _h_ are predicates of constantly growing incompatibility.
When the quality _i_ is discovered, it is so manifestly incompatible
with _a_ that all attempt to refer it to the same subject _M_ is
resisted. Two alternatives are now logically open. The subject-matter
_M_, as the synthesis of the qualities _a_-_h_, may be taken up; it may
be asked whether the object is really _M_ with these qualities; whether
it is not rather Σ, having instead of the predicates _a_, _b_, etc., the
qualities ρα, ρβ, with which the new quality _i_ is quite compatible. But
this process goes against the practical grain of our knowledge; it means
not only that we do not know what we thought we knew; it means that we
did not _do_ what we thought we did. Such unsettling of action is hardly
to be borne. It is easier to erect a new object _N_, to which the more
incompatible predicates are referred. Finally, it is discovered that
both _M_ and _N_ have the same predicates _r_ and _s_; that in virtue
of this community of qualities there is a certain like element even in
the qualities previously considered disparate. This mutual attraction
continues until it becomes so marked a feature of the case that there
is no alternative but to suppose that the _r_ and _s_ of one produces
these qualities in the other, and thereby influences all the qualities
of the other. This drawing together continues until we have the one
reconstructed object Σ, with the traits ρα, ρβρ, etc. It is found that
there is one somewhat comprehensive synthesis which includes within
itself the several separate objects so far produced; and it is found that
this inclusion in the larger whole reacts into the meaning of the several
constituting parts—as parts of one whole, they lose traits which they
seemed to possess in their isolation, and gain new traits, because of
their membership in the same whole.
We have now to consider, more in detail, how the intermediate idea of
necessity grows up and how it gives away upon the discovery of the one
inclusive whole. Let us continue the illustration of the killing. The
“general result,” the death of the hated enemy, is at first the fact; all
else is mere accidental circumstance. Indeed, the other circumstances
at first are hardly that; they do not attract attention, having no
importance. Not only the savage, but also the common-sense man of
to-day, I conceive, would say that any attempt to extend the definition
of the “fact” beyond the mere occurrence of the death is metaphysical
refinement; that the _fact_ is the killing, the death, and that that
“fact” remains quite the same, however it is brought about. What has
been done, in other words, is to abstract part of the real fact, part of
_this_ death, and set up the trait or universal thus abstracted as itself
_fact_, and not only as fact, but as _the_ fact, _par excellence_, with
reference to which all the factors which constitute the reality, the
concrete fact, of _this_ death, are circumstantial and “accidental.”[66]
A fragment of the whole reality, of the actual fact individualised and
specified with all kind of minute detail, having been thus hypostatised
into an object, the idea of necessity is in fair way to arise. These
deaths in general do not occur. Although the mere death of the man, his
removal from the face of the earth, is the _fact_, none the less all
_actual_ deaths have a certain amount of detail in them. The savage has
to hit his enemy with a club or spear, or perform a magic incantation,
before he can attain that all-important end of getting rid of him.
Moreover, a man with a coat of armor on will not die just the same way
as the man who is defenseless. These circumstances have to be taken into
account. Now, if the “fact” had not been so rigidly identified with
the bare practical outcome, the removal of the hated one, a coherent
interpretation of the need for these further incidents would be open. It
could be admitted that the original death was a highly complex affair,
involving a synthesis of a very large number of different factors;
furthermore, the new cases of murder could be employed to reconstruct
the original analysis-synthesis; to eliminate supposed factors which
were not relevant, and to show the presence of factors at first not
suspected. In other words, the real fact would be under constant process
of definition, of “production.” But the stiff-necked identification of
the fragment, which happened to have practical importance with the real
object, effectually prevents any such reaction and reconstruction. What
is to be done, however, with these conditions of spear, of stone, of
armor, which so obviously have something _to do_ with the real fact,
although, as it would seem, they are not the fact? They are considered
as circumstances, _accidental_, so far as death in general is concerned;
_necessary_, so far as _this_ death is concerned. That is, wanting simply
to get the net result of the removal of my enemy, so that he will no
longer blight the fair face of nature, it is accidental how I do it;
but having, after all, to kill a man of certain characteristics and
surroundings in life, having to choose time and place, etc., it becomes
necessary, _if_ I am to succeed, that I kill him in a certain way, say,
with poison, or a dynamite bomb. Thus we get our concrete, individual
fact again.
Consider, then, that tortuous path from reality to reality, _via_
a circuit of unreality, which calls the thought of necessity into
existence. We first mutilate the actual fact by selecting some portion
that appeals to our needs; we falsify, by erecting this fragment into
the whole fact. Having the rest of the fact thus left on our hands for
disposal, when we have no need of the concrete fact we consider it
accidental, merely circumstantial; but we consider it necessary whenever
we have occasion to descend from the outcome which we have abstracted
back to the real fact, in all its individuality. Necessity is a device
by which we both conceal from ourselves the unreal character of what we
have called real, and also get rid of the practical evil consequences of
hypostatising a fragment into an independent whole.
If the purely teleological character of necessity is not yet evident,
I think the following considerations will serve to bring it out. The
practical value, the fruit from the tree, we pick out and set up for the
entire fact so far as our past action is concerned. But so far as our
_future_ action is concerned, this value is a result _to be_ reached;
it is an end to be attained. Other factors, in reality all the time
bound up in the one concrete fact or individual whole, have now to be
brought in as means to get this end. Although after our desire has been
met they have been eliminated as accidental, as irrelevant, yet when the
experience is again desired their integral membership in the real fact
has to be recognised. This is done under the guise of considering them as
means which are necessary to bring about the end. Thus the idea of the
circumstances as external to the “fact” is retained, while we get all the
practical benefit of their being not external but elements of one and the
same whole. Contingent and necessary are thus the correlative aspects
of one and the same fact; conditions are accidental so far as we have
abstracted a fragment and set it up as the whole; they are necessary the
moment it is required to pass from this abstraction back to the concrete
fact. Both are teleological in character—contingency referring to the
separation of means from end, due to the fact that the end having been
already reached the means have lost their value for us; necessity being
the reference of means to an end _which has still to be got_. Necessary
means _needed_; contingency means no longer required—because already
enjoyed.
Note that the necessity of the means has reference to an end still to
be attained, and in so far itself hypothetical or contingent, while the
contingent circumstances are no longer needed precisely because they have
resulted in a definite outcome (which, accordingly, is now a fact, and,
in that sense, necessary) and we begin to see how completely necessity
and chance are bound up with each other.
Their correlation may thus be stated: _If_ we are to reach an end we
_must_ take certain means; while so far as we want an undefined end,
an end in general, conditions which accompany it are mere accidents.
Whichever way the relationship be stated, the underlying truth is that we
are dealing with only partial phases of fact, which, having been unduly
separated from each other through their erection into distinct wholes,
have now to be brought back into their real unity.
In the first place, then, _if_ I am to reach an end, certain means
_must_ be used. Here the end is obviously postulated; save as it is
begged (presupposed), the necessity of the means has no sense. If,
when starving, I am to live I must steal a dinner, but, having stolen,
the logical but unsympathetic judge may question the relevancy (that
is, the necessity) of my end, and thus cut the ground out from under
the necessity of my means. My end requires _its_ justification, the
establishing of its validity, before the necessity of the means is
anything more than hypothetical. The proximate end must be referred to a
more ultimate and inclusive end to get any solid ground. Here we have our
choice: we may deny the existence of any organic whole in life and keep
chasing in a never-ending series, the _progressus ad infinitum_, after
an end valid in itself. In this case we never get beyond a hypothetical
necessity—something is necessary _if_ we are to have something else,
the necessity being relative to the implied doubt. Or, being convinced
that life is a whole and not a series merely, we may say there is one
comprehensive end which gives its own validity to the lesser ends in
so far as they constitute it. While, on the other alternative, we
reach only a hypothetical necessity, on this we reach none at all. The
comprehensive end is no end at all in the sense of something by itself
to be reached by means external to it. Any such end would be simply one
in the infinite series and would be itself hypothetical. Whenever minor
ends cease to be in turn means to further ends it is because they have
become parts, constituent elements, of the higher end and thus ceased to
be steps towards an end and beyond and outside of themselves. Given a
final (i. e., inclusive) end, eating and drinking, study and gossip, play
and business, cease to be means _towards_ an end and become its concrete
definition, its analytic content. The minor activities state the supreme
activity in its specific factors.
Our dilemma is the choice between an end which itself has no existence
save upon presupposition of another end, (is contingent,) and an end
which as an end in itself simply _is_.
The externality of means to end is merely a symptom of lack of
specification or concreteness in the end itself. _If_ I am going to
invent some improvement in a type-writer, the necessity of going through
certain preliminary steps is exactly proportionate to the indefiniteness
of my conception of what the improvement is to be; when the end is
realised, the operations which enter into the realisation cease to be
means necessary to an end and become the specific _content_ of that end.
The improvement is a _fact_, having such and such elements defining it.
If I simply want, in general, to get my mail I _must_ take this path
(there being but one road); but if my end is not thus general, if it is
individualised with concrete filling, the walk to the office may become
a part of the end, a part of the actual fact. In so far, of course, it
loses all aspect of necessitation. It simply _is_. And in general, so
far as my end is vague, or abstract, so far as it is not specified as
to its details, so far the filling up of its empty schema to give it
particularity (and thus make it fact) appears as a means necessary to
reach an end outside itself. The growth in concreteness of the end itself
is transformed into ways of effecting an end already presupposed. Or, to
state it in yet one other way, determination in the sense of definition
in consciousness is hypostatised into determination in the sense of a
physical making.
The point may come out more clearly if we consider it with the emphasis
on chance instead of upon necessity. The usual statement that chance is
relative to ignorance seems to me to convey the truth though not in the
sense generally intended—viz., that if we knew more about the occurrence
we should see it necessitated by its conditions. Chance is relative to
ignorance in the sense rather that it refers to an indefiniteness in
our conception of what we are doing. In our consciousness of our end
(our acts) we are always making impossible abstractions; we break off
certain phases of the act which are of chief interest to us, without
any regard to whether the concrete conditions of action—that is, the
deed in its whole definition—permits any such division. Then, when in
our actual doing the circumstances to which we have not attended thrust
themselves into consciousness—when, that is to say, the act appears in
more of its own specific nature—we dispose of those events, foreign to
our conscious purpose, as accidental; we did not want them or intend
them—what more proof of their accidental character is needed? The falling
of a stone upon a man’s head as he walks under a window is “chance,”
for it has nothing to do with what the man proposed to do, it is no
part of his conception of that walk. To an enemy who takes that means
of killing him, it is anything but an accident, being involved in
_his_ conscious purpose. It is “chance” when we throw a two and a six;
for the concreteness of the act falls outside of the content of our
intention. We intended _a_ throw, some throw, and in so far the result
is not accidental, but this special result, being irrelevant to our
conception of what we were to do, in so far is contingent. The vagueness
or lack of determinateness in our end, the irrelevancy of actual end to
conscious intent, chance, are all names for the same thing. And if I
am asked whether a gambler who has a hundred dollars upon the outcome
does not _intend_ to throw double sixes, I reply that he has no such
intention—unless the dice are loaded. He may _hope_ to make that throw,
but he cannot intend it save as he can define that act—tell how to do it,
tell, that is, just _what_ the act is. Or, once more, if I intend to get
my mail and there are four paths open to me it is chance which I take,
just in proportion to the abstractness of my end. If I have not defined
it beyond the mere “general result” of getting mail, anything else is
extraneous and in so far contingent. If the end is individualised to the
extent, say, of getting the mail in the shortest possible time, or with
the maximum of pleasant surroundings, or with the maximum of healthy
exercise, the indifferency of the “means,” and with it their contingency,
disappears. This or that path is no longer a mere means which _may_ be
taken to get a result foreign to its own value; the path is an intrinsic
part of the end.
In so far as a man presents to himself an end in general, he sets up an
abstraction so far lacking in detail as (taken _per se_) to exclude the
possibility of realisation. In order to exist as concrete or individual
(and of course, nothing can exist except as individual or concrete)
it must be defined or particularised. But so far as consciousness is
concerned the original vague end is _the_ reality; it is all that the man
cares about and hence constitutes his act. The further particularisation
of the end, therefore, instead of appearing as what it really is, viz.,
the discovery of the actual reality, presents itself as something
outside that end. This externality to the end previously realised in
consciousness is, taken as mere externality, contingency, or accident;
taken as none the less so bound up with the desired end that it must
be gone through before reaching that end, it is necessary. Chance, in
other words, stands for the irrelevancy as the matter at first presents
itself to consciousness; necessity is the required, but partial, negation
of this irrelevancy. Let it be complete, instead of partial, and we
have the one real activity defined throughout. With reference to this
reality, conditions are neither accidental nor necessary, but simply
constituting elements—they neither may be nor must be, but just are. What
is irrelevant is now not simply indifferent; it is excluded, eliminated.
What is relevant is no longer something required in order to get a result
beyond itself; it is incorporated into the result, it is integral.
It now remains to connect the two parts of our discussion, the logical
and the practical consideration of necessity, and show that, as
suggested, logical necessity rests upon teleological—that, indeed, it
is the teleological read backwards. The logical process of discovering
and stating the reality of some event simply reverses the process which
the mind goes through in setting up and realising an end. Instead of the
killing of an enemy as something to be accomplished, we have the fact of
a murder to be accounted for. Just as on the practical side, the end, as
it first arises in consciousness, is an end in general and thus contrasts
with the concrete end which is individualised; so the fact, as at first
realised in consciousness, is a _bare_ fact, and thus contrasts with the
actual event with its complete particularisation. The actual fact, the
murder as it really took place, is one thing; the fact as it stands in
consciousness, the phases of the actual event which are picked out and
put together, is another thing. The fact of knowledge, it is safe to
say, is no _fact_ at all; that is, if there had been in reality no more
particularisation, no more of detail, than there is consciousness, the
murder would never have happened. But just as, practically, we take the
end in general to be the real thing, (since it is the only thing of any
direct interest,) so in knowledge we take the bare fact as abstracted
from the actual whole, as _the_ fact. Just as the end of the savage is
merely to kill his enemy, so the “fact” is merely the dead body with
the weapon sticking in it. The fact, as it stands in consciousness, is
indeterminate and partial, but, since it is in consciousness by itself,
it is taken as a whole and as the certain thing. But as the abstractness
of the “end in general” is confessed in the fact that means are required
in order to make it real—to give it existence—so the unreal character of
the “fact” is revealed in the statement that the causes which produced
it are unknown and have to be discovered. The bare fact thus becomes
a result to be accounted for: in this conception the two sides are
combined; the “fact” is at once given a certain reality of its own while
at the same time the lack of concreteness is recognised in the reference
to external causes.
The gradual introduction of further factors, under the guise of causes
accounting for the effect, defines the original vague “fact,” until,
at last, when it is accounted for, we have before us the one and only
concrete reality. This done, we no longer have an effect to be accounted
for, and causes which produce it, but one fact whose statement or
description is such and such. But intermediate between the isolation and
the integration is the stage when necessity appears. We have advanced,
we will suppose, from the bare fact of the murder to the discovery of a
large amount of “circumstantial” evidence regarding that fact. We hear of
a man who had a quarrel with the deceased; he cannot account for himself
at the time when the murder _must_ have been committed; he is found
to have had a weapon like that with which the murder _must_ have been
committed. Finally we conclude he _must_ have been the murderer. What
do these “musts” (the “must” of the time, weapon, and murderer) mean?
Are they not obviously the gradual filling-in of the previously empty
judgment, through bringing things at first unconnected into relation
with each other? The existence of the man M. N. is wholly isolated from
the “fact” of the murder till it is learned that he had a grudge against
the murdered man; this third fact, also distinct _per se_, brought
into connection with the others (the “fact” of the murder and of the
existence of M. N.) compels them to move together; the result is at
first the possibility, later, as the points of connection get more and
more marked and numerous, the “necessity,” that M. N. is the murderer.
Further, it is clear that this “must” marks not a greater certainty or
actuality than a mere “is” would indicate, but rather a doubt, a surmise
or guess gradually gaining in certainty. When the fact is really made
out to our satisfaction, we drop the “must” and fall back on the simple
_is_. Only so long as there is room for doubt, and thus for argument
do we state that the time and weapon must have been such and such. So
when we finally conclude that the murderer must have been M. N., it
means that we have woven a large number of facts, previously discrete,
into such a state of inter-relationship that we do not see how to avoid
denying their discreteness and incorporating them all into one concrete
whole, or individual fact. That we still say “must” shows, however, that
we have not quite succeeded in overcoming the partial and indefinite
character of the original “fact.” Had we succeeded in getting the whole
fact before us the judgment would take this form: The murder _is_ a fact
of such and such definite nature, having as its content such and such
precise elements. In this comprehensive whole all distinction of effect
to be accounted for and causes which produce clean disappears. The idea
of necessity, in a word, comes in only while we are still engaged in
correcting our original error, but have not surrendered it root and
branch; this error being that the fragment of reality which we grasp is
concrete enough to warrant the appellation “fact.”
A great deal of attention has been directed to the category of cause
and effect. One striking feature of the ordinary consideration is, that
it takes for granted the matter most needing investigation and aims the
inquiry at the dependent member of the firm. The effect seems to be so
clearly _there_, while the cause is so obviously something to be searched
for that the category of effect is assumed, and it is supposed that only
the idea of causation is in need of examination. And yet this abstraction
of certain phases of fact, the erection of the parts thus abstracted into
distinct entities, which, though distinct, are still dependent in their
mode of existence, is precisely the point needing examination. It is but
another instance of the supreme importance of our practical interests.
The effect is the end, the practical outcome, which interests us; the
search for causes is but the search for the means which would produce
the result. We call it “means and end” when we set up a result to be
reached in the future and set ourselves upon finding the causes which
put the desired end in our hands; we call it “cause and effect” when
the “result” is given, and the search for means is a regressive one. In
either case the separation of one side from the other, of cause from
effect, of means from end, has the same origin: a partial and vague idea
of the whole fact, together with the habit of taking this part (because
of its superior practical importance) for a whole, for a fact.
I hope now to have made good my original thesis: that the idea of
necessity marks a certain stage in the development of judgment; that
it refers to a residuum, in our judgments and thus in our objects,
of indeterminateness or vagueness, which it replaces without wholly
negating; that it is thus relative to “chance” or contingency; that its
value consists wholly in the impulse given judgment towards the _is_, or
the concrete reality defined throughout. The analysis has been long; the
reader may have found it not only tedious, but seemingly superfluous,
since, as he may be saying to himself, no one nowadays regards necessity
as anything but a name for fixed uniformities in nature, and of this view
of the case nothing has been said. I hope, however, that when we come
to a consideration of necessity as equivalent to uniformity, it will be
found that the course of this discussion has not been irrelevant, but the
sure basis for going further.
JOHN DEWEY.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] This article, as the title may indicate, was suggested by Mr.
Peirce’s article upon “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” As, however,
my thought takes finally a different turn, I have deemed it better to let
it run its own course from the start, and so have not referred, except
indirectly, to Mr. Peirce’s argument. I hope this will not be taken as a
desire to slur over my indebtedness to him.
[66] The reason of this abstraction is in practical nature, as already
indicated. For all the savage _cares_ about it, the death in general,
_is_ the real fact. It is all that interests him. It is hardly worth
while to attempt to persuade the savage; indeed, if he were not only a
savage, but also a philosopher, he might boldly challenge the objector
to present _any_ definition of object which should not refer objectivity
to man’s practical activity; although he might, as a shrewd savage,
admit that some one activity (or self) to which the object is referred
has more content than another. In this case, I, for one, should not care
about entering the lists against the savage. But when the common-sense
philosopher, who resists all attempts to reconstruct the original object
on the ground that a fact is a fact and all beyond that is metaphysics,
is also a case-hardened nominalist (as he generally is), it is time to
protest. It might be true that the real object is always relative to the
value of some action; but to erect this pure universal into the object,
and then pride one’s self on enlightenment in rejecting the “scholastic
figment” of the reality of universals is a little too much.
THE ISSUES OF “SYNECHISM.”
In a late number of _The Monist_, (Vol. II, No. 4,) there appears a
singularly acute and profound article, from the pen of one of the ablest
of American logicians and mathematicians, Mr. Charles S. Peirce. Its
subject is “The Law of Mind”—the idea of continuity. The writer tells
us, (p. 534,) “the tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which
I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy, may
conveniently be termed _Synechism_.” With this _synechistic_ philosophy,
as applied to mind, the paper is occupied, to the exclusion, for the
nonce, of Mr. Peirce’s companion doctrine of _Tychism_,[67] which was
dealt with, by him, in the January, 1891, and April, 1892, issues of _The
Monist_. These conceptions are, both of them, to be viewed as essential
to philosophy as a whole, but the latter is; for the present, allowed
to drop out of sight, in order to allow of the due elaboration of the
former.[68]
THE FORMULA OF SYNECHISM.
The formula of Synechism, with which the article begins, is as follows:
“Logical analysis applied to mental phenomena shows that there
is but one law of mind, namely, that ideas tend to spread
continuously, and to affect certain others which stand to them
in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they
lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others,
but gain generality, and become welded with other ideas.” (Vol.
II, No. 4, p. 534.)
The individuality and continuity of ideas are, then, shown respectively
to involve no contradiction; an idea once past—in the sense of an
event in an individual consciousness—is not wholly past, it is only
going—“infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable past date.”
Thus the conclusion is reached that “the present is connected with the
past by a series of real, infinitesimal steps.” Again, “We are forced to
say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval
of time. This is all that is requisite.” (_Ibid._, pp. 535-536.)
All that it is necessary to say at the outset is, that this view is
supported by an elaborate inquiry into the nature of infinity and
continuity in general, into which, for the purpose of the present paper,
it is not needful to enter. And this for two reasons: (1) The synechistic
philosophy, by itself, does not profess to be monistic. Its expounder
does not, even if his Tychism were not in reserve, profess to carry it
beyond the realm of mind, with all that is implied in such a reservation.
Now, it is the bearing of Mr. Peirce’s Synechism upon a monistic solution
of the universe with which the present article is concerned. And (2)
Mr. Peirce’s method of treatment, though precise and logical in the
direction of its own path, is too purely technical to be summarised for
the general reader’s benefit. But withal, Synechism is far too fertile,
not so much in respect of what it makes clear, as suggestively, and, if
the expression may be allowed, _obliquely_, to be passed over without
comment. Its excogitator is eminently frank; he does not conceal the
difficulties which, ever and anon, occur in his statement. Sometimes
his theory seems a trifle too wide for the facts encountered, sometimes
rather too scanty to contain them. Such phrases as the following: “No, I
think we can only hold”—p. 552; “we are driven to perceive”—p. 555; “this
obliges me to say”—p. 557; “the principle with which I set out requires
me to maintain”—p. 558; “the only answer that I can, at present, make
is”—p. 559, etc., etc., do every credit to the writer’s candor, but they
would scarcely occur in an exposition, which, in the mind of its author,
made the rough places altogether plain. Synechism, even with Tychism in
the background, probably does not, in Mr. Peirce’s own mind, completely
solve the world-riddle, at least, as yet. Still these very pauses
themselves, on the part of a thinker of such ability, are eminently
suggestive. To use his own words: “the present paper is intended to show
what Synechism is, and what it leads to.” Let us emphasise this latter
clause, as likely to be more fruitful than the former.
MR. PEIRCE’S POSITIVISM.
Mr. Peirce, in spite of his theory of chance, is, in his Synechism,
almost severely a positivist;[69] but his positivism, like most of that
current nowadays, does not go deep enough. He is positivist, _after_ he
has got externality—fertile in excitations—comfortably disposed around
his subject; and vibrations, undulations, attractions, etc., ready to
play upon the thousand-stringed harp, _but not before_. For, “we must not
tax introspection,” he tells us, p. 548, “to make a phenomenon manifest,
which essentially involves externality,” when the real problem at issue
is: Is there externality, in the vulgar sense, at all, or is it only that
_rationalised externality_ which _circumspection_, within the limits
of egoity, reveals? Now, upon this a good deal hinges. At all events
the difference in question, or, rather, that there _is_ a difference,
has been mooted, to say the least. And, this being the case, it is a
little tedious, when the really vital point of the spatial extension of
feelings is being debated, to have this illustration brought in, (p.
548,): “Moreover, our own feelings are focused in attention to such a
degree, that we are not aware that ideas are not brought to an absolute
unity. Just as nobody, not instructed by special experiment, has any idea
how very, very little of the field of vision is distinct.” Why, that is
reasoning in a circle, if some systems are true; and it is a begging of
the question, if they are the reverse.
If the system of so-called objective reality were, at sight, wholly
veracious, if everything existed just as it seems, this positivism of
Mr. Peirce’s might be workable. Then no one would seek to go beneath
the process of the apparent, the actually visible, for a _rationale_.
But modern science teaches, in its very primer, that many things are,
and act, quite otherwise than as they seem to be, and do. Appearances
_rationalised_ are alone to be accepted. The sun does not “rise”
and “set,” as it seems to do. The earth is not, as it appears to be,
an immovable plane, and so on. And, this once allowed, where is the
principle to end? If the superficial judgment may be thus corrected,
or reversed, it is liable to revision or reversal _ad infinitum_,
unless reason be shown to the contrary. It may thus be disputed whether
our author is quite in order in writing, as he does, and using the
statement to support his theory—“Precisely how primary sensations, as
colors and tones, are excited, we cannot tell, in the present state of
psychology.... As far as sight and hearing are in question, we know that
they are only excited by vibrations of inconceivable complexity; and the
chemical senses are probably not more simple.” (P. 557.)
To argue, we cannot tell precisely _how_ they are excited, but we know
that they _are_ excited, is somewhat feminine; seeing that the said
“excitement” is not patent on the surface of ordinary perception. And,
this being the case, the excitement, or its mode rather, not being given
immediately, but only mentally annexed, Mr. Peirce is not consistently
positivist. It is equally open to an opponent to “annex” something else
of his own to the “given” thing, or altogether to deny the necessity of
anything whatever being thus annexed. In any case that (if anything)
which is sought to be annexed must stand the test of positivism; we must
know _if_ such a thing is, and _what_ it is precisely. And this is just
what Mr. Peirce cannot do for us. He cannot tell us exactly what the
“excitant” of feelings _is_; he can only guess what it is “_something
like_,” viz.: the feelings themselves. Hence the following:
“The principle with which I set out [that of continuity]
requires me to maintain that these feelings are communicated to
the nerves by continuity, _so that there must be something like
them in the excitants themselves_. If this seems extravagant,
it is to be remembered that it is the sole possible way of
reaching any explanation of sensation, which otherwise must be
pronounced a general fact absolutely inexplicable and ultimate.
Now absolute inexplicability is a hypothesis which sound logic
refuses, under any circumstances, to justify.” (P. 558.—The
italics are not in the original.)
There must be something like the feelings in the excitants of the
feelings. Now, this point is worthy of the closest attention. Note that
“the excitant” _alone_ is mentioned. _Vibrations_ excite sight and
hearing. Yet, from what follows, it is plain that Synechism is not
inconsistent with belief in a fixed objective. “Even the least psychical
of peripheral sensations, that of pressure, has, in its excitation,
conditions which, though apparently simple, are seen to be complicated
enough when we consider _the molecules and their attractions_,” pp.
557-558. Can there, then, be any doubt that we have here three distinct
things: (1) a subjective, (2) an “excitant,” and (3) an objective; the
middle term being a vehicle of communication between the first and third?
It does not affect this presentation of Mr. Peirce’s position that,
at an earlier stage of his argument, he speaks of matter—synonymous,
presumably, with the objective—as being “not completely dead, but merely
mind, hide-bound with habits,” as “partially deadened” or “effete,”
mind; or that the editor of _The Monist_ says that, with Mr. Peirce,
“mind is the beginning of all.” (_The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p.
95.) The question, at present, is not regarding origins, but regarding
co-existences. So that there is a distinct _hiatus_ here, arising from
the confusion of the stimulant, or excitant, of sensation with the
objective itself.[70] Now, the stimulant of sensation is never the object
perceived. Hence, once an objective is admitted, a trinity of entities is
unavoidable, since still less can the “stimulant” be the subject. This
special difficulty, in the present writer’s opinion, is inseparable from
dualism in every form. How it besets Mr. Peirce’s theory is evident from
his hazarded suggestion: “There must be _something like_ the feelings
in the excitants.” He thus uses only two of his cosmical terms, and
gives the third the go-by! All dualism halts, but surely there is here a
palpable stumble.
In a recent article in _The Open Court_[71] I have pointed out the
vanity of introducing a vehicle of communication between object and
subject, especially emphasising the fact that, once this intermediate
term is brought in, the veritable objective disappears. “Once you bring
in vibrations,” I remarked, “you practically provide a _second_ object,
which is really a part of the subject, and, in order to do this, you
have taken from the original objective all that composed it.”[72] (_The
Open Court_, p. 3361.)
Is it any wonder, then, that Mr. Peirce should suppose the excitants
to be “something like” the excited feelings? Since he, practically,
surrenders the objective, what could more closely resemble the subjective
than the subjective itself? If he had adopted the position of Hume,
and made impressions and ideas all-in-all, his principle of continuity
might hold. But this he does not do, since (1) he implicitly admits the
objective element, and (2) even if he did not do this, there must be
something other than the idea or feeling in his system, since, otherwise,
there could be no ground for the charge of seeming “extravagance,” which,
he admits, may be leveled against, at least one of, his conclusions.
FEELINGS SPATIALLY EXTENDED.
This leads us to Mr. Peirce’s conclusions regarding subjective spatial
extension—the spatial extension of feelings—as the result of observation
of irritated protoplasm. Our attention is directed to an excited mass of
protoplasm,—an amœba, or a slime-mould,—which “does not differ in any
radical way from the contents of a nerve-cell, though its functions may
be less specialised.” (P. 547.) The irritation is induced when, say, the
amœba is “quiescent and rigid,” and we note its behaviour under it. That
feeling passes from one part of this amorphous continuum of protoplasm to
another, we are led to believe. And this conclusion follows: “Whatever
there is in the whole phenomenon to make us think there is feeling in
such a mass of protoplasm,—_feeling_, but plainly no _personality_,—goes
logically to show that that feeling has a subjective, or substantial,
spatial extension, as the excited state has.” This is a chain of
reasoning. Let us examine its links. We have:
(1) The behaviour of the amœba under immediate, mechanical irritation—the
spread, or spatial extension, of the state of irritation.
(2) We are asked to identify this spread-out irritation, this field of
excitation, with “feeling” on the part of the amœba, because there is “no
doubt that it feels when it is excited.”
(3) From the spatial extension of the irritation, thus identified with
feeling, we are asked to conclude that the feeling, in the amœba, has a
subjective, spatial extension as the excited state has, and, finally,
passing from the feeling of the amœba to our own feelings, by inference,
we are asked to admit:
(4) Not that we have necessarily a feeling of bigness, but that “the
feeling [inferentially arrived at from the spread-out irritation on the
part of the amœba] as a subject of inhesion is big.” (P. 548.)
After this, we are disposed to agree with Mr. Peirce when he says: “This
is, no doubt, a difficult idea to seize”; not, as he goes on to say, “for
the reason that it is a subjective, not an objective, extension,” but on
the ground that the reasoning involves, plainly, not only the subjective
and objective, but what Clifford calls the “ejective,” as well, and this
assumption, _inter alia_, that the last-named lies on the same plane as
the former. Never, surely, was the conclusion that feelings have spatial
extension more easily reached. It is only when we find that in (1) we
are dealing with the objective pure and simple, observed phenomena; that
in (2) the connection between irritation or excitation, and feeling
is assumed, in the object, because feeling, subjectively, is found to
accompany irritation; that (3) as the irritation, in the amœba, is spread
out, so is the feeling to be viewed; and (4) that, as the feeling of the
amœba, so is our feeling to be considered, viz.: that the feeling, “as
a subject of inhesion, is big,” we are led to say after all this, that,
by such a process, anything, or everything, could be demonstrated,—the
_field_ of spatial extension, for example, having no more claim to be
assumed than the _point_ at which the irritation admittedly begins. Why
should the _middle_ stage of the irritation be selected in preference to
the _initial_ and _final_ ones? The irritation originates in a point,
spreads, and then dies out. Thus our feeling, (we purposely use Mr.
Peirce’s nomenclature,) or idea, of an elephant, is unquestionably,
as a subject of inhesion, “big.” _But only for a time, and not at
first._ Really, our idea, or feeling—in Synechism—of an elephant, must
logically commence as a minute speck, and return to this vanishing-point
again. There is no other way out of it. For must not the analogy of the
irritated amœba be followed throughout, and if not, why not?
DUALISM AND THE WAY OUT.
The _crux_ of philosophy, from the time of Hume to the present day, has
been, what may be summarised as, the consciousness of succession _as_
succession. The hours pass over the mental dial, but, though one succeeds
the other, something is needed besides the succession of the terms of the
series to give consciousness of the series _as a series_, to give the
synthesis of the day made up of hours. Hume virtually gave up the problem
in eviscerating the subjective. Prof. T. H. Green only missed the point
at issue when he placed his eternal consciousness, which was to “have
and to hold” the terms of the cosmical series, as it were in solution,
for the human organism, _out of time altogether_. Mr. Peirce puts the
matter boldly when he says: “An idea once past is gone forever, [in the
sense of an event in an individual consciousness,] and any supposed
recurrence of it is another idea.” (P. 534.) In order, then, that an
idea past may be present really, and not vicariously, the notion that
consciousness necessarily occupies an interval of (finite) time must be
given up; since, to put it briefly, a second past is as much past as a
year. According to Mr. Peirce then, and his contention is supported by an
elaborate inquiry into the nature of infinity and continuity generally,
“we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.”
For the complete _rationale_, reference must necessarily be made to the
article itself.
Even the above outline, however, is sufficient to show that, here as
elsewhere, Mr. Peirce’s dualism is his snare. Nothing but this could lead
to a disintegration so complete as the following:
“In this infinitesimal interval, not only is consciousness
continuous in a subjective sense, that is, considered as a
subject, or substance, having the attribute of duration; but
also, because it is immediate consciousness, its object is
_ipso facto_ continuous.” (P. 536.)
This is to admit, practically, that there is something in consciousness
other than the consciousness itself. And this is evident, because at
one and the same time, (whether an interval of finite time, or an
infinitesimal interval,—whether an “instant” or a “moment,”—does not
matter,) these two entities are different. For:
“This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object
represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively,
or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced
in the second moment.” (_Ibid._)
But this “mediate” and “immediate” cannot simultaneously exist, unless
there is something else _to which_ they do so exist. It is only paltering
with us in a double sense to speak of “instant” and “moment” in this
connection. The one may pass into the other, but there is “a time when”
(it matters not whether the interval be finite or infinitesimal) they do
not coexist. Hence, they are not the same, but different.
According to Mr. Peirce’s notation, for all ordinary purposes we may
write, if _a_ is a finite quantity, and _i_ an infinitesimal, _a_ + _i_
= _a_. “That is to say, this is so for all purposes of measurement.” Be
it so; the infinitesimal may be neglected for purposes of calculation.
But such a formula can only be experimental. The theory which embodies
it cannot avail for a world-scheme; to admit it would be to grant that
a thing is, and is not, at one and the same time. Surely the most
superficial reader will see that, to put it popularly, a world-scheme
admits of no alternative subject to accept, or to reject, a neglectable
quantity.
And this is not the only instance of dualism in Mr. Peirce’s world-scheme
as a totality. For have we not Synechism and Tychism as well? With the
latter Mr. Peirce does not deal in the paper now under consideration. He
must, however, be credited, or debited, with it, as held in reserve. For
our present purpose it is not necessary to examine Tychism in detail. Its
alleged existence is sufficient. For, and here let the significance of
what follows be noted, in Mr. Peirce’s view, as opposed to determinism,
Tychism exists as a principle. It _is_, otherwise it could not be
expounded as operative. But it also exists as an idea, first, it may be,
in our author’s mind, and subsequently in the minds of his disciples.
Thus it falls into the synechistic province: “As an idea it can only be
affected by an idea, by anything but an idea it cannot be affected at
all.” (“The Law of Mind,” p. 557.) Yet to affirm Tychism thus impotent,
because unaffectible, outside the synechistic sphere, is to contradict
Mr. Peirce’s conclusions, for if Tychism is nothing outside the ideal
realm, it is altogether inside it. Hence Synechism is everything
practically, and Tychism nothing. But that Mr. Peirce will not have. He
has a two-fold Tychism, that is the fact; actual and operative on the one
hand, ideal on the other. And this is dualism confessed.
Mr. Peirce’s method is quite fertile in duplication of the subjective
entity. His latest paper, “Man’s Glassy Essence,” (_The Monist_, Vol.
III, No. 1,) contains some typical instances.
“Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of
action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter.
Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character
as feeling, it appears as consciousness.” (P. 20.)
This is the strictly empirical view. And it may be possibly defended
with the contention that all problems, to be duly examined, must, in
the first place, be viewed from that standpoint. But it must be plainly
manifest to any unprejudiced thinker that, even granted a total cosmical
problem made up of separate problems of an individual nature, the same
method of solving the sum cannot be employed which is used in solving
its constituents. In the above instance, considering matter in its
totality, and consciousness in its totality, what is left to view them
indifferently from “outside,” or “inside”? Plainly nothing. Still more
transparent an example is the following:
“The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In
each action of that habit certain atoms get thrown out of
their orbit, and replaced by others. Upon all the different
occasions it is different atoms that are thrown off, but they
are analogous from a physical point of view, and there is an
inward sense of their being analogous. Every time one of the
associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less vague sense
that there are others, that it has a general character, and of
about what this general character is.” (P. 20.)
This is part of the answer to the query: How do general ideas appear in
the molecular theory of protoplasm? Now, without discussing the value
of this _rationale_, as affecting Mr. Peirce’s own theories, it is not
difficult to see what its acceptance would “lead to.” Certain atoms of
a molecule get thrown out and are replaced by _others_. This happens
repeatedly. On different occasions _different atoms_ come and go. Yet
they are “analogous,” and there is “an inward sense” of this. Upon whose
shoulders is the burden of proving the analogy placed, or of experiencing
it even? With whom or what is there “an inward sense”? Perhaps it is
better not to answer otherwise than to say that if this faculty be
not present in the ever changing molecule to begin with, it cannot be
logically reached by any process of multiplying it.
THE MONISTIC SOLUTION.
Monism, as a unitary system of the universe, does not necessarily commend
itself to acceptance simply _as_ monism. To say, this is dualism,
_therefore_ it cannot be a correct _rationale_ of the universe, since
the only true one must be monistic, is to start with an unphilosophical
prepossession. The true solution may be two-fold, or it may be manifold.
But it is not too much to say, perhaps, on the other hand, that, even as
causes may not be multiplied without necessity, even so phenomena must
not logically be divided into independent groupings without sufficient
reason given. Preference should be accorded to a monistic, rather than
to a dualistic, system, not on the ground alone of the simplicity of
the former, but on the ground that a theory which has one explanation
for one set of phenomena and another explanation for a second set, must
first demonstrate that a unitary conception of the universe is, at
least, improbable, otherwise it will always be hinted that the dualism
in question has not gone deep enough to find a synthetic bond wherewith
to unite the apparently diverse. Mr. Peirce, throughout his article on
Synechism, constantly touches, despite his latent dualism, the margin
of a truth so great as to merit the title of transcendent. As often he
misses it. And his concluding words are, in this connection, almost
wistful: “The facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us
in the face, are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily
discerned. That has been remarked from time immemorial.” (P. 559.) But
though thus “remarked,” the maxim has, as immemorially, been neglected
in practice. To none can this remark be more fitly applied than to the
excogitator of Synechism, himself seeing that, having arrived at the
point of asserting that “there must be _something like_ the feelings in
the excitants themselves,” he does not see that the excitant and the
feeling are one and the same; and that there is no second or third term
in the cosmical equation.
Does this seem “extravagant”? If so, the reply must be _not_ that it is
the only escape from an otherwise inexplicable difficulty, but that there
is really no difficulty at all. What Mr. Peirce’s own Synechism “_leads
to_” is that the past, the present, and the to-come, alike of matter and
idea, are not reconciled by “time and its flow,” or even by the logic
of infinitesimals, subtle though that may be, but that the contents of
each and all, with all their apparently infinite variety, resolve into a
consistent unity.
THE “MISSING LINK.”
Pushed to a logical conclusion, the excitants and the feelings owe
their apparent variety to their assigned position in a series, the
correspondence or relation between them being _only another link in
the self-same chain_. Vulgar realism never fathoms this explanation.
It always harps upon the one string that idealism, and more especially
idealistic monism, fails to account for variety or difference;
forgetting, or rather never seeing, that difference or variety which
is its essence, is only one more added perception on the same plane
with ordinary perceptions; so that given _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_,—sundry
perceptions,—their essential variety may be stated as _e_. Or this may
be stated numerically; variety, as a whole, being nothing more than
the sum of differences, which is always something other than the terms
differentiated, but always on the same level with them—the difference
between any continuous number, above unity, and another number being a
third number, which is different from either. Variety in numbers cannot
be expressed otherwise than numerically. So, in the last recess, the
variety of colors is only colorable, of tones audible, and so on. The
“vibrations of inconceivable complexity” which, according to Mr. Peirce,
“excite sight and hearing,” can be approximately stated numerically,
so that the difference between red and, say, yellow, is a number
corresponding to another color, which may be orange or not; it being
part of the present scientific theory of light that any specific number
of ethereal undulations happening between the colors of the ocular
spectrum, corresponds to a possible color, although the retinal expanse
may be insensible to these particular rates of tremor. To Mr. Peirce it
may appear “extravagant,” but the difference between any two colors and
tones is another color, another tone; just as the difference between any
two numbers is a third number. This is the logical outcome of his own
Synechism; _this_, in part, is what it “leads to.”
TIME AND ITS “FLOW” RATIONALISED.
Excitants and feelings being unified, and the element of variety,
hitherto supposed to be the exclusive copyright of vulgar realism, shown
to be nothing but another term added to the series, or, numerically, a
concurrent series—so that should _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ ... be a series,
the variety of the series may be expressed as _e_, or the individual
differences as _f_, _g_, _h_ ...—it only needs an examination of what
Mr. Peirce terms “time and its flow,” to render his system a completely
monistic one, and this although true monism is much more than the
negation of determinism, synechistically expressed.
In Mr. Peirce’s article under examination, “The Law of Mind,” the
notation of infinitesimals, which forms the keystone of Synechism, is
only introduced after a lament over the incapacity, or unworkableness
rather, of finite time, when the duration of consciousness is involved.
If _finite_ time is to come in as a factor—“an idea once past [in the
sense of an event in an individual consciousness] is gone forever, and
any supposed recurrence of it is another idea” (p. 534). And the problem
which Mr. Peirce sets himself to solve is how in effect to bring _back_
this past idea—not vicariously—but in all its pristine freshness, into
the now-time. This is sought to be accomplished by the explanation that
the past idea is “not wholly past, it is only going, less past than any
assignable past date”—and so on through the intricacies of Mr. Peirce’s
infinitesimal theory, into which we need not enter at present. But the
statement of the, supposed, difficulty which finite time presents in this
connection,—the past idea really past and gone, and the recurrence of it
another idea,—if put in a slightly different form, hints a solution, in
continuity with the foregoing pages, without the aid of the infinitesimal
at all. _That an idea is once past and gone_, any occurrence, or
recurrence, of this idea, _is another idea_.[73]
But, in the meantime, let us see what Mr. Peirce has to say regarding
“time and its flow”:
“One of the most marked features about the law of mind is, that
it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past
to future. The relation of past to future is, in reference
to the law of mind, different from the relation of future to
past. This makes one of the great contrasts between the law
of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more
distinction between the two opposite directions in time than
between moving northward, and moving southward” (p. 546).
This for once is not very clear. It is difficult to see how “the law of
physical force” can be spoken of as “in time,” to the exclusion of mind;
not easy, also, to understand the distinction further insisted upon. But
the intention is evident, viz., to perpetuate, if not to originate, a
cosmical duality. Time, it would seem, marches indifferently in at least
two directions, though it is not very clear how this is accomplished.
And then the old fiction follows, that “Time, as the universal form of
change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, etc.”
(p. 547.)
The same notation suits in this case as in the foregoing. Time is only
another term in the series. If _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ be a series, _e_
is the variety, _f_ the whole time involved, and _g_ the individual
intervals. Of course all this is not a simple series, it is an infinitely
complicated one; the above arrangement is only intended to show that
difference, variety, time, etc., are no mysterious entities pervading
events, acting as their “form” or carrying them in their “flow,” but
simply percepts, or concepts, on a level with others.
This is not patent on the surface, it may be. Time has the appearance
of a current in which events float. But this is an illusion dispelled
by examination. Events cannot be submerged in time. Time cannot be
the vehicle of events. It is impossible to conceive time as existing
simultaneously with an event. It always follows it. What to Mr. Peirce
appears as a “flow,” arises from the foregoing. Take events, percepts,
or concepts, as a hypothetical series, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ ... and their
times as _a´_, _b´_, _c´_, _d´_ ... the first series contains the event
_per se_, or as happening; the “time when” is contained in the second
series, practically inseparable from the first, but the time when
necessarily follows—consequently if the first be _a_, the second must
be, at least _a_. But no concept or percept is abstract, except the
concept time itself, which, being unconnected, _seems_ anywhere, and,
like its fellow-abstract space, is spread out, to us, tri-dimensionally,
as past, present, and to come. And, as in space the position is simply
spectral,[74] a question of perspective or adjustment, so, in time, the
timal series is adjusted to the substantive idea. But this two-fold
spectral succession breeds by comparative intensity (which is another
complex series) the sense of a flow, where there is none, but only the
idea of a flowing, which is another matter. Thus, the so-called “veil
of the future” is no more a veil than it is a brickbat. It is simply
the indeterminateness of an unconnected adjective—as if one should say,
white—and the query arises, _What_ is it that is white? When the noun is
supplied you have something definite. Just so, when the future lapses
into the present.
Thus there is never anything without, at least, these three additions:
first, variety or difference; second, time; third, relation, spatial
or otherwise. These are all terms in a series, or set of concurrent
series. Nothing can be, practically, isolated, for everything runs in a
series. But this is a much broader theory of continuity than that which
Synechism affords.[75] All apparent perplexities vanish. The difficulty
no longer exists that to perceive a series we must hold it, as it were,
in solution. Since other than series nothing is. Hence the cosmos is
an illimitable series or complex of series. But inasmuch as the timal
element (as also the spatial) occurs through the series having time-term
and space-term resident within it, all difficulty in apprehending it as
a series vanishes. The impracticability, if any, would be in viewing any
term as isolated.
THE RESULT _RE_ TYCHISM.
What a flood of light does such a system shed indirectly upon Tychism,
since the controversy between the latter and determinism mainly hinges
upon the “must be,” the imperative, as it were, of the series! It has
been very ably pointed out by Dr. Carus in his article _re_ Mr. Peirce’s
“Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No.
4, pp. 573-4.) that the formula adopted by Mr. Peirce in his Tychism,
“chance is first, law is second, the tendency of habits is third,”
involves its author in the admission of a law in a system professing to
be, in its inception at all events, chanceful and _lawless_. Mr. Peirce’s
“Synechism” professes to be the law of mind. Parenthetically, however,
it may be remarked, that the distinction as to law, and lawlessness or
“chance,” narrows itself to the plane of one term more or less in a
series, or _even to less than that subordinate place_. For, although,
for convenience sake, and for facility of contrast, we have followed
Mr. Peirce’s figure of a series, to show more clearly also to what his
theory leads, it is nevertheless plain, that time and its accompanying
relations being placed on their proper level, that of integral percepts
and concepts, the figure of a series is simply a matter of convenience
of arrangement. Certainly as the “time when” is necessarily annexed to
every percept and concept the timal element may be said to follow, not
to precede, its fellow-term. Really, however, they may be said to be
simultaneous, since the timal refinements of finite, infinite, past,
present, and future are each of them contained in a percept of its own.
EXTERNALITY A SERIAL TERM.
But if the timal element be independent as a separate percept, the
spatial as another, and so on, it follows that, although the terms of the
series may, as it were, _run_, though we cannot conceive them separated,
or as, in practice, otherwise than as continuous in their flow, still,
theoretically, a series or complex of series it _is_, and a series may
be interrupted at any term. Thus externality itself being a spatial
relation, is but _one term more_, non-essential in theory, to the term
preceding. So that when the Neo-Kantians speak of the “constitution of
the objective” it ought to be added that it is not only the content
of the objective which is thus constituted by consciousness, but that
externality, all that goes to make up what is termed “out-sidedness,” is
constituted by consciousness also.
THE NOW-TIME.
“_The present is half past, and half to come_,” (p. 546) like the color
of a curved boundary line on a particolored surface; i. e. “betwixt
and between” the two. It is here that the theory of Synechism shows
its chief defect. Up to this stage we have been dealing with ideas,
feelings, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ ... successively passing through a point
of consciousness _e_. And the infinitesimal notation suits the required
process fairly well. It is complicated enough, but it is ingenious, and
at least plausible. Nothing up to this stage would lead us to suppose
that any additional element was to be imported into the _rationale_ which
Mr. Peirce presents. As we have seen, finite time would not serve his
purpose. By however minute a _finite_ interval have _a_, _b_, _c_ or _d_
passed the point _e_, all chance of their recovery is hopeless. Well, we
have recourse to infinitesimals, and find (to put it popularly, and not
in Mr. Peirce’s technical terms) that _a_ past the point of consciousness
by an infinitesimal interval heralds _b_. So that _e_ is simultaneously
confronted with the disappearing form of the first and the appearing
form of the second, and the same with _b_, and _c_, in turn, and so on.
Thus the present, in the sense of ideas successively passing through
consciousness, is half _a_ and half _b_, then half _b_ and half _c_, this
infinitesimal gradation ultimately ensuring the presence of the whole
series in the last “moment.”
But this will not avail with the concept time itself as distinguished
from timed succession. That these two are separate with Mr. Peirce it is
impossible to doubt. He says, e. g., “Time with its continuity logically
involves some other kind of continuity than its own,” (p. 547) and
speaks of “time and its flow,” and of “time as the universal form of
change.” And it is confusing, to say the least, when we are shifted
without warning from what is practically the perceptual to the conceptual
region. Granted the ideas, the feelings, or what not, “gliding almost
imperceptibly” (as did the late Mr. Bardell to another sphere) past the
central point of consciousness, yet not wholly past, only going, less
past than any assignable past date, granted this, the assertion is not
consequently warranted that time itself, the _present_, as time, not
as involving the succession of ideas, is “half past and half to come.”
The ideas, the feelings, of which Mr. Peirce writes, successively pass
through the stage of being thus half past and half to come, but that
is by no means the same thing as saying that the present is half past,
half to come, as Synechism avers. With our theory, as presented in the
foregoing pages there is indeed no such difficulty, but Mr. Peirce, on
the other hand, has elected to stand by infinitesimally measuring time,
as applied to ideas etc., as separate from conceptual time, and must take
the consequences of his decision. He says _the present, not the present
idea_.
Now, in the concept time as a whole, in its entire range, a definite
point may be selected—to the exclusion of other points—a point having
position but not extension, as _the present_. Is it, then,—the
present,—half past, half to come, as a timed idea is? Certainly not.
There is nothing of the flow of a series in it. Further, this selection
of the “now,” as a point, does not interfere with its permanence.
“Nowness” may persist. And the moment it partook, even infinitesimally,
of the character of the past or of the future, it would cease to be the
present. In the case of a series of ideas in time the difficulty is to
get them all in present solution, as it were, without detriment to their
evident continuity, but the definition of the present as a point in time
presents no such difficulty. The conditions are quite distinct. Yet
regarding this time point—the present—Mr. Peirce assures us that it is
“half past, half to come,” which is just that of which it is the precise
negation, if words are to have any meaning.
Again, Mr. Peirce’s _rationale_ shows, upon the face of it, that there
is (1) finitely divisible time and, (2) time divided infinitesimally,
for what finite time could not do, in that it had limitations,
the infinitesimal notation readily accomplishes. In its ulterior
consequences, this is somewhat unfortunate for Synechism, inasmuch as the
consciousness of ideas in continuity being confined to the infinitesimal
theory, where, it may be asked, is the place, in consciousness, for
the succession of finite intervals? Consciousness must be practically
doubled, so to speak, if it is to hold both of these together. This
is what comes of making one’s world-scheme hang upon a mathematical
subtlety—the subtlety in question partaking as a rule, more or less of
the nature of an escape from the difficulties of the vulgar notation, the
vulgar notation remains to be reckoned with, and both have to be credited
to consciousness. As an instance of this take the following from Mr.
Peirce’s late article,[76] “Man’s Glassy Essence”—p. 15:
“In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and
firmly assimilated into a broken molecule of protoplasm,
it is necessary not only that it should have precisely the
right chemical composition, but also that it should be at
precisely the right spot _at the right time_ and should be
moving in precisely the right direction with precisely the
right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled, ...
it will be in special danger of being thrown out again” (The
italics are not in the original).
Now here is a “time when” which can be exactly specified in accordance
with the conditions. Certain results follow unless it is kept to.
This is what Mr. Peirce would doubtless consider as a timed physical
event, part and parcel of the regularity of matter, and yet an event
which, in its own time and way, goes to account for both feeling and
habit-taking—capable, therefore, of being stated in terms of finite
time, as happening at a given instant, and neither before nor after it.
But when this same molecule is, by virtue of keeping its appointment
punctually, safely installed in feeling protoplasm, the succession of
ideas, or feelings, of which, as subject, it is capable, obeys another
rule—a given _instant_ obtains no longer; it is the _moment_ which is
everything[77]—a moment half its predecessor, half its successor. Even
granted the function of the infinitesimal, this looks very much like a
reduction to absurdity. For, if the above mentioned timed coalescence
of the sub-molecule with the broken molecule were _also_ a matter of
subjective feeling, passed as process through a consciousness, the
conclusion follows that the juncture of the molecules happens at two
different times! There is no escape from this. Given the _instant_ in
the one case, the _moment_ in the other, these two cannot possibly be
the same point in time. The moment partakes, however insensibly, of the
preceding and succeeding stages, the instant does not. Hence they are not
the same but different times.
OTHERNESS.
The foregoing has a distinct bearing upon the question of “other selves”
of which Mr. Peirce writes as follows:
“The recognition by one person of another’s personality takes
place by means to some extent identical with the means by which
he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second
personality, which is as much as to say that second personality
itself, enters within the field of direct consciousness of
the first person, and is as immediately perceived as his ego,
though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between
the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the
second is recognised.” (“The Law of Mind,” p. 558.)
This is the scheme of “otherness” which, in the case of the Neo-Kantians,
particularly the French section, represented by M. Pillon, M. Renouvier,
and others, has proved such a snare. To these thinkers, (as indeed to
the late Prof. T. H. Green, of Oxford, though in a less degree,) the
so-called external world lies in “other” thinking subjects—in “foreign
centres of representations.” The free-trade doctrine has verily
penetrated to the philosophic region—the wholesale admission of foreign
wares to the detriment of home products. Why should I place the content
of that so-called external world, which, external or internal, is my
very own inalienably, in a centre of representation other than my own,
thus making my cognition of it rest entirely upon the “ejective” plane?
It is only when I discover, as I must sooner or later, that there is
nothing in the report of an “outsider” (or in any number of them) beyond
what I credit him or her with in my own consciousness; and that the
outsider is on the same plane as other objects, it is only then that
the mystification is cleared up. I do _not_ cognise, or recognise, the
external at second-hand. The “note” of otherness is simply another term
more or less in the cosmical series.
It is, however, not only with the familiar “other selves” of ordinary
life that we are confronted in Synechism. In the creed of animism
“Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,”
and Mr. Peirce speaks of “spiritual influences” (p. 559) as having at
least no hindrance presented to them by his doctrine. But he has some
other shadowy personalities at command, which, it must be confessed, are
well calculated to give us pause. “There should be something like[78]
personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely
sympathetic communion.... None of us can fully realise which the minds
of corporations are.... But the law of mind clearly points to the
existence of such personalities.” It is probably true that the “minds of
corporations,” must ever present an insoluble riddle of perversity to the
suburban dweller, vexed with the mockery of paving and lighting. But we
need not linger over this speculation, for there are other shades behind.
“If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere it
should be in the Church.... Surely a personality ought to have
developed in that Church, in that ‘bride of Christ,’ as they
call it.” (“Man’s Glassy Essence,” pp. 21-22.)
A PERSONAL CREATOR.
Bearing our ecclesiastical divisions in mind, it is difficult to conceive
the unity of a “corporate personality” of this kind, but, to let that
pass, it may be remarked that, when any one begins to imagine that there
are others in the universe besides himself, he is not, as a rule, content
with two or three companions of his solitude. They come in battalions.
Thus, behind the other selves, corporate personalities and spiritual
influences of Synechism, there looms a transcendent personality. “A
genuine evolutionary philosophy,” we are told, “... is so far from being
antagonistic to the idea of a personal Creator, that it is really
inseparable from that idea.” And a philosophy of pseudo-evolutionism is
“hostile to all hopes of personal relations to God.” (“The Law of Mind,”
p. 557.)
Mr. Peirce thus assigns to his first cause a place in the _continuum_ of
ideas, and says that if there is a personal God we must have a direct
perception of that person and “indeed be in personal communication
with him.” The difficulty, he admits, is that if this be so, how is it
possible that the existence of this being should ever have been doubted
by anybody. And the only answer he can at present make is, that “facts
that stand before our face and eyes, and stare us in the face, are
far from being in all cases the ones most easily discerned. That,” he
adds, “has been remarked from time immemorial.” (“The Law of Mind,” pp.
558-559.)
One of the ablest of living philosophical writers, Professor Veitch,
of Glasgow University, puts it somewhat similarly, though with his own
realistic coloring, when he says:
“God, if at all, must rise above the line of finite regress; He
cannot be a cause in that; He cannot be a cause dependent on
another cause; He must be somewhere, or at some point, in the
line of an otherwise endless scientific regress, there, above
it, yet related to it, and in it; otherwise He is nothing for
us.” (“Knowing and Being,” p. 320.)
The parallelism is worth noting. Those views embody what has been the
contention of the present writer throughout this paper, _with this most
notable difference_: that no term of a series may thus transcend the
series, or be other than on a level with the other terms, being itself
only a term, a link, in the series itself. And with this falls forever
the idea of a cause uncaused.
Yet am _I_ not _in_ the series? For all that is in the series is
mine every percept, every concept; so that, “extravagant” as it may
appear, it is _I who am the series_. In other words, the ego is the
universe-synthesis, and the universe-synthesis the ego.
Is Mr. Peirce prepared to take the consequences of that which his
Synechism leads to?
G. M. MCCRIE.
FOOTNOTES:
[67] From τύχη, chance.
[68] _Tychism_ again comes to the front in the succeeding number of _The
Monist_, (Vol. III, No. 1,) in an article by Mr. Peirce, entitled “Man’s
Glassy Essence.”
[69] Dr. Carus, in his review of Mr. Peirce’s doctrines, (_The Monist_,
Vol. II, No. 4, p. 575,) notes this positivistic-constructionism.
[70] Cf. T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Ch. II, p. 63.
[71] Nos. 258, 59, 61, August, 1892. _Miss Naden’s World-Scheme._
[72] In a note to this passage was appended a quotation from a pamphlet
by Dr. E. Cobham Brewer as a practical instance of the objective being,
on the antiquated subject-object plane, actually superseded. Suppose a
very remote star to become extinct, the “vibrations” would continue to
“travel” towards a spectator situated on our planet for years, it may
be for centuries. So that the spectator, ultimately, “sees” that which
does not even exist. Dr. Brewer’s comment, which cannot be considered any
contribution to a satisfactory _rationale_, is: “the objects, however,
must have existed, or no messenger could have been sent from their
courts.” Evidently, in this case, that which is sent is, at least, as
good as the sender—is, in fact, the self-same thing. Only, in that case,
what of the extinct object?
[73] Or to put it in another form, any one idea, and the timing of this
idea are really two ideas, although, as we shall see later, they may be
inseparable in practice.
[74] Cf., in this connection, the results of experiments by Cheselden,
as far back as 1727 on congenitally blind persons, couched for double
cataract.
[75] Much more inclusive, also, than the Relational Theory of the
Neo-Kantians.
[76] _The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1.
[77] Mr. Peirce uses the word “instant” to mean a point of time, and
“moment” to mean an infinitesimal duration.
[78] The phrase, “something like,” is significant, when we remember, (see
_ante_,) that with Mr. Peirce the excitants were “something like” the
excited feelings.
THE FOURTH DIMENSION.
MATHEMATICAL AND SPIRITUALISTIC.
INTRODUCTORY.
The tendency to generalise long ago led mathematicians to extend the
notion of three-dimensional space, which is the space of sensible
representation, and to define aggregates of points, or spaces, of more
than three dimensions, with the view of employing these definitions as
useful means of investigation. They had no idea of requiring people to
imagine four-dimensional things and worlds, and they were even still
less remote from requiring of them to believe in the real existence of
a four-dimensioned space. In the hands of mathematicians this extension
of the notion of space was a mere means devised for the discovery and
expression, by shorter and more convenient ways, of truths applicable to
common geometry and to algebra operating with more than three unknown
quantities. At this stage, however, the spiritualists came in, and coolly
took possession of this private property of the mathematicians. They
were in great perplexity as to where they should put the spirits of the
dead. To give them a place in the world accessible to our senses was not
exactly practicable. They were compelled, therefore, to look around after
some _terra incognita_, which should oppose to the spirit of research
inborn in humanity an insuperable barrier. The residence of the spirits
had to be a place inaccessible to our senses and full of mystery to the
mind. This property the four-dimensioned space of the mathematicians
possessed. With an intellectual perversity which science has no idea of,
these spiritualists boldly asserted, first, that the whole world was so
situated in a four-dimensioned space as a plane might be situated in
the space familiar to us, secondly, that the spirits of the dead lived
in such a four-dimensioned space, thirdly, that these spirits could
accordingly act upon the world and, consequently, upon the human beings
resident in it, exactly as we three-dimensioned creatures can produce
effects upon things that are two-dimensional; for example, such effects
as that produced when we shatter a lamina of ice, and so influence some
possibly existing two-dimensioned _ice_-world.
Since spiritualism, under the leadership of the Leipsic Professor
Zöllner, thus proclaimed the existence of a four-dimensioned space, this
notion, which the mathematicians are thoroughly master of,—for in all
their operations with it, though they have forsaken the path of actual
representability, they have never left that of the truth,—this notion
has also passed into the heads of lay persons who have used it as a
catchword, ordinarily without having any clear idea of what they or any
one else mean by it. To clear up such ideas and to correct the wrong
impressions of cultured people who have not a technical mathematical
training, is the purpose of the following pages. A similar elucidation
was aimed at in the tracts which Schlegel (Riemann, Berlin, 1888) and
Cranz (Virchow-Holtzendorff’s Sammlung, Nos. 112 and 113) have published
on the so-called fourth dimension. Both treatises possess indubitable
merits, but their methods of presentation are in many respects too
concise to give a lay mind any profound comprehension of the subject. The
author, accordingly, has been able to add to the reflections which these
excellent treatises offer, a great deal that appears to him necessary for
a thorough explanation in the minds of non-mathematicians of the notion
of the fourth dimension.
I.
THE CONCEPT OF DIMENSION.
Many text-books of stereometry begin with the words: “Every body has
three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness.” If we should ask the
author of a book of this description to tell us the length, breadth, and
thickness of an apple, of a sponge, or of a cloud of tobacco smoke, he
would be somewhat perplexed and would probably say, that the definition
in question referred to something different. A cubical box, or some
similar structure, whose angles are all right angles and whose bounding
surfaces are consequently all rectangles is the only body of which it can
at all be unmistakably asserted that there are three principal directions
distinguishable in it, of which any one can be called the length, any
other the breadth, and any third the thickness. We thus see that the
notions of length, breadth, and thickness are not sufficiently clear and
universal to enable us to derive from them any idea of what is meant when
it is said that every body possesses three dimensions, or that the space
of the world is three-dimensional.
This distinction may be made sharper and more evident by the following
considerations: We have, let us suppose, a straight line on which a
point is situated, and the problem is proposed to determine the position
of the point on the line in an unequivocal manner. The simplest way to
solve this is, to state how far the point is removed in the one or the
other direction from some given fixed point; just as in a thermometer
the position of the surface of the mercury is given by a statement of
its distance in the direction of cold or heat from a predetermined fixed
point—the point of freezing water. To state, therefore, the position
of a point on a straight line, the sole datum necessary is a single
number, for beforehand we have fixed upon some standard line, like the
centimetre, and some definite point to which we give the value zero,
and have also previously decided in what direction from the zero-point,
points must be situated whose position is expressed by positive numbers,
and also in what direction those must lie whose position is expressed by
negative numbers. This last mentioned fact, that a _single_ number is
sufficient to determine the place of a point in a straight line, is the
real reason why we attribute to the straight line or to any part of it a
single dimension.
More generally, we call every totality or system, of infinitely numerous
things, _one_-dimensional, in which _one_ number is all that is requisite
to determine and distinguish any particular one of these things amidst
the entire totality. Thus, time is one-dimensional. We, as inhabitants
of the earth, have naturally chosen as our unit of time, the period of
the rotation of the earth about its axis, namely, the day, or a definite
portion of a day. The zero-point of time is regarded in Christian
countries as the year of the birth of Christ, and the positive direction
of time is the time _subsequent_ to the birth of Christ. These data
fixed, all that is necessary to establish and distinguish any definite
point of time amid the infinite totality of all the points of time, _is
a single number_. Of course this number need not be a whole number, but
may be made up of the sum of a whole number and a fraction in whose
numerator and denominator we may have numbers as great as we please. We
may, therefore, also say that the totality of all conceivable numerical
magnitudes, or of only such as are greater than one definite number and
smaller than some other definite number, is one-dimensional.
We shall add here a few additional examples of one-dimensioned magnitudes
presented by geometry. First, the circumference of a circle is a
one-dimensional magnitude, as is every curved line, whether it returns
into itself or not. Further, the totality of all equilateral triangles
which stand on the same base is one-dimensional, or the totality of
all circles that can be described through two fixed points. Also, the
totality of all conceivable cubes will be seen to be one-dimensional,
provided they are distinguished, not with respect to position, but with
respect to magnitude.
In conformity with the fundamental ideas by which we define the notion
of a one-dimensional manifoldness, it will be seen that the attribute
_two_-dimensional must be applied to all totalities of things in
which _two_ numbers are necessary (and sufficient) to distinguish
any determinate individual thing amid the totality. The simplest
two-dimensioned complex which we know of is the plane. To determine
accurately the position of a point in a plane, the simplest way is to
take two axes at right angles to each other, that is, fixed straight
lines, and then to specify the distances by which the point in question
is removed from each of these axes.
This method of determining the position of a point in a plane suggested
to the celebrated philosopher and mathematician Descartes the fundamental
idea of analytical geometry, a branch of mathematics in which by the
simple artifice of ascribing to every point in a plane two numerical
values, determined by its distances from the two axes above referred
to, planimetrical considerations are transformed into algebraical. So,
too, all kinds of curves that graphically represent the dependence of
things on time, make use of the fact that the totality of the points in
a plane is two-dimensional. For example, to represent in a graphical
form the increase of the population of a city, we take a horizontal axis
to represent the time, and a perpendicular one to represent the numbers
which are the measures of the population. Any two lines, then, whose
lengths practical considerations determine, are taken as the unit of
time, which we may say is a year, and as the unit of population, which
we will say is one thousand. Some definite year, say 1850, is fixed
upon as the zero point. Then, from all the equally distant points on
the horizontal axis, which points stand for the years, we proceed in
directions parallel to the other axis, that is, in the perpendicular
direction, just so much upwards as the numbers which stand for the
population of that year require. The terminal points so reached, or the
curve which runs through these terminal points, will then present a
graphic picture of the rates of increase of the population of the town
in the different years. The rectangular axes of Descartes are employed
in a similar way for the construction of barometer curves, which specify
for the different localities of a country the amount of variation of the
atmospheric pressure during any period of time. Immediately next to the
plane the surface of the earth will be recognised as a two-dimensional
aggregate of points. In this case geographical latitude and longitude
supply the two numbers that are requisite accurately to determine the
position of a point. Also, the totality of all the possible straight
lines that can be drawn through any point in space is two-dimensional, as
we shall best understand if we picture to ourselves a plane which is cut
in a point by each of these straight lines and then remember that by such
a construction every point on the plane will belong to some one line and,
_vice versa_, a line to every point, whence it follows that the totality
of all the straight lines which pass through the point assigned are of
the same dimensions as the totality of the points of the imagined plane.
The question might be asked, In what way and to what extent in this
case is the specification of _two_ numbers requisite and sufficient
to determine amid all the rays which pass through the specified point
a definite individual ray? To get a clear idea of the problem here
involved, let us imagine the ray produced far into the heavens, where
some quite definite point will correspond to it. Now, the position of
a point in the heavens depends, as does the position of a point on all
spherical surfaces, on two numbers. In the heavens these two numbers are
ordinarily supplied by the two angles called altitude, or the distance
above the plane of the horizon, and azimuth, or the angular distance
between the circle on which the altitude is measured and the meridian
of the observer. It will be seen thus that the totality of all the
luminous rays that an eye, conceived as a point, can receive from the
outer world is two-dimensional, and also that a luminous point emits
a two-dimensional group of luminous rays. It will also be observed,
in connection with this example, that the two-dimensional totality of
all the rays that can be drawn through a point in space is something
different from the totality of the rays that pass through a point but
are required to lie in a given plane. Such a group of objects as the
last-named one, is a one-dimensional totality.
Now that we have sufficiently discussed the attributes that are
characteristic of one and two-dimensional aggregates, we may, without any
further investigation of the subject, propose the following definition,
that, generally, _an n-dimensional totality of infinitely numerous
things is such, with respect to which the specification of n numbers
is necessary and sufficient to indicate a definite individual amid the
totality of all the infinitely numerous individuals of the group_.
Accordingly, the point-aggregate made up of the world-space which we
inhabit, is a three-dimensional totality. To get true bearings in this
space and to define any determinate point in it, we have therefore to lay
through any point which we take as our zero-point three axes at right
angles to each other, one running from right to left, one backwards
and forwards, and one upwards and downwards. We then join each two of
these axes by a plane and are enabled thus to specify the position of
every point in space by the three perpendicular distances by which the
point in question is removed in a positive or negative sense from
these three planes. It is customary to denote the numbers which are the
measures of these three distances by _x_, _y_, and _z_, the positive
_x_, positive _y_, and positive _z_ ordinarily being reckoned in the
right hand, the forward, and the upward directions from the origin.
If now, with direct reference to this fundamental axial system, any
particular specification of _x_, _y_, and _z_ be made, there will, by
such an operation, be cut out and isolated from the three-dimensional
manifoldness of all the points of space a totality of less dimensions.
If, for example, _z_ is equal to seven units or measures, this is
equivalent to a statement that only the two-dimensional totality of the
points is meant, which constitute the plane that can be laid at right
angles to the upward-passing _z_-axis at a distance of seven measures
from the zero-point. Consequently, every imaginable equation between _x_,
_y_, and _z_ isolates and defines a two-dimensional aggregate of points.
If two different equations obtain between _x_, _y_, and _z_, two such
two-dimensional totalities will be isolated from among all the points
of space. But as these last must have some one-dimensional totality in
common, we may say that the co-existence of two equations between _x_,
_y_, and _z_ defines a one-dimensional totality of points, that is to say
a straight line, a line curved in a plane, or even, perhaps, one curved
in space. It is evident from this that the introduction of the three axes
of reference forms a bridge between the theory of space and the theory of
equations involving three variable quantities, _x_, _y_, _z_. The reason
that the theory of space cannot thus be brought into connection with
algebra in general, that is, with the theory of indefinitely numerous
equations, but only with the algebra of three quantities, _x_, _y_, _z_,
is simply to be sought in the fact that space, as we picture it, can only
have three dimensions.
We have now only to supply a few additional examples of _n_-dimensional
totalities. All particles of air are four-dimensional in magnitude
when in addition to their position in space we also consider the
variable densities which they assume, as they are expressed by
the different heights of the barometer in the different parts of
the atmosphere. Similarly, all conceivable spheres in space are
four-dimensional magnitudes, for their centres form a three-dimensional
point-aggregate, and around each centre there may be additionally
conceived a one-dimensional totality of spheres, the radii of which can
be expressed by every numerical magnitude from zero to infinity. Further,
if we imagine a measuring stick of invariable length to assume every
conceivable position in space, the positions so obtained will constitute
a five-dimensional aggregate. For, in the first place, one of the
extremities of the measuring stick may be conceived to assume a position
at every point of space, and this determines for one extremity alone
of the stick a three-dimensional totality of positions; and secondly,
as we have seen above, there proceeds from every such position of this
extremity a two-dimensional totality of directions, and by conceiving the
measuring-stick to be placed lengthwise in every one of these directions
we shall obtain all the conceivable positions which the second extremity
can assume, and consequently, the dimensions must be 3 plus 2 or 5.
Finally, to find out how many dimensions the totality of all the possible
positions of a square, invariable in magnitude, possesses, we first give
one of its corners all conceivable positions in space, and we thus obtain
three dimensions. One definite point in space now being fixed for the
position of one corner of the square, we imagine drawn through this point
all possible lines, and on each we lay off the length of the side of
the square and thus obtain two additional dimensions. Through the point
obtained for the position of the second corner of the square we must
now conceive all the possible directions drawn that are perpendicular
to the line thus fixed, and we must lay off once more on each of these
directions the side of the square. By this last determination the
dimensions are only increased by one, for only one one-dimensional
totality of perpendicular directions is possible to one straight line
in one of its points. Three corners of the square are now fixed and
therewith the position of the fourth also is uniquely determined.
Accordingly, the totality of all equal squares which only differ from one
another by their position in space, constitutes a manifoldness of six
dimensions.
II.
THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NOTION OF FOUR-DIMENSIONAL POINT-AGGREGATES,
PERMISSIBLE.
In the preceding section it was shown that we can conceive not only
of manifoldnesses of one, two, and three dimensions, but also of
manifoldnesses of _any_ number of dimensions. But it was at the same time
indicated that our world-space, that is, the totality of all conceivable
_points_ that differ only in respect of position, cannot in agreement
with our notions of things possess more than three dimensions. But the
question now arises, whether, if the progress of science tends in such
a direction, it is permissible to extend the notion of space by the
introduction of point-aggregates of more than three dimensions, and to
engage in the study of the properties of such creations, although we know
that notwithstanding the fact that we may conceptually establish and
explore such aggregates of points, yet we cannot picture to ourselves
these creations as we do the spatial magnitudes which surround us, that
is, the regular three-dimensional aggregates of points.
To show the reader clearly that this question must be answered in the
affirmative, that the extension of our notion of space is permissible,
although it leads to things which we cannot perceive by our senses,
I may call the reader’s attention to the fact that in arithmetic
we are accustomed from our youth upwards to extensions of ideas,
which, accurately viewed, as little admit of graphic conception as a
four-dimensional space, that is, a point-aggregate of four dimensions. By
his senses man first reaches only the idea of whole numbers—the results
of counting. The observation of primitive peoples[79] and of children
clearly proves that the essential decisive factors of counting are these
three: First, we abstract, in the counting of things, completely from
the individual and characteristic attributes of these things, that is,
we consider them as homogeneous. Second, we associate individually with
the things which we count other homogeneous things. These other things
are even now, among uncivilised peoples, the ten fingers of the two
hands. They may, however, be simple strokes, or, as in the case of dice
and dominoes, black points on a white background. Third, we substitute
for the result of this association some concise symbol or word; for
example, the Romans substituted for three things counted, three strokes
placed side by side, namely: III; but for greater numbers of things
they employed abbreviated signs. The Aztecs, the original inhabitants
of Mexico, had time enough, it seems, to express all the numbers up to
nineteen by equal circles placed side by side. They had abbreviated signs
only for the numbers 20, 400, 8000, and so forth. In speaking, some one
same sound might be associated with the things counted; but this method
of counting is nowadays employed only by clocks: the languages of men
since prehistoric times have fashioned concise words for the results of
the association in question. From the notion of number, thus fixed as
the result of counting, man reached the notion of the addition of two
numbers, and thence the notion that is the inverse of the last process,
the notion of subtraction. But at this point it clearly appears that
not every problem which may be propounded is soluble; for there is no
number which can express the result of the subtraction of a number from
one which is equally large or from one which is smaller than itself. The
primary school pupil who says that 8 from 5 “won’t go” is perfectly right
from his point of view. For there really does not exist any result of
counting which added to eight will give five.
If humanity had abided by this point of view and had rested content with
the opinion that the problem “5 minus 8” is not solvable, the science of
arithmetic would never have received its full development, and humanity
would not have advanced as far in civilisation as it has. Fortunately,
men said to themselves at this crisis: “If 5 minus 8 won’t go, we’ll
_make it go_; if 5 minus 8 does not possess an intelligible meaning, we
will simply give it one.” As a fact, things which have not a meaning
always afford men a pleasing opportunity of investing them with one. The
question is, then, what significance is the problem “5 minus 8” to be
invested with?
The most natural and, therefore, the most advantageous solution
undoubtedly is to abide by the original notion of subtraction as the
inverse of addition, and to make the significance of 5 minus 8 such,
that for 5 minus 8 plus 8 we shall get our original minuend 5. By such a
method all the rules of computation which apply to real differences will
also hold good for unreal differences, such as 5 minus 8. But it then
clearly appears that all forms expressive of differences in which the
number that stands before the minus direction is less by an equal amount
than that which follows it may be regarded as equal; so that the simplest
course seems to be to introduce as the common characteristic of all equal
differential forms of this description a common sign, which will indicate
at the same time the difference of the two numbers thus associated. Thus
it came about, that for 5 minus 8, as well as for every differential form
which can be regarded as equal thereto the sign “-3” was introduced. But
in calling differential forms of this description numbers, the notion of
number was extended and a new domain was opened up, namely, the domain of
negative numbers.
In the further development of the science of arithmetic, through the
operation of division viewed as the inverse of multiplication, a second
extension of the idea of number was reached, namely, the notion of
fractional numbers as the outcome of divisions that had led to numbers
hitherto undefined. We find, thus, that the science of arithmetic
throughout its whole development has strictly adhered to the principle
of conformity and consistency and has invested every association of
two numbers, which before had no significance, by the introduction of
new numbers, with a real significance, such that similar operations in
conformity with exactly the same rules could be performed with the new
numbers, viewed as the results of this association, as with the numbers
which were before known and perfectly defined. Thus the science proceeded
further on its way and reached the notions of irrational, imaginary, and
complex numbers.
The point in all this, which the reader must carefully note, is, that
all the numbers of arithmetic, with the exception of the positive whole
numbers, are artificial products of human thought, invented to make the
language of arithmetic more flexible, and to accelerate the progress of
science. All these numbers lack the attributes of representability.
No man in the world can picture to himself “minus three trees.” It is
possible, of course, to know that when three trees of a garden have been
cut down and carried away, that three are missing, and by substituting
for “missing” the inverse notion of “added,” we may say, perhaps, that
“minus three trees” are added. But this is quite different from the feat
of imagining a negative number of trees. We can only picture to ourselves
a number of trees that results from actual counting, that is, a positive
whole number. Yet, notwithstanding all this, people had not the slightest
hesitation in extending the notion of number. Exactly so must it be
permitted us in geometry to extend the notion of space, even though such
an extension can only be mentally defined and can never be brought within
the range of human powers of representation.
In mathematics, in fact, the extension of any notion is admissible,
provided such extension does not lead to contradictions with itself or
with results which are well established. Whether such extensions are
necessary, justifiable, or important for the advancement of science
is a different question. It must be admitted, therefore, that the
mathematician is justified in the extension of the notion of space as a
point-aggregate of three dimensions, and in the introduction of space or
point-aggregates of more than three dimensions, and in the employment
of them as means of research. Other sciences also operate with things
which they do not know exist, and which, though they are sufficiently
defined, cannot be perceived by our senses. For example, the physicist
employs the ether as a means of investigation, though he can have no
sensory knowledge of it. The ether is nothing more than a means which
enables us to comprehend mechanically the effects known as action at a
distance and to bring them within the range of a common point of view.
Without the assumption of a material which penetrates everything, and
by means of whose undulations impulses are transmitted to the remotest
parts of space, the phenomena of light, of heat, of gravitation, and of
electricity would be a jumble of isolated and unconnected mysteries. The
assumption of an ether, however, comprises in a systematic scheme all
these isolated events, facilitates our mental control of the phenomena
of nature, and enables us to produce these phenomena at will. But it
must not be forgotten in such reflections that the ether itself is
even a greater problem for man, and that the ether-hypothesis does not
solve the difficulties of phenomena, but only puts them in a unitary
conceptual shape. Notwithstanding all this, physicists have never had
the least hesitation in employing the ether as a means of investigation.
And as little do reasons exist why the mathematicians should hesitate to
investigate the properties of a four-dimensioned point-aggregate, with
the view of acquiring thus a convenient means of research.
III.
THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IDEA OF FOUR-DIMENSIONED POINT-AGGREGATES OF
SERVICE TO RESEARCH.
From the concession that the mathematician has the right to define
and investigate the properties of point-aggregates of more than three
dimensions, it does not necessarily follow that the introduction of an
idea of this description is of value to science. Thus, for example, in
arithmetic, the introduction of operations which spring from involution,
as involution and its two inverse operations proceed from multiplication,
is undoubtedly permitted. Just as for “_a_ times _a_ times _a_” we write
the abbreviated symbol “_a_³,” (which we read, _a_ to the third power,)
and investigate in detail the operation of involution thus defined, so we
might also introduce some shorthand symbol for “_a_ to the _a_ᵗʰ power to
the _a_ᵗʰ power” and thus reach an operation of the fourth degree, which
would regard _a_ as a passive number and the number 3, or any higher
number, as the active number, that is, as the number which indicates how
often _a_ is taken as the base of a power whose exponent may be _a_, or
“_a_ to the _a_ᵗʰ,” or “_a_ to the _a_ᵗʰ to the _a_ᵗʰ power.”
But the introduction of such an operation of the fourth degree has proved
itself to be of no especial value to mathematics. And the reason is that
in the operation of involution the law of commutation does not hold
good. In addition, the numbers to be added may be interchanged and the
introduction of multiplication is therefore of great value. So, also,
in multiplication the numbers which are combined, that is, the factors,
may be changed about in any way, and thus the introduction of involution
is of value. But in involution the base and the exponent cannot be
interchanged, and consequently the introduction of any higher operation
is almost valueless.
But with the introduction of the idea of point-aggregates of multiple
dimensions the case is wholly different. The innovation in question
has proved itself to be not only of great importance to research, but
the progress of science has irresistibly forced investigators to the
introduction of this idea, as we shall now set forth in detail.
In the first place, algebra, especially the algebraical theory of
systems of equations, derives much advantage from the notion of multiple
dimensioned spaces. If we have only three unknown quantities, _x_, _y_,
_z_, the algebraical questions which arise from the possible problems of
this class admit, as we have above seen, of geometrical representation
to the eye. Owing to this possibility of geometrical representation,
some certain simple geometrical ideas like “moving,” “lying in,”
“intersecting,” and so forth, may be translated into algebraical
events. Now, no reason exists why algebra should stop at three variable
quantities; it must in fact take into consideration any number of
variable quantities.
For purposes of brevity and greater evidentness, therefore, it is quite
natural to employ geometrical forms of speech in the consideration of
more than three variables. But when we do this, we assume, perhaps
without really intending to do so, the idea of a space of more than
three dimensions. If we have four variable quantities, _x_, _y_,
_z_, _u_, we arrive, by conceiving attributed to each of these four
quantities every possible numerical magnitude, at a four-dimensioned
manifoldness of numerical quantities, which we may just as well regard as
a four-dimensioned aggregate of points. Two equations which exist on this
supposition between _x_, _y_, _z_, and _u_, define two three-dimensioned
aggregates of points, which intersect, as we may briefly say, in a
two-dimensioned aggregate of points, that is, in a surface; and so on.
In a somewhat different manner the determination of the contents of a
square or a cube by the involution of a number which stands for the
length of its sides, leads to the notion of four-dimensioned structures,
and, consequently, to the notion of a four-dimensioned point-space. When
we note that _a_² stands for the contents of a square, and _a_³ for
the contents of a cube, we naturally inquire after the contents of a
structure which is produced from the cube as the cube is produced from
the square and which also will have the contents _a_⁴. We cannot, it
is true, clearly picture to ourselves a structure of this description,
but we can, nevertheless, establish its properties with mathematical
exactness.[80] It is bounded by 8 cubes just as the cube is bounded by 6
squares; it has 16 corners, 24 squares, and 32 edges, so that from every
corner 4 edges, 6 squares, and 4 cubes proceed, and from every edge 3
squares and 3 cubes.
Yet despite the great service to algebra of this idea of
multiple-dimensioned space, it must be conceded that the conception
although convenient is yet not indispensable. It is true, algebra is in
need of the idea of multiple dimensions, but it is not so absolutely in
need of the idea of _point_-aggregates of multiple dimensions.
This notion is, however, necessary and serviceable for a profound
comprehension of geometry. The system of geometrical knowledge which
Euclid of Alexandria created about three hundred years before Christ,
supplied during a period of more than two thousand years a brilliant
example of a body of conclusions and truths which were mutually
consistent and logical. Up to the present century the idea of elementary
geometry was indissolubly bound up with the name of Euclid, so that in
England where people adhered longest to the rigid deductive system of
the Grecian mathematician, the task of “learning geometry” and “reading
Euclid” were until a few years ago identical. Every proposition of this
Euclidian system rests on other propositions, as one building-stone in a
house rests upon another. Only the very lowest stones, the foundations,
were without supports. These are the axioms or fundamental propositions,
truths on which all other truths are, directly or indirectly, founded,
but which themselves are assumed without demonstration as self-evident.
But the spirit of mathematical research grew in time more and more
critical, and finally asked, whether these axioms might not possibly
admit of demonstration. Especially was a rigid proof sought for the
eleventh axiom of Euclid, which treats of parallels.
After centuries of fruitless attempts to prove Euclid’s eleventh axiom,
Gauss, and with him Bolyai and Lobatschewsky, Riemann and Helmholtz,
finally stated the decisive reasons why any attempt to prove the axiom
of the parallels must necessarily be futile. These reasons consist of
the fact that though this axiom holds good enough in the world-space
such as we do and can conceive it, yet three-dimensioned spaces are
ideally conceivable though not capable of mental representation, where
the axiom does not hold good. The axiom was thus shown to be a mere
fact of _observation_, and from that time on there could no longer be
any thought of a deductive demonstration of it. In view of the intimate
connection, which both in an historical and epistemological point of view
exists between the extension of the concept of space and the critical
examination of the axioms of Euclid, we must enter at somewhat greater
length into the discussion of the last mentioned propositions.
Of the axioms which Euclid premises to his geometry, only the following
three are really geometrical axioms:
_Eighth axiom_: Magnitudes which coincide with one another are equal to
one another.
_Eleventh axiom_: If a straight line meet two straight lines so as to
make the two interior angles on the same side of it taken together less
than two right angles, these straight lines, being continually produced,
shall at length meet on that side on which are the angles which are less
than two right angles.
_Twelfth axiom_: Two straight lines cannot inclose a [finite] space.
The numerous proofs which in the course of time were adduced in
demonstration of these axioms, especially of the eleventh, all turn out
on close examination to be pseudo-proofs. Legendre drew attention to the
fact that either of the following axioms might be substituted for the
eleventh:
_a_) Through a point there can be drawn to a straight line, within the
plane which joins the point with the line, one and one line only which
shall not intersect the first (parallels) however far the two lines may
be produced;
_b_) If two parallel lines are cut by a third straight line, the interior
alternate angles will be equal.
_c_) The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles,
that is, to the angle of a straight line or 180°.
By the aid of any one of these three assertions, the eleventh axiom of
Euclid may be proved, and, _vice versa_, by the aid of the latter each
of the three assertions may be proved, of course with the help of the
other two axioms, eight and twelve. The perception that the eleventh
axiom does not admit of demonstration without the employment of one of
the foregoing substitutes may best be gained from the consideration of
congruent figures. Every reader will remember from his first instruction
in geometry that the congruence of two triangles is demonstrated by the
superposition of one triangle on the other and by then ascertaining
whether the two completely coincide, no assumptions being made in the
determination except those above mentioned.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
In the case of triangles which are congruent as are I and II in
the preceding cut, this coincidence may be effected by the simple
_displacement_ of one of the triangles; so that even a two-dimensional
being, supposed to be endowed with powers of reasoning, but only capable
of picturing to itself motions within a plane, also might convince itself
that the two triangles I and II could be made to coincide. But a being
of this description could not convince itself in like manner of the
congruence of triangles I and III. It would discover the equality of
the three sides and the three angles, but it could never succeed in so
superposing the two triangles on each other as to make them coincide. A
three-dimensioned being, however, can do this very easily. It has simply
to turn triangle I about one of its sides and to shove the triangle,
thus brought into the position of its reflection in a mirror, into the
position of triangle III. Similarly, triangles II and III may be made to
coincide by moving either out of the plane of the paper around one of
its sides as axis and turning it until it again falls in the plane of
the paper. The triangle thus turned over can then be brought into the
position of the other.
Later on we shall revert to these two kinds of congruence: “congruence
by displacement” and “congruence by circumversion.” For the present we
will start from the fact that it is always possible within the limits of
a plane to take a triangle out of one position and bring it into another
without altering its sides and angles. The question is, whether this
is only possible in the plane, or whether it can also be done on other
surfaces.
We find that there are certain surfaces in which this is possible, and
certain others in which it is not. For instance, it is impossible to move
the triangle drawn on the surface of an egg into some other position on
the egg’s surface without a distension or contraction of some of the
triangle’s parts. On the other hand, it is quite possible to move the
triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere into any other position on the
sphere’s surface without a distension or contraction of its parts. The
mathematical reason of this fact is, that the surface of a sphere, like
the plane, has everywhere the same curvature, but that the surface of an
egg at different places has different curvatures. Of a plane we say that
it has everywhere the curvature zero; of the surface of a sphere we say
it has everywhere a positive curvature, which is greater in proportion
as the radius is smaller. There are surfaces also which have a constant
negative curvature; these surfaces exhibit at every point in directions
proceeding from the same side a partly concave and a partly convex
structure, somewhat like the centre of a saddle. There is no necessity
of our entering in any detail into the character and structure of the
last-mentioned surfaces.
Intimately related with the plane, however, are all those surfaces,
which, like the plane, have the curvature zero; in this category belong
especially cylindrical surfaces and conical surfaces. A sheet of paper
of the form of the sector of a circle may, for example, be readily bent
into the shape of a conical surface. If two congruent triangles, now,
be drawn on the sheet of paper, which may by displacement be translated
the one into the other, these triangles will, it is plain, also remain
congruent on the conical surface; that is, on the conical surface also
we may displace the one into the other; for though a bending of the
figures will take place, there will be no distension or contraction.
Similarly, there are surfaces which, like the sphere, have everywhere a
constant positive curvature. On such surfaces also every figure can be
transferred into some other position without distension or contraction
of its parts. Accordingly, on all surfaces thus related to the plane or
sphere, the assumption which underlies the eighth axiom of Euclid, that
it is possible to transfer into any new position any figure drawn on such
surfaces without distortion, holds good.
The eleventh axiom in its turn also holds good on all surfaces of
constant curvature, whether the curvature be zero or positive; only in
such instances instead of “straight” line we must say “shortest” line. On
the surface of a sphere, namely, two shortest lines, that is, arcs of two
great circles, always intersect, no matter whether they are produced in
the direction of the side at which the third arc of a great circle makes
with them angles less than two right angles, or, in the direction of the
other side, where this arc makes with them angles of more than two right
angles. On the plane, however, two straight lines intersect only on the
side where a third straight line that meets them makes with them interior
angles less than two right angles.
The twelfth axiom of Euclid, finally, only holds good on the plane and
on the surfaces related to it, but not on the sphere or other surfaces
which, like the sphere, have a constant positive curvature. This also
accounts for the fact that one of the three postulates which we regarded
as substitutes for the eleventh axiom, though valid for the plane, is not
true for the surface of a sphere; namely, the postulate that defines
the sum of the angles of a triangle. This sum in a plane triangle is two
right angles; in a spherical triangle it is more than two right angles,
the spherical triangle being greater, the greater the excess the sum
of its angles is above two right angles. It will be seen, from these
considerations, that in geometries in which curved surfaces and not fixed
planes are studied, the axioms of Euclid are either all or partially
false.
The axioms of geometry thus having been revealed as facts of experience,
the question suggested itself whether in the same way in which it was
shown that different two-dimensional geometries were possible, also
different three-dimensional systems of geometry might not be developed;
and consequently what the relations were in which these might stand to
the geometry of the space given by our senses and representable to our
mind. As a fact, a three-dimensional geometry can be developed, which
like the geometry of the surface of an egg will exclude the axiom that a
figure or body can be transferred from any one part of space to any other
and yet remain congruent to itself. Of a three-dimensional space in which
such a geometry can be developed we say, that it has no constant measure
of curvature.
The space which is representable to us, and which we shall henceforth
call the _space of experience_, possesses, as our experiences without
exception confirm, the especial property that every bodily thing can be
transferred from any one part of it to any other without suffering in the
transference any distension or any contraction. The space of experience,
therefore, has a constant measure of curvature. The question, however,
whether this measure of curvature is zero or positive, that is, whether
the space of experience possesses the properties which in two-dimensioned
structures a plane possesses, or whether it is the three-dimensioned
analogon of the surface of a sphere is one which future experience alone
can answer. If the space of experience has a constant positive measure
of curvature which is different from zero, be the difference ever so
slight, a point which should move forever onward in a straight line, or,
more accurately expressed, in a shortest line, would sometime, though
perhaps after having traversed a distance which to us is inconceivable,
ultimately have to arrive from the opposite direction at the place from
which it set out, just as a point which moves forever onward in the
same direction on the surface of a sphere must ultimately arrive at its
starting point, the distance it traverses being longer the greater the
radius of the sphere or the smaller its curvature.
It will seem, at first blush, almost incredible, that the space of
experience even _can_ have this property. But an example, which is the
historical analogon of this modern transformation of our conceptions,
will render the idea less marvellous. Let us transport ourselves back to
the age of Homer. At that time people believed that the earth was a great
disc surrounded on all sides by oceans which were conceived to be in
all directions infinitely great. Indeed, for the primitive man, who has
never journeyed far from the place of his birth, this is the most natural
conception. But imagine now that some scholar had come, and had informed
the Homeric hero Ulysses that if he would travel forever on the earth in
the same direction he would ultimately come back to the point from which
he started; surely Ulysses would have gazed with as much astonishment
upon this scholar as we now look upon the mathematician who tells us that
it is possible that a point which moves forever onward in space in the
same direction may ultimately arrive at the place from which it started.
But despite the fact that Ulysses would have regarded the assertion of
the scholar as false because contradictory to his familiar conceptions,
that scholar, nevertheless, would have been right; for the earth is not
a plane but a spherical surface. So also the mathematician might be
right who bases this more recent strange view on the possible fact that
the space of experience may have a measure of curvature which is not
exactly zero but slightly greater than zero. If this were really the
case, the _volume_ of the space of experience, though very large, would,
nevertheless, be finite; just as the real spherical surface of the earth
as contrasted with the Homeric plane surface is finite, having so and so
many square miles. When the objection is here made that a finiteness of
space is totally at variance with our modes of thought and conceptions,
two ideas, “infinitely great” and “unlimited,” are confounded. All that
is at variance with our practical conceptions is that space can anywhere
have a limit; not that it may possibly be of tremendous but finite
magnitude.
It will now be asked if we cannot determine by actual observation
whether the measure of curvature of experiential space is exactly zero
or slightly different therefrom. The theorem of the sum of the angles of
a triangle and the conclusions which follow from this theorem do indeed
supply us with a means of ascertaining this fact. And the results of
observation have been, that _the measure of curvature of space is in all
probability exactly equal to zero or if it is slightly different from
zero it is so little so that the technical means of observation at our
command and especially our telescopes are not competent to determine the
amount of the deviation_. More, we cannot with any certainty say.
All these reflections, to which the criticism of the hypotheses that
underlie geometry long ago led investigators, compel us to institute a
comparison between the space of experience and other three-dimensioned
aggregates of points (spaces), which we cannot mentally represent but can
in thought and word accurately define and investigate. As soon, however,
as we are fully involved in the task of accurately investigating the
properties of three-dimensional aggregates of points, we similarly find
ourselves forced to regard such aggregates as the component elements
of a manifoldness of more than three dimensions. In this way the exact
criticism of even ordinary geometry leads us to the abstract assumption
of a space of more than three dimensions. And as the extension of
every idea gives a clearer and more translucent form to the idea as it
originally stood, here too the idea of multiple-dimensioned aggregates
of points and the investigation of their properties has thrown a new
light on the truths of ordinary geometry and placed its properties in
clearer relief. Amid the numerous examples which show how the notion of a
space of multiple-dimensions has been of great service to science in the
investigation of three-dimensioned space, we shall give one a place here
which is within the comprehension of non-mathematicians.
Imagine in a plane two triangles whose angles are denoted by pairs of
numbers—namely, by 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, and 2-5, 3-5, 4-5. (See Fig. 2.) Let
the two triangles so lie that the three lines which join the angles
1-2 and 2-5, 1-3 and 3-5, and 1-4 and 4-5 intersect at a point, which
we will call 1-5. If now we cause the sides of the triangles which are
opposite to these angles to intersect, it will be found that the points
of intersection so obtained possess the peculiar property of lying all
in one and the same straight line. The point of intersection of the
connection 1-3 and 1-4 with the connection 4-5 and 3-5 may appropriately
be called 3-4. Similarly, the point of intersection 2-4 is produced by
the meeting of 4-5, 2-5 and 1-2, 1-4; and the point of intersection
2-3, by the meeting of 1-3, 1-2 and 3-5, 2-5. The statement, that the
three points of intersection 3-4, 2-4, 2-3, thus obtained, lie in one
straight line, can be proved by the principles of plane geometry only
with difficulty and great circumstantiality. But by resorting to the
three-dimensional space of experience, in which the plane of the drawing
lies, the proposition may be rendered almost self-evident.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
To begin with, imagine any five points in space which may be denoted by
the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; then imagine all the possible ten straight
lines of junction drawn between each two of these points, namely, 1-2,
1-3 ... 4-5; and finally, also, all the ten planes of junction of every
three points described, namely, the plane 1-2-3, 1-2-4, ... 3-4-5. A
spatial figure will thus be obtained, whose ten straight lines will meet
some interposed plane in ten points whose relative positions are exactly
those of the ten points above described. Thus, for example, on this plane
the points 1-2, 1-3, and 2-3 will lie in a straight line, for through the
three spatial points 1, 2, 3, a plane can be drawn which will cut the
plane of a drawing in a straight line. The reason, therefore, that the
three points 3-4, 2-4, 2-3, also must ultimately lie in a straight line,
consists in the simple fact that the plane of the three points 2, 3, 4,
must cut the plane of the drawing in a straight line. The figure here
considered consists of ten points of which sets of three so lie ten times
in a straight line that conversely from every point also three straight
lines proceed.
[Illustration: Fig. 3.]
Now, just as this figure is a section of a complete three-dimensional
pentagon, so another remarkable figure, of similar properties, may be
obtained by the section of a figure of four-dimensioned space. Imagine,
namely, six points, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, situated in this four-dimensioned
space, and every three of them connected by a plane, and every four of
them by a three-dimensioned space. We shall obtain thus twenty planes and
fifteen three-dimensioned spaces which will cut the plane in which the
figure is to be produced in twenty points and fifteen rays which so lie
that each point sends out three rays and every ray contains four points.
(See Fig. 3.) Figures of this description, which are so composed of
points and rays that an equal number of rays proceed from every point and
an equal number of points lie in every ray, are called _configurations_.
Other configurations may, of course, be produced, by taking a different
number of points and by assuming that the points taken lie in a space of
different or even higher dimensions. The author of this article was the
first to draw attention to configurations derived from spaces of higher
dimensions. As we see, then, the notion of a space of more than three
dimensions has performed important work in the investigations of common
plane geometry.
In conclusion, I should like to add a remark which Cranz makes regarding
the application of the idea of multiple-dimensioned space to theoretical
chemistry. (See the treatise before cited.) In chemistry, the molecules
of a compound body are said to consist of the atoms of the elements
which are contained in the body, and these are supposed to be situated
at certain distances from one another, and to be held in their relative
positions by certain forces. At first, the centres of the atoms were
conceived to lie in one and the same plane. But Wislicenus was led by
researches in paralactic acid to explain the differences of isomeric
molecules of the same structural formulæ by the different positions of
the atoms in _space_. (Compare “La chimie dans l’espace” by van’t Hoff,
1875, preface by J. Wislicenus). In fact four points can always be so
arranged in space that every two of them may have any distance from each
other; and the change of one of the six distances does not necessarily
involve the alteration of any other.
But suppose our molecule consists of five atoms? Four of these may be
so placed that the distance between any two of them can be made what we
please. But it is no longer possible to give the fifth atom a position
such that each of the four distances by which it is separated from
the other atoms may be what we please. Quite the contrary, the fourth
distance is dependent on the three remaining distances; for the space of
experience has only three dimensions. If, therefore, I have a molecule
which consists of five atoms I cannot alter the distance between two of
them without at least altering some second distance. But if we imagine
the centres of the atoms placed in a four-dimensioned space, this can be
done; all the ten distances which may be conceived to exist between the
five points will then be independent of one another. To reach the same
result in the case of six atoms we must assume a five-dimensional space;
and so on.
Now, if the independence of all the possible distances between the atoms
of a molecule is absolutely required by theoretical chemical research,
the science is really compelled, if it deals with molecules of more
than four atoms, to make use of the idea of a space of more than three
dimensions. This idea is, in this case, simply an instrument of research,
just as are, also, the ideas of molecules and atoms—means designed to
embrace in an obvious and systematic form the phenomena of chemistry
and to discover the conditions under which new phenomena can be evoked.
Whether a four-dimensioned space really exists is a question whose
insolubility cannot prevent research from making use of the idea, exactly
as chemistry has not been prevented from making use of the notion of
atom, although no one really knows whether the things we call atoms exist
or not.
IV.
REFUTATION OF THE ARGUMENTS ADDUCED TO PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF A
FOUR-DIMENSIONED SPACE INCLUSIVE OF THE VISIBLE WORLD.
The considerations of the preceding section will have convinced
the cultured non-mathematician of the service which the theory of
multiple-dimensioned spaces has done, and bids fair to do, for
geometrical research. In addition thereto is the consideration that every
extension of one branch of mathematical science is a constant source of
beneficial and helpful influence to the other branches. The knowledge,
however, that mathematicians can employ the notion of four-dimensioned
space with good results in their researches, would never have been
sufficient to procure it its present popularity; for every man of
intelligence has now heard of it, and, in jest or in earnest, often
speaks of it. The knowledge of a four-dimensioned space did not reach
the ears of cultured non-mathematicians until the consequences which the
spiritualists fancied it was permissible to draw from this mathematical
notion were publicly known. But it is a tremendous step from the
four-dimensioned space of the mathematicians to the space from which the
spirit-friends of the spiritualistic mediums entertain us with rappings,
knockings, and bad English. Before taking this step we will first discuss
the question of the real existence of a four-dimensional space, not
judging the question whether this space, if it really does exist, is
inhabited by reasonable beings who consciously act upon the world in
which we exist.
[Illustration: Fig. 4.]
Among the reasons which are put forward to prove the existence of a
four-dimensional space containing the world, the least reprehensible are
those which are based on the existence of symmetry. We spoke above of
two triangles in the same plane which have all their sides and angles
congruent, but which cannot be made to coincide by simple displacement
within the plane; but we saw that this coincidence could be effected by
holding fast one side of one triangle and moving it out of its plane
until it had been so far turned round that it fell back into its plane.
Now something similar to this exists in space. Cut two figures, exactly
like that of Fig. 4., out of a piece of paper, and turn the triangle
_ABF_ about the side _AB_, _ACE_ about the side _AC_, _BCD_ about the
side _BC_, and in one figure above and in the other below; then in both
cases the points _D_, _E_, _F_ will meet at a point, because _AE_ is
equal to _AF_, _BF_ is equal to _BD_, _CD_ is equal to _CE_. In this
manner we obtain two pyramids which in all lengths and all angles are
congruent, yet which cannot, no matter how we try, be made to coincide,
that is, be so fitted the one into the other that they shall both stand
as one pyramid. But the _reflected_ image of the one could be brought
into coincidence with the other. Two spatial structures whose sides and
angles are thus equal to each other, and of which each may be viewed
as the reflected image of the other, are called _symmetrical_. For
instance, the right and the left hand are symmetrical; or, a right and
a left glove. Now just as in two dimensions it is impossible by simple
displacement to bring into congruence triangles which like those above
mentioned can only be made to coincide by circumversion, so also in three
dimensions it is impossible to bring into congruence two symmetrical
pyramids. Careful mathematical reflection, however, declares, that this
could be effected if it were possible, while holding one of the surfaces,
to move the pyramid out of the space of experience, and to turn it round
through a four-dimensioned space until it reached a point at which it
would return again into our experiential space. This process would simply
be the four-dimensional analogon of the three-dimensional circumversion
in the above-mentioned case of the two triangles. Further, the interior
surfaces in this process would be converted into exterior surfaces,
and _vice versa_, exactly as in the circumversion of a triangle the
anterior and posterior sides are interchanged. If the structure which is
to be converted into its symmetrical counterpart is made of a flexible
material, the interchange mentioned of the interior and exterior surfaces
may be effected by simply turning the structure inside out; for example,
a right glove may thus be converted into a left glove.
Now from this truth, that every structure can be converted by means
of a four-dimensional space inclusive of the world, into a structure
symmetrical with it, it has been sought to establish the probability of
the real existence of a four-dimensioned space. Yet it will be evident,
from the discussions of the preceding section, that the only inference
which we can here make is, that the idea of a four-dimensioned space is
competent, from a mathematical point of view, to throw some light upon
the phenomena of symmetry. To conclude from these facts that a space
of this kind really exists, would be as daring as to conclude from
the fact that the uniform angular velocity of the apparent motions of
the fixed stars is explicable from the assumption of an axial motion
of the firmament, that the fixed stars are really rigidly placed in a
celestial sphere rotating about its axis. It must not be forgotten that
our comprehension of the phenomena of the real world consists of two
elements: first, of that which the things really are; and, second, of
that by which we rationally apprehend the things. This latter element
is partly dependent on the sum of the experiences which we have before
acquired, and partly on the necessity, due to the imperfection of reason,
of our embracing the multitudinous isolated phenomena of the world into
categories which we ourselves have formed, and which, therefore, are not
wholly derived from the phenomena themselves, but to a great extent are
dependent on us.
Besides geometrical reasons, Zöllner has also adduced cosmological
reasons to prove the existence of a four-dimensional space. To these
reasons belong especially the questions whether the number of the fixed
stars is infinitely great, whether the world is finite or infinite
in extension, whether the world had a beginning or will have an end,
whether the world is not hastening towards a condition of equilibrium or
dead level by the universal distribution of its matter and energy; the
problems, also, of gravitation and action at a distance; and finally, the
questions concerning the relations between the phenomena in the world of
sense-perception to the unknown things-in-themselves. All these questions
which can be decided in no definite sense, led Zöllner and his followers
to the assumption that a four-dimensioned space inclusive of the space of
experience must really exist. But more careful reflection will show that
this assumption does not dispose of the difficulties but simply displaces
them into another realm. Furthermore, even if four-dimensioned space did
unravel and make clear all the cosmological problems which have bothered
the human mind, still, its existence would not be proved thereby; it
would yet remain a mere hypothesis, designed to render more intelligible
to a being who can only make experiences in a three-dimensional space,
the phenomena therein which are full of mystery to it. A four-dimensioned
space would in such case possess for the metaphysician a value similar
to that which the ether possesses for the physicist. Still more
convincing than these cosmological reasons to the majority of men is
the physio-psychological reason drawn from the phenomena of vision which
Zöllner adduces. Into this main argument we will enter in more detail.
When we “see” an object, as we all know, the light which proceeds or is
reflected therefrom produces an image on the retina of our eye; this
image is conducted to our consciousness by means of the optical nerve,
and our reason draws therefrom an inference respecting the object. When,
now, we look at a square whose sides are a decimetre in length, and
whose centre is situated at the distance of a metre from the pupil of
our eye, an image is produced on the retina. But exactly the same image
will be produced there if we look at a square whose sides are parallel
to the sides of the first square but two decimetres in length, and whose
centre is situated at a distance of two metres from the pupil of the eye.
Proceeding thus further, we readily discover that an eye can perceive
in any length or line only the ratio of its magnitude to the distance
at which it is situated from it, and that generally a three-dimensional
world must appear to the eye two-dimensional, because all points which
lie behind each other in the direction outwards from the eye produce
on the retina only one image. This is due to the fact that the retinal
images are themselves two-dimensional; for which reason, Zöllner says,
the world must appear to a child as two-dimensional, if it be supposed to
live in a primitive condition of unconscious mental activity. To such a
child two objects which are moving the one behind the other, must appear
as suffering displacement on a surface, which we conceive behind the
objects, and on which the latter are projected. In all these apparent
displacements, coincidences and changes of form also are effected. All
these things must appear puzzling to a human being in the first stages
of its development, and the mind thus finds itself, as Zöllner further
argues, in the first years of childhood forced to adopt a hypothesis
concerning the constitution of space and to assume that the world is
three-dimensional, although the eye can really perceive it as only
two-dimensional. Zöllner then further says, that in the explanation of
the effects of the external world, man constantly finds this hypothesis
of his childish years confirmed, and that in this way it has become in
his mind so profound a conviction that it is no longer possible for him
to think it away. Consonant with this argumentation, also, is Zöllner’s
remark, that the same phenomenon has presented itself in astronomical
methods of knowledge. To explain the movements of the planets, which
appear to describe regular paths on the surface of a celestial sphere,
we were compelled in the solution of the riddles which these motions
presented, to assume in the structure of the heavens a dimension of
“depth,” and the complicated motions in the two-dimensioned firmament
were converted into very simple motions in three-dimensioned space.
Zöllner also contends that our conception of the entire visible world as
possessed of three dimensions is a product of our reason, which the mind
was driven to form by the contradictions which would be presented to it
on the assumption of only two dimensions by the perspective distortions,
coincidences, and changes of magnitude of objects. When a child moves its
hand before its eyes, turns it, brings it nearer, or pushes it farther
away, this child successively receives the most various impressions on
the surface of its retina of one and the same object of whose identity
and constancy its feelings offer it a perfect assurance. If the child
regarded the changeable projection of the hand on the surface of the
retina as the real object, and not the hand which lies beyond it, the
child would constantly be met with contradictions in its experience,
and to avoid this it makes the hypothesis that the space of experience
is three-dimensional. Zöllner’s contention is, therefore, that man
originally had only a two-dimensional intuition of space, but was forced
by experience to represent to himself the objects which on the retinal
surface appeared two-dimensional, as three-dimensional, and thus to
transform his two-dimensional space-intuition into a three-dimensional
one. Now, in exactly the same way, according to Zöllner’s notion, will
man, by the advancement and increasing exactness of his knowledge of
the phenomena of the outer world, also be compelled to conceive of the
material world as a “shadow cast by a more real four-dimensional world,”
so that these conceptions will be just as trivial for the people of the
twentieth century as since Copernicus’s time the explanation of the
motions of the heavenly bodies by means of a three-dimensional motion
has been.
Zöllner’s arguments from the phenomena of vision may be refuted as
follows: In the first place it is incorrect to say that we see the
things of the external world by means of two-dimensional retinal images.
The light which penetrates the eye causes an irritation of the optical
nerves, and any such effect which, though it be not powerful, is,
nevertheless, a mechanical one, can only take place on things which are
material. But material things are always three-dimensional. The effect
of light on the sensitive plates of photography can with just as little
justice be regarded as two-dimensional. Our senses can have perception
of nothing but three-dimensional things, and this perception is effected
by forces which in their turn act on three-dimensional things, namely,
our sensory nerves. It is wrong to call an image two-dimensional,
for it is only by abstraction that we can conceive of a thickness so
growing constantly smaller and smaller as to admit of our regarding a
three-dimensional picture as two-dimensional, by giving it in mind a
vanishingly small thickness. It is also wrong to say, as Zöllner says,
that when we see the shadow of a hand which is cast upon a wall we see
something two-dimensional. What we really perceive is that no light
falls upon our eye from the region included by the shadow, while from
the entire surrounding region light does fall on our eye. But this light
is reflected from the material particles which form the surface of the
wall, that is, from three-dimensional particles of matter. We must
always remember that our eye communicates to us only three-dimensional
knowledge, and that for the comprehension of anything which has two, one,
or no dimensions, _a purely intellectual act of abstraction must be added
to the act of perception_. When we imagine we have made a lead-pencil
mark on paper, we have, exactly viewed, simply heaped along side of each
other little particles of graphite in such a manner that there are by
far fewer graphite particles in the lateral and upward directions than
there are in the longitudinal direction, and thus our reason arrives by
abstraction at the notion of a straight line. When we look at an object,
say a cube of wood, we recognise the object as three-dimensional, and
it is only by abstraction that we can conceive of its two-dimensional
surfaces, of its twelve one-dimensional edges, and of its eight
no-dimensional corners. For we reach the perception of its surface, for
example, solely by reason of the fact that the material particles which
form the cube prevent the transmission of light, and reflect it, whereby
a part of the light reflected from every material particle strikes our
eye. Now, by thinking exclusively of those material particles which are
reflected, in contrariety to the empty space without and the hidden and
therefore non-reflected particles within, we form the notion of a surface.
It is evident from this, that all that we perceive is three-dimensional,
that we cannot come at anything two-dimensional without an intellectual
abstraction, and that, therefore, we cannot conceive of anything
two-dimensional exerting effects upon material things. But this fact is a
refutation of the retinal argument of Zöllner. If vision consisted wholly
and exclusively in the creation of a two-dimensioned image, the things
which take place in the world could never come into our consciousness.
The child, therefore, does not originally apprehend the world, as Zöllner
says, as two-dimensional; on the contrary, it apprehends it either not
at all, or it apprehends it as three-dimensional. Of course the child
must first “learn how” to see. It is found from the observation of
children during the first months of their lives, and of the congenitally
blind, who have suddenly acquired the power of vision by some successful
operation, that seeing does not consist alone in the irritations which
arise in the optic nerves, but also in the correct interpretation of
these irritations by reason. This correct interpretation, however, can
be accomplished only by the accumulation of a considerable stock of
experience. Especially must the recognition of the distance of the object
seen, be gradually learned. In this, two things are especially helpful;
first, the fact that we have two eyes and, consequently, that we must
feel two irritations of the optic nerves which are not wholly alike; and
secondly, the fact that we are enabled by our power of motion and our
sense of touch to convince ourselves of the distance and form of the
bodies seen. The question now arises, what sort of an intuition of space
would a creature have that had only one eye, that could neither move
itself nor its eye, and also possessed no peripheral nerves. According
to Zöllner’s view, this creature could, owing to its two-dimensional
retinal images, only have a two-dimensional intuition of space. The
author’s opinion, however, is, that such a creature could not see at all,
as it has no possibility of collecting experiences which are adapted in
any way to interpreting the effects of things on its retina. The light
which proceeded from the objects roundabout and fell on the retina could
produce no other effect on the being than that of a wholly intelligible
irritation, or, perhaps, even pain.
The reflections presented sufficiently show that neither the phenomena
of symmetry nor the retinal images of the objects of vision necessarily
force upon us the assumption of a four-dimensioned space. If the
material world should ever present problems which could not in the
progress of knowledge be solved in a natural way, the assumption that
a four-dimensional space containing the world exists would also be
incompetent to resolve the difficulties presented; it would simply
convert these difficulties into others, and not dispose of the problems
but simply displace them to another world. Yet the question might be
asked, Is the existence of a four-dimensional space really _impossible_?
To answer this question, we must first clearly know what we mean by
“exist.” If existence means that the intellectual _idea_ of a thing
can be formed and that this idea shall not lead to contradictions with
other well-established ideas and with experience, we have only to
say that four-dimensioned space does exist, as the arguments adduced
in sections II and III have rendered plain. If, namely, the space
of four dimensions did not exist as a clear idea in the minds of
mathematicians, mathematicians could certainly not have been led by
this idea to results which are recognised by the senses as true, and
which really take place in our own representable space. But if existence
means “material actuality” we must say that we neither now nor in the
future can know anything about it. For we know material actuality
only as three-dimensional, our senses can only make three-dimensional
experiences, and the inferences of our reason, although they can
well abstract from material things, can never ascend to the point of
explaining a four-dimensional materiality. Just as little, therefore,
as we can locally fix the idea of a two-dimensional material world, as
little can we substantiate the notion of a four-dimensioned material
existence.
V.
EXAMINATION OF THE HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE EXISTENCE OF
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SPIRITS.
In connection with the belief that the visible world is contained in a
four-dimensioned space, Zöllner and his adherents further hold that this
higher space is inhabited by intelligent beings who can act consciously
and at will on the human beings who live in experiential space. To invest
this opinion with greater strength Zöllner appealed to the fact that the
greatest thinkers of antiquity and of modern times were either wholly
of this opinion or at least held views from which his contentions might
be immediately derived. Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Glaukon
in the seventh book of the Republic, is evidence, says Zöllner, that
this greatest philosopher of antiquity possessed some presentiment of
this extension of the notion of space. Yet any one who has connectedly
studied and understood Plato’s system of philosophy must concede that
the so-called “ideas” of the Platonic system denote something wholly
different from what Zöllner sees in them or pretends to see. Zöllner
says that these Platonic ideas are spatial objects of more than three
dimensions and represent “real existence” in the same sense that the
material world, as contrasted with the images on the retina, represents
it. Zöllner similarly deals with the Kantian “thing-in-itself,” which is
also regarded as an object of higher dimensions.
To show Kant in the light of a predecessor, Zöllner quotes the following
passage from the former’s “Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch
Träume der Metaphysik” (1766, Collected Works, Vol. VII, page 32 et
seqq.): “I confess that I am very much inclined to assert the existence
of immaterial beings in the world, and to rank my own soul as one of
such a class. It appears, there is a spiritual essence existent which is
intimately bound up with matter but which does not act on those forces of
the elements by which the latter are connected, but upon some internal
principle of its own condition. It will, in the time to come—I know not
when or where—be proved, that the human soul, even in this life, exists
in a state of uninterrupted connection with all the immaterial natures
of the spiritual world; that it alternately acts on them and receives
impressions from them, of which, as a human soul, it is not, in the
normal state of things, conscious. It would be a great thing, if some
such systematic constitution of the spiritual world, as we conceive it,
could be deduced, not exclusively from our general notion of spiritual
nature, which is altogether too hypothetical, but from some real and
universally admitted observations,—or, for that matter, if it could even
be shown to be probable.”
What Kant really asserts here is, first, the partly independent and
partly dependent existence of the soul, and of spiritual beings
generally, on matter, and, second, that spiritual beings have some
common connection with and mutually influence one another. This
contention, which is that of very many thinkers, does not, however,
entail the consequence that the “transcendental subject of Kant” must be
four-dimensional, as Zöllner asserts it does. Kant never even hinted at
the theory that the psychical features of the world owe their connection
with the material features to the fact that they are four-dimensional
and, therefore, include the three-dimensional. Is it a necessary
conclusion that if a thing exists and is not three-dimensional, as is
the case with the soul, that it is therefore four-dimensional? Can it
not in fact be so constituted that it is wholly meaningless to speak of
dimensions at all in connection with it?
Yet still more strongly than the words of Plato and Kant do certain
utterances of the mathematicians Gauss and Riemann speak in favor of
Zöllner’s hypothesis. S. v. Waltershausen relates of Gauss in his “Gruss
zum Gedächtnis,” (Leipsic, 1856,) that Gauss had often remarked that the
three dimensions of space were only a specific peculiarity of the human
mind. We can think ourselves, he said, into beings who are only conscious
of two dimensions; similarly, perhaps, beings who are above and outside
our world may look down upon us; and there were, he continued, in a
jesting tone, a number of problems which he had here indefinitely laid
aside, but hoped to treat in a superior state by superior geometrical
methods. Leaving aside this jest, which quite naturally suggested itself,
the remarks of Gauss are quite correct. We possess the power to abstract
and can think, therefore, what kind of geometry a being that is only
acquainted with a two-dimensional world would have; for instance, we can
imagine that such a being could not conceive of the possibility of making
two triangles coincide which were congruent in the sense above explained,
and so on. So, also, we can understand that a being who has control of
four dimensions can only conceive of a geometry of four-dimensional
space, yet may have the capacity of thinking itself into spaces of other
dimensions. But it does not follow from this that a four-dimensional
space exists, let alone that it is inhabited by reasonable beings.
Riemann, on the other hand, speaks directly of a world of spirits. In
his “Neue mathematische Principien der Naturphilosophie” he puts forth
the hypothesis that the space of the world is filled with a material
that is constantly pouring into the ponderable atoms, there to disappear
from the phenomenal world. In every ponderable atom, he says, at every
moment of time, there enters and appears a determinate amount of matter,
proportional to the force of gravitation. The ponderable bodies,
according to this theory, are the place at which the spiritual world
enters and acts on the material world. Riemann’s world of spirits, the
sole office of which is to explain the phenomenon of gravitation as
a force governing matter, is, though, essentially different from the
spiritual world of Zöllner, the function of which is to explain supposed
supersensuous phenomena which stand in the most glaring contradiction
with the established known laws of the material world.
Besides this appeal to the testimony of eminent men like Plato, Kant,
Gauss, and Riemann, the scientific prophet of modern spiritualism also
bases his theory on the belief, which has obtained at all times and
appeared in various forms among all peoples, that there exist in the
world forces which at times are competent to evoke phenomena that are
exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. We have but to think of the
phenomena of table-turning which once excited the Chinese as much as
it has aroused, during the last few decades, the European and American
worlds; or of the divining-rod, by whose help our forefathers sought for
water, in fact, as we do now in parts of Europe and America.
Cranz, in his essay on the subject, divides spiritualistic phenomena
into physical and intellectual. Of the first class he enumerates
the following: the moving of chairs and tables; the animation of
walking-sticks, slippers, and broomsticks; the miraculous throwing of
objects; spirit-rappings (Luther heard a sound in the Wartburg, “as if
three score casks were hurled down the stairs”); the ecstatic suspension
of persons above the floor; the diminution of the forces of gravity; the
ordeals of witches; the fetching of wished-for objects; the declination
of the magnetic needle by persons at a distance; the untying of knots
in a closed string; insensibility to injury and exemption therefrom
when tortured, as in handling red-hot coals, carrying hot irons, etc.;
the music of invisible spirits; the materialisations of spirits or of
individual parts of spirits (the footprints in the experiments of Slade,
photographed by Zöllner); the double appearance of the same person;
the penetration of matter (of closed doors, windows, and so forth).
As numerous also is the selection presented by Cranz of intellectual
phenomena, namely: spirit-writing (Have’s instrument for the facilitation
of intercourse with spirits), the clairvoyance and divination of
somnambulists, of visionary, ecstatic, and hypnotised persons, prompted
or controlled by narcotic medicines, by sleeping in temples, by music and
dancing, by ascetic modes of life and residence in barren localities, by
the exudations of the soil and of water, by the contemplation of jewels,
mirrors, and crystal-pure water, and by anointing the finger-nails with
consecrated oil. Also the following additional intellectual phenomena
are cited: increased eloquence or suddenly acquired power of speaking
in foreign languages; spirit-effects at a distance; inability to move,
transferences of the will, and so forth.
All these phenomena, presented with the aspect of truth, and associated
more or less with trickery, self-deception, and humbug, are adduced
by the spiritualists to substantiate the belief in a world of spirits
which consciously and purposely take part in the events of the material
world, and that these phenomena may be sufficiently and consistently
explained by the effects of the activity of such a world. It is
impossible for us to discuss and put to the test here the explanations
of all these supersensuous phenomena. Anything and everything can be
explained by spirits who act at will upon the world. There are only a
few of these phenomena, namely, clairvoyance and Slade’s experiments,
whose explanations are so intimately connected with our main theme, the
so-called fourth dimension, that they cannot be passed over.
First, with respect to clairvoyance, the American visionary Davis
describes the experiences which he claims to have made in this condition,
induced by “magnetic sleep,” as follows:[81] “The sphere of my vision
now began to expand. At first, I could only clearly discern the walls of
the house. At the start they seemed to me dark and gloomy; but they soon
became brighter and finally transparent. I could now see the objects,
the utensils, and the persons in the adjoining house as easily as those
in the room in which I sat. But my perceptions extended further still;
before my wandering glance, which seemed to control a great semi-circle,
the broad surface of the earth, for hundreds of miles about me, grew as
transparent as water, and I saw the brains, the entrails, and the entire
anatomy of the beasts that wandered about in the forests of the eastern
hemisphere, hundreds and thousands of miles from the room in which I
sat.” The belief in the possibility of such states of clairvoyance is
by no means new. Alexander Dumas made use of it, for example, in his
“Mémoires d’un médicin,” in which Count Balsamo, afterwards called
Cagliostro, is said to possess the power of transforming suitable persons
into this wonderful condition and thus to find out what other persons at
distant places are doing. Zöllner explains clairvoyance by means of the
fourth dimension thus:
A man who is accustomed to viewing things on a plain is supposed to
ascend to a considerable height in a balloon. He will there enjoy a
much more extended prospect than if he had remained on the plain below,
and will also be able to signal to greater distances. The plain,
that is, the two-dimensioned space, is accordingly viewed by him from
points outside of the plain as “open” in all directions. Exactly so,
in Zöllner’s theory, must three-dimensioned spaces appear, when viewed
from points in four-dimensioned space, namely, as “open”; and the more
so in proportion as the point in question is situated at a greater
distance from the place of our body, or in proportion as the soul ascends
to a greater height in this fourth dimension. Zöllner thus explains
clairvoyance as a condition in which the soul has displaced itself out
of its three-dimensioned space and reached a point which with respect
to this space is four-dimensionally situated and whence it is able to
contemplate the three-dimensional world without the interference of
intervening obstacles.
The following remark is to be made to this explanation. The reason why
we have a better and more extended view from a balloon than from places
on the earth is simply this, that between the suspended balloon and the
objects seen at a distance nothing intervenes but the air, and air allows
the transmission of light, whereas, at the places below on the earth
there are all kinds of material things about the observer which prevent
the transmission of light and either render difficult or absolutely
impossible the sight of things which lie far away. In the same way,
also, from a point in four-dimensioned space, a three-dimensional object
will be visible only provided there are no obstacles intervening. If,
therefore, this awareness of a distant object is a real, actual vision by
means of a luminous ray which strikes the eye, there is contained in the
explanation of Zöllner the tacit assumption that the medium with which
the four-dimensional world is filled is also pervious to light exactly as
the atmosphere is.
The theory that there are four-dimensional spirits who produce the
phenomena cited by the spiritualists received special support from the
experiments which the prestidigitateur Slade, who claimed he was a
spiritualistic medium, performed before Zöllner. Of these experiments
we will speak of the two most important, the experiment with the glass
sphere and the experiment with the knots. To explain the connection
of the glass sphere experiment with the fourth dimension, we must
first conceive of two-dimensional reasoning beings, or, let us say,
two-dimensional worms, living and moving in a plane. For a creature of
this kind it will be self-evident that there are no other paths between
two points of its plane than such as lie within the plane. It must,
accordingly, be beyond the range of conception of this worm, how any
two-dimensional object which lies within a circle in its space can be
brought to any other position in its space outside the circle without the
object passing through the barriers formed by the circle’s circumference.
But if this worm could procure the services of a three-dimensional being,
the transportation of the object from a position within the circle to
any position outside it could be effected by the three-dimensional being
simply taking the object _out of_ the plane and placing it at the desired
point. This object, therefore, would, in an inexplicable manner, suddenly
disappear before the eyes of the worms who were assembled as spectators,
and after the lapse of an interval of time would again appear outside
the circle without having passed at any point through the circle’s
circumference. If now we add another dimension, we shall derive from this
trick, which is wholly removed from the sense-perception of the flattened
worms, the following experiment, which is wholly beyond the perception
of us human beings. Inside a glass sphere, which is closed all around,
a grain of corn is placed; the problem is to transport the corn to some
place outside the sphere without passing through the glass surface. Now
we should be able to perform this trick if some four-dimensional being
would render us the same aid that we before rendered the two-dimensional
worm. For the four-dimensional being could take the grain of corn into
his four-dimensional space and then replace it in our space in the
desired spot outside of the glass sphere. Slade performed this trick
before Zöllner. Its mere performance sufficed to convince this latter
investigator that Slade had here made use of a four-dimensional agent,
who, in respect of power of motion, controlled his four-dimensional space
as we do our three-dimensional space. It never occurred to Zöllner that
this experiment was the cleverly executed trick of a prestidigitateur,
or, as it would at once occur to us, that the whole thing was a sensory
illusion. The fact that we cannot explain a trick easily and naturally
does not irrevocably prove that it is accomplished by other means than
those which the world of matter presents.
Still better known than this last performance is Slade’s experiments
with knots. To explain this in connection with the fourth dimension, we
must resort again to the plane and the flat worm inhabiting it. To two
parallel lines in a plane let the two ends of a third line, which has a
double point, that is, intersects itself once, be attached. Our flat worm
would not be able to untie the loop formed by the doubled third line,
which we will call a string, because it cannot execute motions in three
dimensions. If, therefore, a two-dimensional prestidigitateur should
appear and accomplish the trick of untying this loop without removing the
two ends of the string from the parallel lines, he will have accomplished
for our flat worm a supersensuous experiment. A human being engaged in
the service of the prestidigitateur could execute for him the experiment
by simply lifting the string a little out of the plane, pulling it
taut, and placing it back again. This suggests the following analogous
experiment for three-dimensional beings. The two ends of a string in
which a common knot has been made are sealed to the opposite walls of a
room. The problem is to untie this knot without breaking the seals at the
two ends of the string. Everybody knows that this problem is not soluble,
but it may be calculated mathematically that the knot in the string can
be untied as easily by motions in a fourth dimension of space as in the
experiment above described the knot in the two-dimensional string was
untied by a three-dimensional motion. Now as Slade untied the knot before
Zöllner’s eyes without apparently making any use of the ends fastened in
the walls, Zöllner was still more strongly confirmed in the view that
Slade had power over spirits who performed the experiments for him.
Still more far-reaching is the theory of Carl du Prel concerning the
relations of the material and the four-dimensional world. (Compare his
numerous essays in the spiritualistic magazine _Sphinx_.) Just as the
shadows of three-dimensional objects cast on a wall are controlled
in their movements by the things whose projections they are, in the
same way it is claimed does there exist back of everything of this
sense-perceptible world a real transcendental and four-dimensional
“thing-in itself” whose projection in the space of experience is what we
falsely regard as the independent thing. Thus every man besides existing
in his terrestrial self also exists in a spiritual or astral self which
constantly accompanies him in his walks through life and whose existence
is especially proclaimed in states of profound sleep, of somnambulism,
and in the conditions of mediums. In this way Du Prel explains the
wonderful feats of somnambulists, and the aerial journeys of sorcerers
and witches. Whereas, ordinarily the separation of the material body from
the astral body is only effected at the moment of death; in the case of
somnambulists this separation may take place at any time, or, as Du Prel
says: “the threshold of feeling may be permanently displaced.”
In view of the natural relations of such theories to the dogmas of
Christianity it is explainable that theologians also have raised their
voices for or against spiritualism. While the _Protestant Church Times_
beheld in the “repulsive thaumaturgic performances which these coryphæi
of modern science offer, a lack of comprehension of real philosophy,” the
magazine _The Proof of Faith_, expresses its delight at the discovery
of spiritualism in the following manner: “Every Christian will surely
rejoice at the deep and perhaps mortal wound which these new discoveries
have in all probability administered to modern materialism.”
We shall pass by the childish opinion that the Bible also speaks of
four dimensions, as both in Job (xi, 8-9) and in the Epistle to the
Ephesians (iii, 18) only breadth, length, depth, and height, that is,
four directions of extension, are mentioned. Yet we will still add, as
Cranz has done, the reflections which Zöllner, as the most prominent
representative of modern spiritualism, has put forward respecting its
relation to the doctrines of Christianity (_Wissensch. Abhandl._,
Vol. III). By the foundation of transcendental physics on the basis
of spiritualistic phenomena, the “new light” has arisen which is
spoken of in the New Testament. The rending of the veil of the Temple
on the crucifixion of Christ, the resurrection, the ascension, the
transfiguration, the speaking with many tongues on the giving out of the
Holy Ghost, all these are in Zöllner’s view spiritualistic phenomena.
Similarly, he sees a reference to the four-dimensional world of spirits
in all those sayings of Christ in which the latter speaks to his Apostles
of the impossibility of their having any image or notion of the place to
which when he disappeared he would go and whence he would return. (Gospel
of St. John, xiii, 33, 36; xiv, 2, 3, 28; xvi, 5, 13).
Ulrici, however, goes furthest in the mingling of spiritualistic and
Christian beliefs; for he sees in the doctrine of spiritualism a means
of strengthening belief in a supreme moral world-order and in the
immortality of the soul. In answer to Ulrici’s tract “Spiritualism
So-called, a Question of Science” (1889) Wundt wrote an annihilating
reply bearing the title “Spiritualism, a Question of Science So-called.”
Wundt criticises the future condition of our souls according to
spiritualistic hypotheses in the following sarcastic yet pertinent words,
which Cranz also quotes: “(1) Physically, the souls of the dead come
into the thraldom of certain living beings who are called mediums. These
mediums are, for the present, at least, a not widely diffused class and
they appear to be almost exclusively Americans. At the command of these
mediums, departed souls perform mechanical feats which possess throughout
the character of absolute aimlessness. They rap, they lift tables and
chairs, they move beds, they play on the harmonica, and do other similar
things. (2) Intellectually, the souls of the dead enter a condition
which, if we are to judge from the productions which they deposit on
the slates of the mediums, must be termed a very lamentable one. These
slate-writings belong throughout in the category of imbecility; they
are totally bereft of any contents. (3) The most favored, apparently,
is the moral condition of the soul. According to the testimony which
we have, its character cannot be said to be anything else than that of
utter harmlessness. From brutal performances, such, for instance, as the
destruction of bed-canopies, the spirits most politely refrain.” Wundt
then laments the demoralising effect which spiritualism exercises on
people who have hitherto devoted their powers to some serious pursuit or
even to the service of science. In fact it is a presumptuous and flagrant
procedure to forsake the path of exact research, which slow as it is,
yet always leads to a sure extension of knowledge, in the hope that
some aimless, foolhardy venture into the realm of uncertainty will carry
us further than the path of slow toil, and that we can ever thus easily
lift the veil which hides from man the problems of the world that are yet
unsolved.
* * * * *
Now that we have presented the opinions of others respecting the
existence of a four-dimensional world of spirits, the author would
like to develop one or two ideas of his own on the subject. In the
preceding section it was stated that everything that we perceive by our
senses is three-dimensional and that everything that possesses four
or more dimensions can only be regarded as abstractions or fictions
which our reason forms in its constant efforts after an extension and
generalisation of knowledge. To speak of a two-dimensional matter is
as self-contradictory as the notion of four-dimensional matter. But a
two or a four-dimensional world might exist in some other manner than a
material manner, and for all we know in one which to us does not admit
of representation. But in such a case, if it were without the power of
affecting the material world, we should never be able to acquire any
knowledge concerning its existence, and it would be totally indifferent
to the people of the three-dimensional world, whether such a world
existed or not. Just as an artist during his lifetime produces a number
of different works of art, so also the Creator might have created a
number of different-dimensioned worlds which in no wise interfere with
one another. In such a case, any one world would not be able to know
anything of any other, and we must consequently regard the question
whether a four-dimensional world exists which is incapable of affecting
ours, as insoluble. We have only to examine, therefore, the question
whether the phenomenal world perhaps is a single individual in a great
layer of worlds of which every successive one has one more dimension
than the preceding and which are so connected with one another that
each successive world contains and includes the preceding world, and,
therefore, can produce effects in it. For our reason, which draws its
inferences from the phenomena of this world, tells us, that if outside
the three-dimensional world there exists a second four-dimensional
world, containing ours, there is no reason why worlds of more or less
dimensions should not, with the same right, also exist. But if now,
as Zöllner and his adherents maintain, four-dimensional spirits exist
which can act by the mere efforts of their own wills on our world,
there is surely no reason why we three-dimensional beings should not
also be able to produce effects on some two-dimensional animated world.
Whether we have, generally, any such influence we do not know, but we
certainly do know that we do not act purposely and consciously on a
two-dimensional world. If, therefore, Zöllner were right, the plan of
creation would possess the wonderful feature that four-dimensional beings
are capable of arbitrarily affecting the three-dimensional world, but
that three-dimensional beings have no right in their turn consciously to
affect a two dimensional world.
The supporters of Zöllner’s hypothesis will perhaps reply to the
objection just made, that the plan of creation might, after all, possibly
possess this wonderful peculiarity, that we human beings perhaps, in
some higher condition of culture, will be able to act consciously on
two-dimensional worlds, and that at any rate it is simply an inference
by analogy to conclude from the non-existence of a relation between
three and two dimensions that the same relation is also wanting in the
case of four and three dimensions. As a matter of fact, the objection
above made is not intended to refute Zöllner’s hypothesis, but only to
stamp it as very improbable. But despite this improbability Zöllner
would still be right if the phenomena of the material world actually
made his hypothesis necessary. That, however, is by no means the case.
Although most of the phenomena to which the spiritualists appeal are
probably founded on sense-illusions, humbug, and self-deception, it
cannot be denied that there possibly do exist phenomena which cannot be
brought into harmony with the natural laws now known. There always have
been mysterious phenomena, and there always will be. Yet, as we have
often seen that the progress of science has again and again revealed as
natural what former generations held to be supernatural, it is certainly
wholly wrong to bring in for the explanation of phenomena which now seem
mysterious an hypothesis like that of Zöllner’s, by which everything in
the world can be explained. If we adopt a point of view which regards it
as natural for spirits arbitrarily to interfere in the workings of the
world, all scientific investigation will cease, for we could never more
trust or rely upon any chemical or physical experiment, or any botanical
or zoölogical culture. If the spirits are the authors of the phenomena
that are mysterious to us, why should they also not have control of
the phenomena which are not mysterious? The existence of mysterious
phenomena justifies in no manner or form the assumption that spirits
exist which produce them. Would it not be much simpler, if we _must_ have
supernatural influences, to adopt the naïve religious point of view,
according to which everything that happens is traceable to the direct,
actual, and personal interference of a single being which we call God?
Things which formerly stood beyond the sphere of our knowledge and were
regarded as marvellous events, as a storm, for example, now stand in the
most intimate connection with known natural laws. Things that formerly
were mysterious are so no longer. If one hundred and fifty years ago some
scientists were in the possession of our present knowledge of inductional
electricity and had connected Paris and Berlin with a wire by whose aid
one could clearly interpret in Berlin what another person had at that
very moment said in Paris, people would have regarded this phenomenon
as supernatural and assumed that the originator of this long-distance
speaking was in league with spirits.
We recognise, thus, that the things which are termed supernatural depend
to a great extent on the stage of culture which humanity has reached.
Things which now appear to us mysterious, may, in a very few decades,
be recognised as quite natural. This knowledge, however, is not to be
obtained by the lazy assumption of bands of spirits as the authors of
mysterious phenomena, but by performing what in physics and chemistry
is called experiment. But the first and essential condition of all
scientific experimenting is that the experimenter shall be absolutely
master of the conditions under which the experiment is or is not to
succeed. Now, this criterion of scientific experimenting is totally
lacking in all spiritualistic experiments. We can never assign in their
case the conditions under which they will or will not succeed. When all
the preparations in a spiritualistic séance have been properly made, but
nothing takes place, the beautiful excuse is always forthcoming that the
“spirits were not willing,” that there were “too many incredulous persons
present,” and so forth. Fortunately, in physical experiments these
pretexts are not necessary. By the path of experiment, and not by that of
transcendental speculation, physics has thus made incredible progress and
has piled new knowledge strata on strata upon the old. Accordingly, the
prospect is left that the mysteries which the conditions and properties
of the human soul still present can be solved more and more by the
methods of scientific experiment. To this end, however, it is especially
necessary that the physio-psychological experiments in question should
only be performed by men who possess the critical eye of inquiry, who are
free from the dangers of self-illusion, and who are competent to keep
apart from their experiments all superstition and deception. The history
of natural science clearly teaches that it is only by this road that man
can arrive at certain and well-established knowledge. If, therefore,
there really is behind such phenomena as mind-reading, telepathy, and
similar psychical phenomena something besides humbug and self-illusion,
what we have to do is to study privately and carefully by serious
experiments the success or non-success of such phenomena, and not allow
ourselves to be influenced by the public and dramatic performances of
psychical artists, like Cumberland and his ilk.
The high eminence on which the knowledge and civilisation of humanity
now stands was not reached by the thoughtless employment of fanciful
ideas, nor by recourse to four-dimensional worlds, but by hard, serious
labor and slow, unceasing research. Let all men of science, therefore,
band themselves together and oppose a solid front to methods that
explain everything that is now mysterious to us by the interference of
independent spirits. For these methods, owing to the fact that they can
explain everything, explain nothing, and thus oppose dangerous obstacles
to the progress of real research, to which we owe the beautiful temple of
modern knowledge.
HERMANN SCHUBERT.
FOOTNOTES:
[79] This is discussed at greater length in my tract _Zahl und Zählen_ in
Virchow-Holtzendorff’s collection of popular essays, J. F. Richter, 1887.
[80] Victor Schlegel, indeed, has made models of the three-dimensional
nets of all the six structures which correspond in four-dimensioned space
to the five regular bodies of our space, in an analogous manner to that
by which we draw in a plane the nets of five regular bodies. Schlegel’s
models are made by Brill of Darmstadt.
[81] Quoted by Cranz.
CORRESPONDENCE.
I.
THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK IN FRANCE.
The return of Mme. Hyacinthe Loyson to France after her American tour,
undertaken, I understand, in order to obtain new support for the Gallican
church, suggests the writing of this article, which will be a brief
survey, from the point of view of an American layman, of the present
religious situation in France.
As Père Hyacinthe’s reform has been made the peg on which to hang this
article, perhaps I cannot do better than begin by an examination of the
noble but fruitless labors of the eloquent ex-Carmelite. While one cannot
help being carried away by the oratory of Hyacinthe Loyson and charmed
with his personality, so full of wit, kindliness, and gentility; while
one must admire the devotedness and earnestness of Mme. Loyson and feel
much sympathy for their studious and promising son Paul, one is convinced
in spite of one’s self that this latter-day Gallicanism is doomed to
failure if indeed it has not already failed. You have simply to visit
the poor little church in the Rue d’Arras, in this city, to see what a
mere handful of followers Père Hyacinthe has been able to collect in
this great centre of two million people, after years of work and after
preaching hundreds of magnificent sermons that would fill to overflowing
the largest edifice in America, Sunday after Sunday, if delivered
with similar eloquence by a divine of no matter what denomination or
of no denomination at all. To the practical layman of this practical
age no further demonstration is necessary in order to prove that Père
Hyacinthe’s mission is, as the French say, _un coup dans l’eau_, that
is, an effort which produces no result. Whenever I leave this humble
church and am well out in the narrow, shabby street in which it is
situated and am away from the influence of the preacher’s fascination, I
cannot help exclaiming, What a waste of power, What a casting of pearls
before swine! And all of Mme. Loyson’s enthusiastic conversation in
private, her accounts of the encouraging letters received by the Père,
furtively of course, from discontented priests, and her statements
concerning the warm words of sympathy and support from the churchmen of
foreign lands, cannot remove that abiding feeling that this rejuvenated
Gallican church movement is other than a dismal failure; more than ever
one exclaims: _C’est un coup dans l’eau_.
Père Hyacinthe has always received, in France as abroad, his greatest
support from the Protestants. But Protestantism here in France is a
sickly growth when compared, for instance, with its rich and sturdy
brother in the United States. It has, at most, only a small band of
followers, nearly lost to view in the vast army of Catholicism and
Freethought. Furthermore, the Liberal wing is losing ground and the
Orthodox wing gaining slightly, not an encouraging sign in these days to
those who hope for the final triumph of faith over the growing tendency
towards infidelity. The real truth is that about the only strength left
in French Protestantism to-day lies in the fact that there is a certain
_éclat_ associated, in the eyes of the upper classes, with the being a
Protestant, much as is the case in America and England, in the same rank,
about being a Roman Catholic. It distinguishes you from the multitude,
and in these democratic times human nature, especially when it is that
of the “upper ten,” is very keen for elimination from “the vulgar
throng.” It is difficult for an American to comprehend this peculiar
little streak of innocent vanity running through certain French circles
which shows itself in this wish to be known as Protestants. It is not
too much to say that to the impartial outside observer this phase of the
French Protestantism of to-day is the one that first strikes the eye;
which goes to prove in a peculiar but significant manner the weak hold,
on the one hand, which the doctrine of Luther and Calvin now has on the
French nation, and, on the other hand, how universal must be scepticism,
freethought, and utter indifference to church and religion of every kind.
If native French Protestantism exerts so little influence on the nation,
it is easy to imagine the excessive futility of the work of the foreign
missionary. There is a great deal said in American and religious circles
about the labors in France of the Salvation Army, the McAll Mission,
the Young Men’s Christian Association, etc. I have received more than
one letter from would-be subscribers in the United States asking me if
these and other similar organisations were really accomplishing all that
they pretend. My reply is invariably that if you regard their labors as
charity work some good is being done, but if money is asked for because
of the religious results which have been accomplished, the demand should
be considered to be arrant humbug. If Père Hyacinthe, a Frenchman and a
Catholic, after forty years of labor, has accomplished next to nothing,
it is easy to imagine how this nation, so reserved in its relations
with the foreigner when he attempts to penetrate into its inner life,
would treat Scotch and Yankee missionaries. From a religious standpoint,
therefore, American money and sympathy is absolutely thrown away when
it is sent to France. If it be answered that much misery and physical
suffering is relieved by these foreign missions, the French might well
ask if charity does not begin at home. The French are a peculiarly
thrifty people. Few are poor, beggars are scarce and charitable
institutions are rich and numerous. Hence devoting American dollars to
the relief of French distress is much like sending coals to Newcastle, if
it is not a piece of sheer impertinence, like our protesting to the Czar
against his Siberian convict system when we have one quite as cruel in
full swing in some of our Southern states.
And now, finally, a few paragraphs about the great Roman Catholic
church of France, the only religious institution of any real first-rate
importance in this country.
While it is true that the Catholic Church, at least as a church, still
has a strong hold on the French nation, it is also quite true that
indifference, infidelity, free thought, and atheism are on the increase.
Matthew Arnold says, in his essay on Tolstoi, written in 1887: “Between
the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he [Tolstoi] had lost, he tells
us, the Christian belief in which he had been brought up, a loss of which
examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere, but which in Russia, as
in France, is among all young men of the upper and cultivated classes
more a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, more avowed, than it is
with us.” Arnold might have enlarged, at least in the case of France, his
limits and stated that in the cities the middle and lower classes, too,
particularly the male portion, have abandoned Rome. One has only to visit
a Paris church to be convinced of the contempt which men feel for the
priesthood and religion: you can count ten female devotees for one of the
masculine gender. In the village church, far away from the great centres,
the priest may still have the large majority of the population, men and
women alike, as faithful attendants upon service. But even here, for one
man who confesses, a dozen or score of women will kneel at the chair.
Then again, this more general participation in religious ceremonies by
the rural population is due in a large measure to the fact that these
Sunday masses and vespers are almost the only break and variety in a very
dead and monotonous existence. The church is a sort of meeting place,
where whole families, babies, children, and adults, congregate. The hum
of idle conversation, the crying of infants, and the ardent exhortations
of the priest are often mingled in a manner that would astonish and shock
a pious Protestant, accustomed to the highly proper atmosphere of an
Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church in the United States.
Another sign of the disfavor in which French Catholicism finds itself
to-day is seen in the quality of its future priests. You have simply to
look into the faces of the seminarists as they pass by you in procession
in the streets of Paris to be convinced of the well-known fact that these
young men are, for the most part, the faint-hearted and dull-headed sons
of the peasantry, eager to escape the drudgery of farm life and not
intelligent enough for business or the petty employments offered by the
State.
“Anybody can make a priest,” is often heard in France. The result is that
just as the English army is the receptacle for the riff-raff—the Tommy
Atkinses of Rudyard Kipling’s “Barrack-room Ballads”—of the cities, so
the French priesthood draws most of its recruits from the scum of the
farming districts. This fact contrasts strongly, by the way, with the
manner in which the Protestants fill their pulpits. The young man who
becomes a pastor is not looked upon by his friends and companions as a
failure and a numskull. Quite the contrary; he is immediately classed
among those taking a high moral stand. Some of the best families of
France are descended from, or have relatives who are, clergymen, and they
are quite proud of the fact; another example of that sentiment of halo
surrounding French Protestantism to which reference has already been made.
Another cause of this boycotting of the cloth as a profession by the
youth of the élite is due to the Church having got on the wrong side
during the struggle for the foundation of the present Republic. The
Catholics supported the Monarchists and Bonapartists and took an active
part in the attempt to prevent the advent of republican institutions and
to overthrow these institutions when they had been accepted by a majority
of the nation. This unpatriotic course brought the Church into bad odor
among republicans, so that the having a son in orders, for example, would
be apt to be an impediment to a father aspiring to political preferment,
especially if the latter belonged to the Radical or Socialist wing of the
Republican army. The result is that a whole great political party is, in
its general tendency, opposed to the Catholic Church.
Nor is the harm occasioned thereby limited to lowering the quality of
the seminarists. It makes a vast number of intelligent and influential
citizens sworn enemies of religion. Thus, when Gambetta attended
funerals, he would not enter the church, but wait outside in the porch.
When Louis Blanc was buried neither church nor priest participated in
the pageant. On the death of Henri Martin, a free-thinking Protestant
clergyman officiated at the burial service. Hundreds of other prominent
Republicans, who have died or been buried since 1870, never entered a
church, perhaps, except when their bodies were borne there by their
families, acting under the influence of its female members, or out of
respect for public sentiment.
One of the shrewdest acts of Leo XIII. is his recent declaration in
favor of the French Republic. He not only accepts the situation, but
has ordered the faithful, both ecclesiastical and lay, in France to do
likewise. But this demand has not been complied with without a murmur.
More than one priest and noble has shown himself more ultramontane than
the Pope. The important fact remains true, however, that officially
the Vatican recognises the political change in France, and, though the
Republicans, particularly those of the Radical camp, are wary of these
new converts and still believe with Gambetta, that “_le clericalisme,
voilà l’ennemi_,” yet the mere fact that the Vatican lays down its arms
means a great deal, even if the hatchet may not be definitively buried.
Moderate Republicans, those who go to church even if they do not believe
what is said there, think they see in this action of the Holy Father a
new source of strength for the Republic. And it seems to me that they are
right, and that this view is the soundest. If the priesthood ceases its
attacks on the political powers that be, and if these latter keep a sharp
watch, which will be done while the Radical and Socialist elements are so
strong in Chamber and Senate, the clerical party can be held in check,
and the Republic will have so many less enemies, even if these quondam
enemies are but lukewarm friends.
THEODORE STANTON.
II.
NEW FRENCH BOOKS.
I am happy to have the opportunity in my present letter to speak
of a book of real importance, _La pathologie des emotions, Études
physiologiques et cliniques_, by M. CH. FÉRÉ. The name of this learned
physician of the Bicêtre is sufficiently well known to dispense me from
the necessity of speaking of his personality, so that I can devote all
that I have to say to his work. Its great merit is not so much the
novelty of the psychological theory which is laid at its foundation, as
the wealth of facts presented and the sureness of the methods pursued.
M. Féré’s mind is of a distinctly positive cast, and he possesses in a
high degree the ability to draw from the thesis which he illustrates and
confirms, the various consequences which from a medical and social point
of view this thesis involves.
States of intellectual consciousness, he writes, citing Spencer, cannot
be dissociated from emotional states. The emotions are the products
of our mental representations of agreeable states or painful states,
and are the stronger according as they contain a greater number of
present or nascent sensations competent to recall these states. The
emotions, accordingly, being simply representations of states of
consciousness provoked by external excitations, it is to be presumed
that the physiological conditions of emotions (of central or cerebral
origin) present a striking analogy, if not an absolute resemblance,
to the physiological conditions of sensations (of peripheral origin,
either internal or external); and this relation should be as prominently
marked in pathological as in normal states. The upshot of all this is,
continues M. Féré, that physical agents capable of modifying a state of
consciousness of peripheral origin (sensations), are also capable of
modifying states of consciousness of central origin (emotions). “The
external signs of these different states of consciousness can be studied
by the same methods. Psychology is only specialised physiology; mental
medicine only a specialisation of general medicine, from which it must
borrow its methods of research and action—all purely physical. The
demonstration of these relations is the object of the present work.”
The work, which contains almost six hundred pages, presents no divisions
but that of chapters. But it would not be difficult to group its contents
under the four general titles: (1) physiological and pathological effects
of physical agents on man; (2) physiological conditions and pathological
and curative effects of emotions; (3) psychopathy and morbid emotivity;
(4) the consequences to individuals and society of morbid emotivity, its
medical treatment, prophylaxis and legislation. The entire demonstration
of M. Féré, I might add, is essentially aimed at the two following
propositions: the first, that all the symptoms of emotions possess a
certain resemblance to those of fatigue or physical pain; the other, that
the original source of morbid emotivities and their resultant disorders
is a state of depression congenital or acquired.
M. Féré reverts constantly to these fundamental ideas. After having
exhibited, for example, the reciprocal influences of the emotions, or
disorders of the imagination, and of disorders which are of physical
origin, he concludes that “physical disease and moral disease have the
same basis.” It is thus only in appearance, he writes, that the mind has
any influence on the functions of the body; the phenomena of mind are,
quite the reverse, the necessary effect of certain modifications of the
body, and it is by the intermediary action of the manifestations of the
body that the representations of the mind act. It is found convenient to
regard the gray matter of the brain as the central organ of the emotions,
and the great sympathetic as the peripheral organ that presides over
their “exteriorisation”; but we have no right to think of the emotions
without their external signs, and we are thus led to the conclusion that
“emotion is essentially a generalised reflex phenomenon the centrifugal
path of which is principally the great sympathetic system.”
A psychological question much debated since M. Ribot took it up, the
question of _attention_, is also treated here, in an incidental yet
very interesting manner (Chapter III). M. Féré connects attention with
the study of the physiological conditions of physical action, and thus
takes sides, it will be seen, with the motory theory of attention.
James Sully, and others, have denied the existence of muscular phenomena
accompanying attention. But physiology is in a position to disclose
the existence of these movements; it can study their qualities, their
energy, their form, their precision, and their rapidity. We will find
in M. Féré’s book a number of new experimental facts establishing the
thesis that “muscular tension constitutes the physiological condition of
attention.” “The mistake of many psychologists (M. Hirth, for example)
has been, that they have confounded rest with willed immobility, which
from a mechanical point of view is very far removed from the former;
for immobility of will is precisely the result of very intense muscular
activities, and can only be produced by a general tension of the muscular
system, which throws the subject in a state such that it can react the
most quickly and most energetically on any excitation, whencesoever it
may proceed.” Willed, or voluntary, immobility is attention itself;
to produce this state, well-enervated and well-nourished muscles are
necessary. “We may say,” declares M. Féré, “that the practice of
immobility is the most favorable exercise for the development of the
mind: a system of education which should neglect this exercise would
suppress attention, it would be a regressive education.”
“It is lack of attention,” he tells us further on, “that is the cause
of the insensibility of hysterical patients, and it is instability of
attention that is the cause of the variability of their sensory and
motory disorders.” It is all due to the want of sufficient energy to
bring simultaneously into a state of tension the muscular settings of all
of the sensory organs. Hysterical anæsthesia according to him—and how
perfectly right he is!—is nothing but a mental and psychical disease,
which may be cured by _suggestion_; it is an organic malady, which cannot
be cured without the restoration of the proper organic state.
Worthy of notice are a few pages on the existence of electrical
phenomena, “which are exaggerated in certain subjects, but which appear
to exist in a more feeble degree in the normal states.” The facts here
involved might furnish us with a key to the phenomena of transmission,
polarisation, elective sensibility, and certain actions at a distance,
whose solution still presents great difficulties. Also to be noted are
a number of corrections of inductions made by Darwin, whom ignorance
of physiology often involved in mistakes concerning the true nature
of phenomena: thus Darwin was often led to attribute an intentional
character to actions which are throughout reflex.
Basing his views on the inevitable correlation of these two orders of
phenomena, the physical and the psychical, M. Féré stands in a position
of direct hostility to the metaphysics (of course, unconscious) of the
great body of alienists. He selects the characteristic disorder of
insanity, namely hallucination, and sets about to show the existence of
physical phenomena concomitant with hallucination. Chapter XIII is one of
the most instructive of his work and well worth thoughtful perusal. Let
us add on this point that M. Féré stoutly combats the doctrine, held by
Magnan in particular, that all forms of phobia, that is to say, of morbid
emotive states, are the brands of degeneration. He admits, however,
that a great number are connected with permanent constitutional states,
congenital or acquired.
M. Féré accepts the pathological and degenerative theory of crime.
But he rejects in a measure Lombroso’s thesis of the assimilation of
genius to insanity. Genius and talent, he says, are by no means devoid
of intellectual and emotional anomalies, but it is not true that
neuropathic states are the indispensable concomitants of genius, although
susceptibility to impressions is, when not developed to excess, one of
the physiological conditions of genius.
With respect to the social consequences involved, I will simply quote
his concise statement that “physiology is quite in accord with political
economy in condemning the intemperate generosity which favors the
development and multiplication of emotive personalities.” With regard,
finally, to the question of responsibility, M. Féré’s position differs,
so far as I can see, in no respect from my own, which I have expounded at
sufficient length in a former number of _The Monist_, to dispense me from
the necessity of reverting to it here.
* * * * *
Our next book is also a remarkable one—_Les transformations du droit_,
by M. G. TARDE, a small volume of some two hundred and twelve pages.
M. Tarde has again and again declared himself the avowed adversary of
Spencerianism, and of evolution generally, at least in so far as the idea
of evolution is indiscriminately and unreflectingly employed, as is the
case, he maintains, in a great class of social questions which make up
the criminal and civil law. Everywhere in these domains, despite apparent
uniformity, which is the simple effect of a perspective that effaces the
differences of remote times, is found diversity. The serial stages of
development professedly disclosed, he rejects as absolutely incompetent
in the explanation of criminal law, procedure, the status of persons and
things, and obligations.
In criminal law, for example, we ordinarily regard the system of
pecuniary composition as the origin of penal justice, and the idea
of vengeance as necessarily antecedent to the idea of culpability. A
mistake, says M. Tarde. And he offers on this subject a distinction which
is quite curious. He sees the defensive reaction made against criminal
acts originally splitting up into two distinct forms of quite unequal
scope: the one moral, the joint product of indignation and compassion;
the other vindictive, malevolent, and ruthless. The first, according
to him, is exercised within the family and between members of the same
social group; the second is displayed towards the foreigner and the
enemy. Of these two sources of penality, the domestic moral punishment
is the most important; the blow-for-blow policy, or vengeance, although
more apparent, is a secondary source. I fully admit that the instinct
of sympathy, the primitive condition of all social aggregation, has
never been wholly absent from human relations, and it might be that
the distinction perceived by M. Tarde is well founded, although the
two sources appear to have become so confounded in the justice of the
tribunals that it is difficult to trace them to that point. But M.
Tarde seems to me to be too much disposed to flatter the portrait of
the primitive man and to make as “mild as lambs” these prehistoric
creatures whom we have pictured as “cruel as tigers,” and to be too much
preoccupied with the ideas of penality and moral responsibility, which he
thinks the new theories have compromised.
With respect to the status of persons, he denies the existence of the
well-known order of development by which promiscuity, matriarchy, and
patriarchy are said to succeed each other. The tribe could only have
arisen, he tells us, from the federation of families, and the strong
family, the one capable of development, could only have been patriarchal.
It is wrong, he adds, to regard uterine filiation, that is, the custom
of considering a child the son of its mother and not the son of its
father, as a vestige of a pre-existent matriarchy. “In a patriarchal
society, polygamy—which is the very reverse of matriarchy—ought in the
very necessity of things to give predominance to the custom referred to,
so that children born of the same mother could be distinguished from one
another.” This, indeed, was the idea of the Greek tragedians. The maxim,
which occurs so often in Euripides, that it is not good that a man should
have several wives, is always disclosed as the anxiety of assuring the
legitimacy of children; Æschylus charges Minerva to defend the “cause of
her father”; it is one of the aspects of the reaction against the customs
of Asia. The primitive family, says M. Tarde, in summing up, was quite
different in its original forms; it was here monogamic, there polygamic,
and in other places polyandrous, at one time exogamic and at another
endogamic, and so forth. “Marriage, therefore, did not spring from a
single typical form, nor does it, in its various forms, make towards
such.”
His criticisms are of equal strength with regard to the status of
things and the presumed priority of collective property. Contrary to
the views of M. de Laveleye, he is of opinion that the community of the
village could only have arisen on an enlarged model of the community of
the family, “just as the vestal fire of the city could only have been
lighted in imitation of the fire of the domestic hearth”: The certain
effect of the first must in its origin have been to encroach upon, not to
produce, the second. Excessively preoccupied in finding in the present
the vestiges of a state of things that is past, the evolutionists involve
themselves, regardless of consequences, in many naïve and wonderful
theories, which M. Tarde, in his keen and pointed style, has not
hesitated to expose. There is much point and a profusion of the _granum
salis_ in these instructive pages.
With respect to obligations, he makes a distinction, as in criminal law,
between internal and external relations. Also, after having asserted
with Sir Henry Sumner Maine, the non-fusion of the law of nature and
the law of nations, he remarks that here also there exists two sources
whose waters have not subsequently flowed together: the _jus naturæ_ is
conceived to be the generalisation of a type of relations abstracted from
the internal relations of the members of the primitive social group; the
_jus gentium_ to be the outcome of relations between men that belong to
different groups.
Is, then, this disordered succession of the social data mere chance? The
reader will bethink himself of a number of facts which go to disprove
this conclusion, and it is a difficulty moreover which M. Tarde has
also felt. He replies by making a distinction of “two kinds of laws,
the laws of causation and the supposed laws of evolution.” The first,
which in his theory are analogous to the laws of celestial mechanics,
whose formulæ remain constant no matter what the history of the solar
systems distributed throughout the heavens may be, are the psychological
laws; the second are merely arbitrary formulæ, which, when we come to
define them accurately, do not admit of adaptation even to the majority
of cases. The psychological laws of which M. Tarde here speaks are
reducible to _imitation_[82]—consequently to _invention_—and to _logic_.
I certainly do not propose to question the importance of these factors.
In a short tract published several years ago I pointed out myself that
the influences of contact are more efficient than the influences of race
or even of climate, and this implicitly involves the idea of imitation.
Yet the character of the psychological factor does not, it seems to me,
exclude a tendency towards a certain arrangement of the data of society,
despite their possible and actual diversity. “With respect to the facts
of society,” I wrote, “we point out their changes but do not succeed
in disclosing the laws of their evolution; the most we have done is to
note amid the totality certain features which appear to predominate.”
To extricate these features is a task not unworthy of the historian. M.
Tarde himself admits that results of this character have already been
reached, and he especially points to “the splendid and commendable
movement in advance, which though not generally noticed[83] has,
nevertheless, accompanied all juridical evolutions”—namely, the constant
enlargement of the relations of law as the result of a growing sympathy
and sociability.
To sum up, the point of view which M. Tarde has taken does not exclude
a class of researches different from his. Nothing can be better than to
formulate the laws of the psychological agent, and M. Tarde, original
mind that he is, has done this with a superiority and penetration to
which I yield my unqualified admiration. At bottom, does not the view
of Auguste Comte, despite his contempt for psychology, involve the
preliminary study of the biological individual and the social agent?
Psychological laws and physical laws undoubtedly meet in the same group
of “laws of causation”; still, it should not be forgotten that in the
social order of things man is the creator of the facts and that his
creations react upon him in the proportion in which they are realised. At
any rate, a tangible relation exists between the creations of the agent
and the variations of the results, and it is not forbidden to inquire if
there does not also exist a certain order in these creations, the effect
of which would be to produce a recognisable serial succession in the
results, a medial line about which the events of our life oscillate. A
difficult investigation—and one in which M. Tarde has shown himself to be
too speedily satisfied, and in which we should strenuously guard against
hasty generalisations. It is unpleasant, we admit, to turn topsy-turvy a
house in which we have long lived in comfort; but our contentment returns
in an increased measure when we have replaced our things in their proper
places, and swept out the dusty corners.
* * * * *
M. M. AGUILÉRA has just published a work entitled, _L’idée du Droit en
Allemagne_. His book is a history of the different schools of law which
have arisen in Germany and lays especial emphasis on the fact that no
nation has advanced as far as this in seeking in philosophical ideas the
motives and the justification of its acts, and he sets about showing how
the existence of Germany’s special conception of law may be explained.
Germany, he writes in his conclusion, everywhere starts from the idea of
force. Its peculiar characteristic is to bow before victorious force. And
to this must be added, if we wish to comprehend its aggressive character,
the sentiment of vanity, which has led it to proclaim “that incredible
formula: the ideal of Germany is the ideal of humanity.”
M. GEORGE LYON gives us a learned historical study, _La philosophie
de Hobbes_. He points out how everything is interrelated in the work
of this philosopher—his conception of the state to his theories of
ethics, his ethical doctrines to his psychological theories, and the
latter to general principles concerning nature, thought, and their laws.
But he also presents with much force the objections to Hobbism. He
condemns its final consequence, which is submission to force. He points
out finally the inevitable ambiguity which permeates this system in
consequence of the struggle “between individual inspiration, which is
purely ontological, and the action of an intellectual environment which
is eminently empirical. Hobbes was the metaphysician of empiricism as
Bacon was its poet.” I dismiss for the present all discussion of these
subjects; an occasion will present itself later of dealing with them.
In _Les races et les langues_ M. ANDRÉ LEFÈVRE sums up the state of
the science of language. The distinguishing characteristic of his work
is the non-separation of language from the organism which has produced
it, and the simultaneous presentation of languages with the ethnical
groups which speak them. M. Lefèvre accepts, let us note at once, the
well-known stages of the linguistic school—monosyllabism, agglutination,
inflection, and analysis, which M. Tarde, if he should unexpectedly
become a philologist would stigmatise as gratuitous. Of the races, of the
places of origin, and of the migrations of the ancient peoples he tells
a great many stories which are somewhat of the fairy-tale order, but
this reservation does not affect in the least the value of his special
linguistic researches.
In conclusion I shall mention _Le problème de la mort, ses solutions
imaginaires et la science positive_, by M. L. BOURDEAU, and _Platon,
sa philosophie, précédé d’un aperçu de sa vie et de ses écrits_, by M.
CH. BÉNARD, a new volume in the series of historical studies by this
venerable professor.[84]
LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
FOOTNOTES:
[82] See his work _Les lois de l’imitation_ (Alcan, Paris).
[83] I have called attention to this in a less definite manner in
several passages of my book _La morale dans le drame, l’épopée et le
roman_, in which I shall have to incorporate the corrections which the
splendid studies of M. Tarde have suggested. For the citation given a
few lines above I ask permission to refer the reader to my _Journal d’un
philosophe_ (Alcan, Paris).
[84] All the works mentioned are published by F. Alcan.
BOOK REVIEWS.
EINLEITUNG IN DIE PHILOSOPHIE. By _Prof. Friedrich Paulsen_. Berlin:
Wilhelm Hertz. 1892.
Friedrich Paulsen, professor at the University of Berlin, writes this
“Introduction” not so much for connoisseurs as for students, whom it
may serve as a guide. He discusses in general outlines the various
fundamental problems of philosophy, at the same time indicating his
own position, which, in more than one respect, is very similar to the
philosophy presented in the columns of _The Monist_.
His own view, which, as he trusts, is the general tendency of modern
philosophical thought, he calls “idealistic monism.” It is opposed, on
the one hand, to supernatural dualism, and on the other hand to atomistic
materialism; the former being the traditional doctrine of the schoolmen
and of ecclesiasticism, separating body and soul, nature and God, etc.,
each into two distinct realities, which are accidentally combined,
the latter being an attempt, having its beginning in the eighteenth
century, to explain all natural phenomena in a purely mechanical way.
Paulsen adds: “The whole history of modern philosophy can be said to
be a continuous attempt to overcome this opposition.... The principle
of natural science is the _Natur-Gesetzmässigkeit_ of all events....
Modern materialism derives from this a kind of metaphysics, represents
all reality as a system of blindly operating physical forces....
Philosophy undertakes to dispel the opposition of these two doctrines;
its proposition is—and we may say that this is the main-spring of the
entire evolution of modern philosophy—_to reconcile the religious
world-conception with that of natural science_. There are many who regard
this aspiration as a sort of squaring of the circle, and we grant that
some similitude between the two may exist, for here as well as there we
can attain only to approximations, here as well as there we can never
solve the problem finally and forever. At any rate, we must recognise the
fact that the whole philosophical thought of the last three centuries has
been directed towards this goal.”
Professor Paulsen classes the various philosophies of the present time
as follows: (1) The phenomenalistic-positivistic philosophy which denies
any absolute cognition of reality, least of all in physics; the world of
objects is a world of phenomena. (2) The idealistic monistic philosophy.
To define the nature of reality as it is in itself, we must rely upon
the data of our inner experience. The intellectual-historical world is
to us the most comprehensible dénouement of reality—in fact, the only
comprehensible one. The ultimate idea to which we are led in tracing
out facts, is this: Reality, which presents itself to our senses in the
objective world as a unitary system of motions, is the appearance of a
spiritual all-being, which must be conceived as the evolution of some
unitary idea. In this respect idealistic monism agrees upon the whole
with speculative philosophy, or rather with all idealism since Plato.
The philosophy of the present time is, further on, characterised (3) as
passing from intellectualism to voluntaryism; namely, it allows the will
to have its legitimate influence in the construction of a world-view. It
is (4) evolutionistic-theological, which latter tendency meets half way
the above-mentioned idealistic monism. Both are beginning to permeate
ethics, sociology, jurisprudence, and politics. The old formalistic
methods are dropped and teleological considerations prevail. Purpose
is recognised to rule in life. Lastly (5) the philosophy of to-day
is historical. The older philosophy is mathematical-naturalistic or
abstract-rationalistic. Speculative philosophy precedes the construction
of an intellectual-historical world; it then attempts also to construct
nature historically, at least in a logico-genetic schematism. Natural
science has already pursued this course in its cosmical and biological
theories of evolution. It is apparent how these tendencies follow the old
tradition of harmonising the physical and the intellectual-historical
worlds into one unitary conception of the whole.
The book is divided into two parts, with an introduction and conclusion.
The introduction defines the relation of philosophy to mythology and to
the sciences. Philosophy cannot be separated from the sciences. Says
Paulsen: “Figuratively speaking, reality is a great riddle proposed to
man; all the various sciences determine some parts of it, and the attempt
to solve the _whole_, to find the key to the _mysterium magnum_ of being,
is called philosophy.”
The first book treats, in two chapters, of the problems of metaphysics,
viz.: the ontological problem and the cosmo-theological problem. In
the former chapter materialism, panpsychism, and the nature of the
soul are discussed, while the second chapter is devoted to atomism and
teleological theism, implying such subjects as the theory of evolution,
causality, pantheism. The second part reviews, in the first chapter, the
problems of the theory of cognition, viz.: the idealistic arguments, the
realistic views, and our knowledge of the outer world. The second chapter
presents an exposé of the problems regarding the origin of cognition as
viewed by rationalism and empiricism, paying special attention to Kant’s
formalistic realism. The conclusion is a brief treatment of some ethical
problems.
It is impossible to discuss all the details of the 444 pages of Paulsen’s
book, but a few specimen quotations from the chapter “Pantheism and
World-soul” may be welcome to our readers. Our author asks: Considering
all the tendencies of yearning and willing that appear in the innumerable
forms of reality, is there a unity of inner life corresponding to the
unity of the physical world in its universal interaction? The affirmation
of this question constitutes the idealistic pantheism.
Idealistic pantheism is to Professor Paulsen the simplest and most
obvious construction of the world possible. To other world-views, the
existence of the soul is a problem; it has even been called an “absolute
problem.” “I believe,” he adds, with great truth, “that there can be
no stronger argument against any world-view than that it regards the
existence of soul as something absolutely mysterious.” There is a power
of conviction in idealistic pantheism verified by the astonishing
agreement of the testimonies of many various thinkers in the Orient as
well as in the Occident, in antiquity no less than in modern times. (P.
243.)
Says Professor Paulsen: “The dayfly may imagine when the sun sinks that
all is at an end; light vanishes forever and the whole world is swallowed
up in darkness and death. But man who sees so many suns sink and rise
should have learned that in the infinite there are many possibilities
which he cannot see at present [p. 241]. The conception of a world-soul,
of a spiritual all-being, of a _mundus intelligibilis_ appears to our
physicists and physiologists in the same light as the conception of
anthropomorphic deities—as a childish dream. They have no need of this
hypothesis [pp. 243-244]. Du Bois-Reymond declares that a naturalist
before admitting the assumption of a world-soul should demand, ‘that
we ought to find somewhere in the world neuroglia embedded in warm
arterial blood under the proper pressure and provided with appropriate
sense-organs, ganglions, and fibres, corresponding to the intellectual
capacities of such a soul.’ An animal,” says Paulsen, “needs as a matter
of course legs to stand upon and to move with, a stomach, teeth, eyes,
and a central nervous system, but the All is not in need of this; it
needs no legs to stand upon and to move with, no stomach for alimentary
purposes, no eyes, no ears, for there is nothing to be seen or heard
outside of it, and so it can also dispense with a nervous system and a
brain.”
Quoting two passages, one from Fechner, the other from Nägeli, to the
effect that the system of fixed stars might be regarded as a group of
molecules in an infinitely larger whole which we should have to conceive
of as a unitary organism, Paulsen says: “Indeed, there is no objection to
regarding a planet as a ganglion of the world-brain. Is it too large? No.
Why should not the world-brain have bigger cells than an animal brain. Or
is its composition inappropriate? Why? We find in it the same materials,
carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, and so forth, and also
innumerable interactions similar for all we know to those that take place
in a ganglion. Who knows how striking would be the resemblance of their
structures, if we could but see a ganglion under a sufficiently powerful
magnifying glass.”
These ideas are mere possibilities and are presented as such, but we
cannot attribute to them any philosophical, scientific, or religious
importance. Our idea of “a world-soul” or, better, of God, is different
and we avoid purposely anything that can be constructed upon the basis of
a vague hypothesis.
We ourselves reject pantheism, the view which identifies God and the
All for reasons which we need not repeat here. We call our view of
God entheism, and in forming our idea of God we purposely avoid such
fantastical assumptions as considering the possibility of solar systems
being molecules in the organism of a huge world-animal. Granted the
truth of this view, the mere possibility of which we cannot deny,
this extraordinary creature or world-animal would not be God, its
will would not be our moral authority; it would not be the eternal,
the immutable, the ground of all being, the ultimate rule of action,
and the omnipotent universal law of existence: it would merely be a
creature like ourselves, only immeasurably bigger, evolving like other
animals and subject to the same or analogous or perhaps similar wants,
disappointments, sufferings, and joys as ourselves. What a miserable God
such a world-being would be; we know nothing of him and he knows nothing
of us. His will and aspirations would have even less influence upon our
aspirations, than, for instance, the hopes of a man upon the molecular
groupings in his tissues, we being only the parasites upon the crust
of an atom of his tissues. We have presented our view of the subject
in Vol. III, No. 2, pp. 249-257, of _The Monist_, in the third part of
the article “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” with reference to a similar
hypothesis incidentally touched upon as a possibility of monistic theism
by Professor Romanes.
We simply state the difference between our position and that of Professor
Paulsen concerning the nature of a world-soul without intending to make
more of it than he does himself; for, if we are not mistaken, it is with
him a mere suggestion.
We conclude our review with a passage which shows Professor Paulsen’s
attitude toward Christianity, which more than anything else proves the
general agreement of his work with ours. He says:
“The Christian faith is not a philosophical system, not a theological
dogma and still less the residue of an old superstition, but the
immediate and living certainty of the heart concerning the nature of the
good and its importance in real life. This faith can be to-day the same
as it was in Luther’s, or St. Augustine’s, or the apostles’ time who saw
Jesus with their own eyes bodily. If Christianity, did indeed consist of
a number of doctrines and opinions, it would certainly be true, as some
claim, that it has been dead a long time, for doctrines and opinions are
not long-lived. If Christianity really did consist of the belief in the
creation of the world five thousand years ago out of nothing, the rib
story of Eve, the story of Eden and the fall, etc., etc., ... then indeed
it would be impossible for a thinking man of to-day to be a Christian.
But all that is not the faith of Christianity, it is not the religion of
Jesus. And if all the leaders of all the confessions declare that this
is the Christian faith and that he who does not believe all these things
can have no part in Christ, their proposition must be rejected as untrue.
No one can be saved by believing these things; while the request of the
church to believe in certain opinions set forth by men has expelled
many an honest man.... In the life and death of Jesus I have learned to
understand the meaning of life and I call God and the revelation of God
that which makes my life possible and explains to me the significance of
my life.... Is such a faith compatible with the above-mentioned monistic
world-conception? My answer is, By all means.”
This is Professor Paulsen’s solution of the problem of a reconciliation
of science and religion—and we add that it is ours too.
P. C.
FIRST STEPS IN PHILOSOPHY. By _William Mackintire Salter_. Chicago: C. H.
Kerr & Co. 1892. Price, $1.00. Pages, 155.
This little book is divided into two parts: (1) Physical, (2) Ethical.
In the first, Mr. Salter discusses the conception of matter; in the
second, that of duty. Mr. Salter’s philosophical position is epitomised
in a sentence which he quotes from Herbert Spencer. This sentence states,
that, “what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to
its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by
objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable.” Mr. Salter’s
philosophical position, accordingly, is, first, Idealism, and, second,
Agnosticism.
In ethics, Mr. Salter’s view embraces Utilitarianism, or Hedonism, and
Intuitionism, both of which, he says, are incomplete in themselves, and
must be supplemented by other elements. Utilitarianism makes happiness
the ultimate end; Intuitionism, virtue; and Mr. Salter adds, such an end
must embrace the “realisation of _all_ our capacities.” Mr. Salter’s
ethical position has been before discussed in our journals.
If we study Mr. Salter’s philosophical views, we shall find that his
theory is a reproduction of Berkeley’s analysis of the data of knowledge,
embellished by the results of modern physiological psychology. Yet Mr.
Salter’s theory, although it everywhere shows the traces of a close study
of Berkeley’s views, presents the strange historical anomaly of undoing
Berkeley’s work. Berkeley’s undoubted aim was to place knowledge on a
basis of fact and refute, in a philosophical manner, the agnosticism,
metaphysicism, and transcendentalism prevalent in his day. But Mr. Salter
adds to Berkeley’s results the very things that Berkeley sought to
overthrow, and thus renders the latter’s analysis (and consequently his
own) in need of an equivalent analysis.
Take, for instance, the above-quoted sentence from Herbert Spencer, to
which Mr. Salter assents. “Objective agencies,” “unknown and unknowable”!
Is this consistent? All knowledge is a knowledge of sensations, a
knowledge _of_ and _in_ the mind, says the idealist, and we cannot, by
any process of ratiocination, arrive at things “outside” the mind. Yet he
himself, it seems, arrives at a knowledge of “objective agencies” outside
the mind (pp. 65, 69), and, what is more wonderful, at agencies that are
“unknown” and “unknowable.” Surely, this is not abiding by an analysis
of the facts of sensation (Berkeley). It is as unrational a procedure to
infer metaphysical objective agencies, as it is to infer a metaphysical
substratum “matter,” which last is the error of the realist.
Again, take the notion of cause. Here, also, the same unwarrantable
abandonment of the facts of sensation, i. e. of _all that is_, is evident.
At the end of an analysis, in which he shows that “all the choir of
Heaven and the furniture of the earth,” and “all which it inhabit,”
retreat and vanish in mind, Mr. Salter asks: “But is there absolutely
nothing real and objective left? So far as sensible phenomena are
concerned, we must answer, No, absolutely nothing is left; the whole
sensible (material) world is but an effect upon ourselves. But,” he adds,
“it would be a hasty inference,” on these grounds, “to say that nothing
whatever is left.” And when asked “what is left,” he answers, “all that
causes sensation.” We can never know scientifically what these causes
are, but “we have an inextinguishable faith” _that_ they are, “there
being no particular thing we are more sure of than that for every event
(and every sensible phenomenon is an event, viz., in ourselves) there is
some kind of explanation or cause.” To sum up: The theory of “sensible or
physical idealism”[85] implies a “supersensible or metaphysical realism.”
In the theory of sensible idealism things only exist as sensations;
“only exist, that is, _save in their supersensible or transcendental
causes_”—which, says the author, we must always add.
What is a cause? Cause is an abstraction. An abstraction from what? from
a real, physical world, or from a metaphysical, transcendental world?
Plainly, from our real world, from Mr. Salter’s world of “sensible
reality.” By what philosophical warrant, then, is this concept applied to
a world from which it has not been derived and to which it surely cannot
apply! It is wrong to speak of a cause of the All. The All has no cause,
just as it has no weight.
All these difficulties arise from the notion that there are two kinds
of knowledge and two kinds of existences. Idealism, to be consistent,
must be absolute; Mr. Salter’s idealism is not absolute. This is exactly
the criticism that the reading of his book at once forces on one. All
knowledge is knowledge of sensations, i. e. of reality; things not
accessible to sensation are not real, they do not exist; consequently,
all entities transcendental, metaphysical, and supersensible do not
exist. This is the conclusion to which any philosophy, idealism, realism,
or what not _must_ lead.
Nowadays, few people dispute the fundamental thesis of idealism (of
course, expressed in different terms from those of Mr. Spencer’s
sentence). In a sense, it is established. Its only drawback is, that its
“establishment” accomplishes nothing. It leaves the problem of philosophy
where it found it.[86] Reality is still reality. The same difficulties
and perplexities exist. The universe still mocks us. And foremost among
the riddles that the world opposes to man, stands that eternal query:
“What is mind?” Mr. Salter’s views of this question will show us what
contributions his theory is likely to make to philosophy.
Mr. Salter defines mind as “that which experiences sensations and
thoughts, or, more simply, that which feels and thinks.” It is not
feeling, not thinking, but _that which_ feels and thinks. It is thus an
agent, a subject. It is difficult to understand how this notion of mind
is come at, without self-contradiction. In their origin, all notions
of mind-subjects, mind-essences, mind-agencies, and so forth, are
materialistic. They must be volatilised and stripped of their substantial
attributes, if they are to take a place in an idealistic philosophy, and
then, as they “cannot be ranged along with the sensible phenomena of
which the mind takes cognisance,” there is but one realm left to exist
in, which is the transcendentalistic.
All this comes from carrying the abstraction by which “mind” is reached,
to mathematically infinite limits. In this abstraction the world retreats
and fades away into nothingness. And what is left? Not a single idea
or fact by which we can fix our abstraction. Mind is all, and mind is
nothing. It is not matter, not time, not space—not even a mathematical
point, which we expect it to become in its infinitely contracting
perspective. It has no attributes, no qualities; it is nothing and
nowhere. This conception of mind, Mr. Salter says, is only mysterious as
we _make_ it so, by careless and inaccurate thinking. And Mr. Salter is
right. It would require much careless thinking to make such a conception
mysterious. A thing or notion that cannot be defined, placed, or brought
into connection with any other thing or notion in the world, is not
_mysterious_, but simply does not exist. In that respect, it is as plain
as day.
The same confusion exists in the discussion which disposes of the query,
“_Where_ is mind?” The idealist, in Mr. Salter’s sense, does not admit
that the mind is in, or in anywise spatially connected with, the brain.
The question, _where_ is mind? he says, has no meaning, any more than
the question, what is the color of a pleasure? This is true. Mind is an
abstraction. In this sense it has no spatial existence. But the phenomena
from which this abstraction has produced itself, _are_ linked with
phenomena which have spatial existence, and in this sense the mental
processes are not mysterious nothings and nowheres. When I lose that
group of sensations called my leg, I know that, generally, I have lost
the feeling of my leg. So, also, when a certain part of that group of
sensations called my brain is destroyed, I know that I shall then have
lost my power of memory or of speech or of motion. I may also experiment
with other groups of sensations called dogs and cats, which I know have
mental powers. In the light of these facts it is not correct, either in
philosophy or common sense, to say that mental processes are absolutely
independent of locality. I know that my thoughts are not connected
with the group of sensations I call the moon, and I know they are not
connected with that group of sensations that I call Mr. Smith. I am
always aware of them as connected with that group of sensations which I
call “myself.”
Mr. Salter, in fact, half recognises this. He says, “The mind _is_
dependent on the body in the sense that our general power of sensation
and thought is connected with those sensations we call our body.” Yet,
“why this should be so is mysterious.” Indeed! One is inclined to ask
Mr. Salter here, what species of explanation or knowledge he wishes
of this phenomenon. Is explanation, or knowledge, something more than
the recognition and seeing of a plain connection between the groups of
sensations that constitute reality? In Mr. Salter’s analysis, all the
facts of the world are mysterious. Why a thing is as it is and is not
other than it is, is mysterious. He utterly fails to understand why
the power of perceiving colors is linked with the particular group of
sensations he calls his eye, and why it should not just as well be linked
with some other group or no group at all.
Why do I see with my eye? Why do I not see with my hand or with the hairs
of my head, or why do I not eat with my elbow, instead of my mouth?
Why do not stones fall upwards? Why do not magnets point towards the
East? Why do not the planets move about Jupiter or Saturn? Mr. Salter’s
question makes a jumble of the whole universe.
It is not the object of science or philosophy to find out why things are
not what they are, but to find out what they are. In this inquiry the why
and wherefore, properly understood, will evolve themselves.
Science simply concerns itself with the connection of the groups of
sensations which the idealist, and for that matter every one else, calls
reality. It cannot concern itself with anything else. All other things
are artificial and self-made existences. Nothing exists but reality
and the connections of reality. To seek for any other connections than
those that exist is absurd and futile. And to seek for any other causes
or cause of relations than such as really are is also futile. Before we
speak of the knowledge of a thing we must analyse and define our notion
of knowledge, and before we speak of the cause of a thing we must analyse
and define our notion of cause. In our view, the relation which Mr.
Salter doubts, is so intimately and inextricably one, that the causal
relation disappears. Neither is the cause of the other. We may, for the
purposes of inquiry, start from either as our general concept, but we
should never go so far as utterly to expel from reality the other. True
science and philosophy are neither idealistic nor materialistic, but
_real_. The two positions are extreme positions, and each is useful only
as a safeguard against the errors of the others. Reality is reality;
that is the main thing. Whether it is idealistic or materialistic is of
minor consequence. Besides reality there is nothing; its negation is
non-existence.
We do not wish in these criticisms to repudiate all that is in Mr.
Salter’s book. A great many of its reflections are helpful and
suggestive. We may refer, for example, to the passages in which the body
is regarded as a gradually decreasing wall of separation between that
part of reality which is known subjectively and that part which is known
objectively. This is really a unitary view. We believe, however, that if
Mr. Salter would carefully analyse the notions of knowledge, explanation,
cause, effect, and, therefore, the notion of reality, he would not
push his philosophy to the mysterious extreme at which it finally
arrives, and he would absolutely reject such unscientific conceptions
as supersensible realism, metaphysical realism, and supersensible
or transcendental causes. These render the reading of his book as a
philosophical help unsatisfactory, and leave the mind even more confused
and perplexed than it was before. However, all discussions of this sort
have their value, and Mr. Salter’s book possesses a virtue which few
other philosophical productions can boast of: it is very short. The
author’s pleasant style will also add to the pleasure of its perusal, and
if read critically the book will evoke much helpful thought.
T. J. MCCORMACK.
A REVIEW OF THE SYSTEMS OF ETHICS FOUNDED ON THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. By
_C. M. Williams_. New York and London: Macmillan & Co. 1893.
This is a book, the perusal of which will leave the earnest student of
moral science full of disappointment. Not at all that it manifests any
lack of ability or information. On the contrary, it is at once clearly
and entertainingly written, and at the same time packed with notes and
comments that are full of interest and instruction.
The course of the book may be briefly stated. The first part, comprising
nearly half of its six hundred pages, is devoted to the statement of
the ethical doctrines maintained by thirteen prominent writers, whose
views have been formed more or less under the influence of the theory of
evolution, viz.: Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Spencer, Fiske, Rolph, Baratt,
Stephen, Carneri, Höffding, Gizycki, Alexander, and Paul Ree. The rest
of the book is the review of our author. This review is conducted under
the topical heads: The Concepts of Evolution; Intelligence and End;
The Will; Thought, Feeling, and Will in Evolution; Egoism and Altruism
in Evolution; Conscience; Moral Progress in History; The Results of
Ethical Inquiry on an Evolutional Basis; and The Ideal and the Way of Its
Attainment.
These are all topics of great interest and importance, and the author
has brought to the consideration of them a mind fully stored and
entirely competent. But we look in vain for that discourse and criticism
which above all other matters relating to moral science those who are
interested in human welfare crave from those who tender their reflections
upon ethical topics.
The great need of moral science is the discovery and certification of its
basis. It is a need that far transcends the scope of mere moral science,
for upon its right determination depends the right determination of a
multitude of questions that deeply involve the welfare of humanity. It
is a need that is not merely crying to be supplied. It is absolutely
wailing. Could it only be rightly determined, mankind would fast enough
orient itself in the course of evolution and with undissipated energy
work out its best possible development. But undiscovered or uncertified
it balks all process, save only that mechanical, halting, stumbling
process that has hitherto obtained; a process that is, as all may
observe, one that has little if any inward coördination, but is full of
inability and cross-purposes. Since it was the professed purpose of
our author to review a number of the more prominent systems of ethics,
which he esteems to be founded on the theory of evolution, his failure
to notice and to comment upon so conspicuous a feature of moral science
would naturally lead a reader, unversed in the works noticed, to suppose
that those works had altogether slighted this topic. Such is, however,
not the case. With the exception of perhaps Darwin and Wallace, all
the writers reviewed by our author have given more or less attention
to this matter, and they have left us in no doubt as to the positions
which they severally hold. Most of them are Hedonists of one sort or
another. Haeckel, Carneri, Rolph, and Alexander are, we believe, the only
exceptions.
But a more serious criticism upon the work under notice is suggested by
its very title. That title as much as says that the various works which
are reviewed by our author are “founded” upon the theory of evolution, at
least in so far as their ethical doctrines are concerned.
Now, what is the theory of evolution? What is its essential nature?
Does not its very form consist in the affirmation of an eternal secular
mutation, in which there is no discontinuity whatever? It says that
existence in sum and in every detail is eternal and continuous process.
It uncompromisingly forbids all suppositions of any absolute beginning,
or of any absolute end, or of any absolutely final adjustment. Hence, no
system of ethics can with truth be said to be “founded” upon the theory
of evolution that ignores or forgets this essential character of it.
Now, when we turn to the consideration of the various “systems” which
our author supposes to be “founded” upon the theory of evolution, we
find them, one and all, occupied more or less with suppositions of ends.
All are forecasting some “ideal” condition, which, being attained, all
chances of retrogression will be foreclosed and all possibilities of
betterment will be exhausted. In other words, they suppose an attainment
of death, or rather an attainment of a death-in-life more utterly
horrible than any actual death can possibly be. The very first condition
for an ethics that will be truly evolutional must be the fit and full
recognition of a boundless horizon to evolution in morals as well as in
all else. Emerson perceived the truth when he said in “The Sphynx”:
“Profounder, profounder
Man’s spirit must dive;
To his aye rolling orb
No goal will arrive.
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found; for _new_ heavens
He spurneth the old.”
And at present, the most serious efforts to establish a truly
clear-sighted ethics of evolution, with an unequivocal disavowal of any
and all Hedonism, is made by the editors of _The Monist_. It, indeed,
is the key-note of the missionary work that characterises all the
publications of The Open Court Publishing Co.
Any truly evolutional ethics must show itself a doctrine that applies
just as well to regress as to progress. Evolution is too often confounded
with progress, but degeneration is just as truly evolutional as is the
contrary movement, and, looking the facts of existence in the face,
mankind has no assurance of any unchangeable course of betterment. The
principles of morals are, however, not dependent upon the benign action
of nature. When the earth’s stock of fuel shall become exhausted, or
when the ice age returns, or when the sun grows cold, there will be no
alteration thereby in the moral law. Good and evil must and will be
the same under all circumstances, and no system of ethics is nor can
be anything but a temporary makeshift, that does not as well fit the
_diastoles_ as it does the _systoles_ of existence. We must look for
a doctrine that shall inform the conduct of men not only for the fore
part of the day, when all is jubilant and bounding and man asks only
for some good task to do, but also for the evening and night, when man
grows weary and craves for rest; for not only youth and maturity, but for
waning strength, old age, and death; for not only the progressive era of
cosmic history, but for the periods when natural conditions may disfavor
mankind, when, say, man may gradually be so reduced in resources that
the same will barely suffice for simple life-preservation; when under
the stress of natural conditions the human intellect, in the course of
generations, becomes step by step eliminated; when indeed humanity itself
tends perhaps slowly, but with certainty, towards permanent extinction.
They who complacently protest that the theory of evolution leaves the
domain of moral science substantially unaffected are surely in great
default either in their comprehension of the nature and implications
of that theory, or in their powers of circumspection, while those who
suppose that moral science becomes evolutional simply because of a little
application of that theory to some of the subordinate questions that are
involved, show themselves in a plight as bad as the others if not worse.
Our author notices without dissent, and even with seeming concurrence,
the various remarks made by many of the writers reviewed by him in
discredit of teleology.
Since as we have before protested the theory of evolution forbids all
suppositions of any ends that are absolutely final, it of course follows
that teleology is in the strictness of its meaning inadmissible, even
in ethics. But in dismissing teleology, let us not pour out the child
with the bath. However it ought to be with the interpretation of the
order of nature as a speculative exercise, something that is analogous
to teleology is an absolute necessity if ethics is to be anything more
than a curious study of human practise. The universe may manifest no
purpose, design or secular tendency, but man is and can be nothing but a
miserable estray on the ocean of existence unless he sails on a course,
instead of merely drifting. To do this he must take something by which to
steer, and any plausible stability is better than no bearings whatever.
At any rate man is insuperably drawn to thus mark out his course. If the
theory of evolution forbids him to suppose any ends that are absolutely
final, it does not prevent him from ascertaining directions. Indeed
evolution affords him data of the very first importance for that behoof.
Instead of ends we have aims and if ethics is to become that counsel and
guide to humanity, which we yearn for so anxiously, it must ascertain
and certify that single paramount aim to which all other tendencies are
naturally subsidiary. Teleology, or rather the determination of the aim
of evolution, must prepare the foundation before any evolutional ethics
that is worthy the name can be established.
Again our author with considerable debate notices the remarks of
the writers reviewed by him on the old question of free will and
necessity,—but like the positing of some end or aim to be subserved,
free will is one of the presuppositions of ethics. When man begins to
debate the possibility of rightly ascertaining the true end or aim for
his pursuit, or when he begins to moot the question of free will, he
is debating not any question of ethics proper, but only whether such a
science is possible. Unless conditions and events are functions, as well
of man’s personality as of his environment; unless persons count for
something in the variations of the course of nature, it is altogether
vain and idle to be troubled with questions of morality.
Free will and somewhat to be achieved are principles which whether well
or ill founded, ethics proper must take for granted before it has or can
have any _raison d’être_. As for free will, however the metaphysicians
may have stumbled over their own feet, the common sense of mankind has
never wavered. As a practical question (and ethics is pre-eminently a
matter of practice) this question is not an open one.
But on the question of what is the true paramount aim for man to pursue,
the decision that shall finally satisfy man is yet to be made. The best
proof that no satisfactory answer has yet been made is the fact that
we are still seeking an answer. As with regard to the needful prime
condition for a truly evolutional ethics we found wisdom in the poetical
insight, so again in this exigency we personally find the most profound
ethical philosophy in that same insight.
“’Tis Life of which our nerves are scant.
’Tis Life, not death for which we pant,
More Life, and fuller that we want.”
FRANCIS C. RUSSELL.
DER PESSIMISMUS IM LICHTE EINER HÖHEREN WELTAUFFASSUNG. By _Dr. J.
Friedländer_ and _Dr. M. Berendt_. Berlin W.: S. Gerstmann. 1893.
The authors’ aim is the refutation of pessimism and the foundation of
a higher world-conception. This latter is a pantheism spiritualised
by moral ideals and contrasted to Darwinism and materialism. Natural
science is said to be the surrounding walls of the new view, furnishing
(1) negative truths of criticism and (2) a knowledge of the positive
features of nature. The negative truths are: the impossibility of the
existence of a personal God, of the efficiency of prayer, of miracles,
of the immortality of the soul, of the separate existence of souls
without bodies. The positive results of natural science are the unity
of nature, the indestructibility of nature, the harmony of the All,
the indivisibility of nature, the irrefragable necessity of natural
processes according to immutable laws, and the freedom or independence of
nature, as having its cause in itself, uncreated and uninfluenced by any
extramundane being.
Natural science alone, according to the authors, is not sufficient to
constitute the new world-conception. A one-sided view of natural science
together with the obsolete conceptions of theism are exactly what has
brought forth the philosophical pessimism of our time. Natural science,
accordingly, is not to be regarded as the sole source of truth; it is
to be corrected by pantheism. The former teaches us “to regard matter
and its motion, so to say, as a dead inert substance to which motion is
attached; it treats matter as an immediate reality. Pantheism, however,
teaches that matter is to be conceived as the interrelation of the
innumerable live acts of will appearing successively in time and side
by side in space,” etc. The authors point out that the necessity of law
which regulates the mechanical processes of nature does not exclude
freedom; for “freedom is not arbitrariness but is controlled by an
immanent _Gesetzmässigkeit_.”
This summary is sufficient to characterise the ideas of the Drs.
Friedländer and Berendt. We cannot say that they admit of no criticism,
(e. g. their conception of natural science must be pronounced as too
narrow if not actually erroneous, nor should the law of the survival
of the fittest be interpreted in the sense that strength means brutal
force,) but we can, nevertheless, express our sympathy with the aim of
the authors as well as with the spirit in which they pursue it.
κρς.
DIE PHILOSOPHIE UND DIE SOCIALE FRAGE. By _Gustav Engel_. Leipsic: C. E.
M. Pfeffer. 1892.
ACHT ABHANDLUNGEN, HERRN PROFESSOR DR. KARL LUDWIG MICHELET ZUM 90.
GEBURTSTAG ALS FESTGRUSS DARGEREICHT VON MITGLIEDERN DER PHILOSOPHISCHEN
GESELLSCHAFT. Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer. 1892.
WIE STEHT ES JETZT MIT DER PHILOSOPHIE, UND WAS HABEN WIR VON IHR ZU
HOFFEN? By _Dr. Wilhelm Paszkowski_. Halle a. S.: F. Beyer, 1892.
This lecture by the well-known writer on the science of statistics
and its related subjects was read before the Philosophical Society of
Berlin on the 31st of May, 1890. It discusses the problem of socialism,
or rather the aspirations of the German social democracy from the
philosophical point of view of the lecturer, which is a modernised
Hegelianism. This lecture drew forth on the evening of its delivery
considerable discussion, which was participated in by Herr Kahle, a
socialist, and Herr Runze. The discussions of these gentlemen, together
with Mr. Engel’s reply, are embodied in the pamphlet.
The second of these two pamphlets is also a publication of the
Philosophical Society of Berlin. It consists of eight treatises, essays,
or lectures, which were presented by the members of the society to Prof.
Karl Ludwig Michelet as a festival gift on his ninetieth natal day. The
authors of these eight essays are: Adolf Lasson, August Cieszkowski,
Gustav Engel, Friedrich Kirchner, Wilhelm Paszkowski, Max Runze, Georg
Ulrich, and F. Zelle. They deal with philosophical subjects, chiefly such
as pertain to the Hegelian philosophy. Appended to the pamphlet is a
bibliography of the writings of this Nestor of the Philosophical Society
by F. Ascherson.
The author of the third pamphlet complains about the decay of philosophy:
“Metaphysics, the inner fane in the temple of science, stands desolate,”
and the last disciples of Hegel can no longer prevent the deluge which
sweeps away the idealism of their grand old master.
κρς.
DER MATERIALISMUS, EINE VERIRRUNG DES MENSCHLICHEN GEISTES, WIDERLEGT
DURCH EINE ZEITGEMÄSSE WELTANSCHAUUNG. By _Dr. Eugen Dreher_. Berlin: S.
Gerstmann. 1892.
The author of this pamphlet, at present a docent at the University of
Halle, feels somewhat oppressed by the materialistic tendencies of our
times. His desire is to establish in the world a province of the ideal,
and this domain of idealistic aspirations and hopes, he says, must and
can be based upon a scientific foundation. To reach this goal, the author
propounds a philosophy which is confessedly dualistic, and which must be
made a kind of religion. Descartes’s _Cogito, ergo sum_, is to him the
beginning of all philosophy. The existence of the All is devoid of sense,
unless there is an ego to think it. This dualism, if made a religion,
will throw light upon the problems of the labyrinth of life.
The aspirations of the author are serious and noble. We cannot, however,
agree with the results of his reasonings. He does not seem to have
considered Kant’s objections to the fallacy of the _cogito, ergo “ego”
sum_. Nor is he familiar with Lichtenberg’s famous remark, that “we
should say by rights ‘it thinks,’ exactly as we say ‘it rains.’” The
same moral conclusions at which the author arrives may be reached, the
same province for ideal aspirations in the world may be gained, the same
religious comfort may be found, without any surrender of the monistic
view of the world. Materialism is an error of human thought. But the
error cannot be cured by dualism.
κρς.
UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG. Psychologische Studie.
By _Max Offner_. Marburg: R. Friedrich. 1892.
This little brochure is a carefully worked out study of the phenomena of
association. The author’s view is summed up in the following statement:
“The attempt to reduce the phenomena of association, in conformity with
their real nature, to one single ultimate process cannot be regarded as
successful, and we shall have to control our aspirations after a unitary
conception and rest satisfied with reducing the various phenomena of
association to two processes which are closely related, namely: (1) to
an association of simultaneity; and (2) to an association of immediate
succession.” There is much that is suggestive in the sixty-seven pages of
this pamphlet.
κρς.
FINITE HOMOGENEOUS STRAIN, FLOW, AND RUPTURE OF ROCKS. Bulletin of
the Geological Society of America. By _George F. Becker_. Rochester:
Published by the Society. 1893.
This is a purely technical research, concerning the causes and form of
the discontinuity of rock masses. The studies presented are the outgrowth
of field-work in the Sierra Nevada of California. This range is so
intersected by false joints, schistose and slaty cleavages, that on a
scale of one mile to the inch their average separation would be for the
most part microscopic. The dynamic manifestations in these regions are
very systematic. Some of the strains which have produced this phenomenon
have been infinitesimal, and others have been finite. Only the latter
are here treated. Finite strain, the relations of stress to strain,
the nature of finite shear, viscosity, flow, plasticity, ductility,
and rupture, the relation of plastic solids to fluids, the spacing of
fissures formed by inclined pressures, jointing, and slaty cleavage,
are the chief subjects discussed. The most important result of the
investigation is that jointing, schistosity, and slaty cleavage all imply
relative movement and are thus as truly orogenic as falls of notable
throw. “In the light of this conclusion,” says the author, “it appears
that if one could reproduce the orogeny of the Sierra in a moderate
interval of time on a model made to a scale of one mile to the inch, it
would seem to yield to external and bodily forces much like a mass of
lard of the same dimensions.”
This pamphlet is neatly got up, and reflects credit upon the author and
publisher.
μκρκ.
DER ECHTE UND DER XENOPHONTISCHE SOKRATES. By _Karl Joël_. Volume I.
Berlin: R. Gaertner. 1893.
There are two sources from which we have derived the main bulk of
our knowledge concerning Socrates; namely, the writings of Plato and
Xenophon. The former is generally regarded as an idealiser, and the
latter as an historical biographer; for Plato simply uses the impressive
figure of Socrates to expound his own philosophy, while Xenophon, the
general, the politician, the historian, is supposed to give in the
“Memorabilia” a simple and faithful account of what appeared to him
worthy of being preserved. As Xenophon was not a philosopher himself, it
is tacitly assumed that he had no reason to alter, to suppress, or to add
his own personal views to the historical account of the great master whom
he bore in grateful remembrance as a faithful disciple. There are some
other sources; but they are less rich than those of Plato and Xenophon.
Among them must be mentioned several passages in Aristotle, especially in
“Magna Moralia” I, p. 1182, a 15. Our author urges with good reason that
the Xenophontic Socrates is radically different from and even opposed
to the real Socrates, and that we ought to rely more on Aristotle than
on Xenophon. Xenophon’s “Memorabilia,” Karl Joël declares, is not an
historical writing but a _Tendenzschrift_, and we have to be on our guard
wherever Xenophon’s special tendency comes in.
Socrates is the representative of the philosophical spirit of Attica,
and the character of his teachings may in a word be described as a noble
and sublimated subjectivism. Socrates is a rationalist and as such he
opposes the mysticism of the soothsayer and mantic. He goes so far in his
rationalism as to identify knowledge and virtue. He cannot understand,
from his point of view, (which regards the soul as a rational being
only and leaves out of sight the existence of impulses,) that a man can
knowingly neglect to choose the better thing and choose the worse. Plato,
in order to avoid the error of Socrates, invented the distinction between
the rational and irrational part of the soul and Aristotle criticises
Socrates saying τὰς γὰρ ἀρετὰς ἐπιστήμας ἐποίει.
The subjectivism of Socrates appears in his trust in the δαιμόνιον, the
divine voice within his soul, his rationalism in his constant request
to gather information before beginning to act. He exhibits in his talks
great irony; for instance, when telling a politician that as a shoemaker
must know his trade before making shoes, so he, the politician, ought to
know _his_ business before undertaking to manage affairs of state. Again
and again he satirises the bungling levity of men who imagine that in the
greatest and gravest things of life they can act without any information.
Both the subjectivism and rationalism of Socrates appear in his constant
inculcation of the Delphian motto “know thyself.”
What a different character is Xenophon! He was a convinced believer in
manticism. There are more than a hundred passages in his writings in
which not rational forethought but the art of the soothsayer is left
to decide the most important questions of practical life. When the
courageous ten thousand offered him the leadership in their dangerous
retreat, his ambition urged him to accept, but he first asks the God,
and the omens being unfavorable, he refuses. He did not accept the offer
until he had received another more auspicious omen. In the same way
Xenophon acts throughout. All important decisions which prudence would
urge, are made dependent upon sacrifices, dreams, or the flight of birds,
and more than once the safety of the army is greatly endangered by a
fatal passivity caused through unfavorable omens which prevent Xenophon’s
acting with decision at the right moment. It is no exaggeration to
say that these ten thousand Greek soldiers escaped only by good luck
the fate of the Athenian army in Sicily under Nikias. And this man,
a zealous believer in manticism, should be an impartial and reliable
historian of the doctrines of Socrates? The δαιμόνιον of Socrates is
changed into a mystic power, a kind of _spiritus familiaris_. It has
ceased to be the divinity of man’s inner self as which it appears in
Plato’s account, and is represented by Xenophon as some peculiarity of
Socrates which was given him as a special favor by the gods. Socrates
dethroned the old fate that was supposed to rule the affairs of men
and pointed out the importance of knowledge, for through knowledge we
can learn to regulate our fate ourselves. The philosopher who thought
little of well-being, of εὐτυχία, and demanded above all a well-doing,
an εὐ πράττειν (“Memorabilia,” III, 9, 14, 15,) did not recommend asking
soothsayers questions where we should better ask ourselves, although it
is probable that he recommended the Athenians to apply to the Delphic
oracle instead of relying upon omens not so much because he believed in
prophesies, but because he thought that they would be influenced by the
authority of this venerable institution whose wisdom and conservative
spirit were beyond question, so that good advice could be expected from
it. Karl Joël, accordingly, advises us to read the “Memorabilia” with
an inversion of the points, viz., to convert the sentences qualified by
“although” and “to be sure” into the main sentences and _vice versa_. In
this way we shall be able to distinguish between the pagan orthodoxy of
Xenophon and the rationalism of Socrates. Why does Xenophon not state
directly and simply (1) Socrates advised his friend to ask the oracles in
all cases of uncertainty, (2) manticism is indispensable in the economy
of a household as well as of a state, and (3) the gods have not granted
us any real knowledge as to a final success and reveal it through special
revelations. Why must he add long sentences introduced by “although”?
He adds to (1) that everybody ought to act solely according to his own
conviction, to (2) that all the trades up to the highest professions had
to be learned before practiced, and to (3) that those who inquired at the
oracles for things which could be learned and studied in the usual way
are crazy and even blasphemers.
This sketch may suffice to characterise the book which is much better
than could be anticipated after a perusal of the preface, which almost
induced us to lay it aside unread. It is not the modesty of the author
which produces a prejudice but the random talk concerning things which
neither a reader nor a reviewer will care to know. The author has
apparently no talent for writing prefaces, and he would be wise to omit
them in the future entirely. The book might be very much condensed,
repetitions avoided, and an alphabetical index certainly should have been
added.
It contains _five hundred and fifty-four_ pages; and the author says he
is preparing a _second_ volume. We think it would have been better for
his views if he had expressed them in a pamphlet.
κρς.
A PERPLEXED PHILOSOPHER. Being an examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
various utterances on the land question, with some incidental reference
to his synthetic philosophy. By _Henry George_. New York: Charles L.
Webster & Company. 320 pp.
The “Perplexed Philosopher” herein described is Mr. Herbert Spencer,
and persons who like ginger in their ale will enjoy this book; for its
eloquent invective, hot from the heart, cheers us like that stimulating
drink. Because of this fiery and revengeful attack on Herbert Spencer
much dignified reproof has been aimed at Mr. George by those excellent
people who religiously forgive the injuries done to others, and allow
only to themselves the luxury of retaliation; but when we consider the
provocation given by Mr. Spencer, this counter-blow of Mr. George is
mild. Mr. Spencer had a critic’s right severely or tenderly to condemn
the doctrines of Mr. George; and had he kept himself within his privilege
Mr. George in reply would not have had any right to assail the personal
character and motives of Mr. Spencer; but the older philosopher chose
to treat the younger with supercilious disdain, and this was a personal
affront that fully justified a retort personal. Scorn is an ignoble
argument, lawful only in return for scorn.
Apart from the truth or error they contain, the writings of Mr. George
have achieved a phenomenal popularity; their influence on social opinion
has been in some directions almost revolutionary; they are to-day
the political creed of many men in different parts of the world, and
especially of many thousands in America, Great Britain, and Australia.
They are bold in theories, attractive in illustration, and admirable
in their literary form. Their approval of “Social Statics” was an
advertisement that multiplied by hundreds the readers of that book, and
there is no philosopher great enough to affect ignorance of Mr. George’s
writings, or to dismiss them with a sneer. More copies of “Progress and
Poverty” have been sold than of any other book on social economics that
ever has been written, and when Mr. Spencer spoke of that book as “a
work which I closed after a few minutes on finding how visionary were
its ideas,” he put on airs of aggravating superiority which naturally
provoked the resentment of Mr. George.
After not reading the book Mr. Spencer condemned its heresies and said:
“There is the movement for land nationalisation pressed by Mr. George
and his friends with avowed disregard for the just claims of existing
owners....
“And now this doctrine (that society as a whole has an absolute right
over the possessions of each member) is being openly proclaimed. Mr.
George and his friends, Mr. Hyndman and his friends, are putting their
theory to its logical issue.”
To that Mr. George replies as follows:
“In nothing I have ever written or spoken is there any justification for
such a characterisation. I am not even a land nationalisationist as the
English and German and American nationalisationists well know.... I have
been a staunch denier of the assumption of the right of society to the
possessions of each member, and a clearer and more resolute upholder of
the rights of property than Mr. Spencer has been.”
Without waiting to inquire whether Mr. George includes within the “rights
of property” the right to property in land, it is enough to say that
here at least Mr. Spencer is at a disadvantage. He disarmed himself
before going into battle by refusing to read Mr. George’s writings, and
scorning to examine them he accused them of communism, confiscation,
and land-nationalisation. Mr. Spencer cannot now strike back for he
has thrown his weapons away. He is a prisoner in the hands of Mr.
George, who couples him with Parson Wilbur denouncing a print called the
_Liberator_, “whose heresies,” he said, “I take every opportunity of
combating, and of which, I thank God, I have never read a single line.”
The parallel is well drawn; and the lesson of it is this, never challenge
a man and then treat him with contempt; if you think he is not a foeman
worthy of your steel, let him alone.
Had Mr. Spencer studied the works of Mr. Henry George, he would have
found in them some doctrines having a manifest family likeness to
communism, confiscation, and land-nationalisation; but they avail Mr.
Spencer nothing, because he would not condescend to read the chapters
where those revolutionary principles are. If he would bend his brow a
moment and examine them he might find that in this controversy there are
two perplexed philosophers instead of one. In the book before us Mr.
George remarks:
“It is this confusion of Mr. Spencer as to rent and value that has led
him into confusion as to the right of property; and that, at first, at
least prevented him from seeing that to secure the equal rights of men
to land, _it is not necessary that society should take formal possession
of land, and let it out_, and consequently, that the difficulties he
anticipated in taking possession of improved land were imaginary.”
But, in “Progress and Poverty,” Chapter II, he said:
“We should satisfy the law of justice, we should meet all economic
requirements, by at one stroke abolishing all private titles, declaring
all land public property, and _letting it out to the highest bidders in
lots to suit_, under such conditions as would safely guard the right to
improvements.”
The italics are ours, directing the attention to apparent contradictions
which it is for Mr. George to reconcile. And, if English words have
any meaning, “abolishing all private titles” means confiscation; and
“declaring all land public property and letting it out to the highest
bidders,” is land-nationalisation; at least, the ordinary reader
may innocently think so, yet Mr. George declares that he is not a
land-nationalisationist.
As a personal defense and explanation Mr. George has a right to say that
he is not a land-nationalisationist, or a communist, or an “ist” of any
other kind, and we are bound to take his word for it, but in this dispute
that matter is wholly immaterial. The question before the meeting is
this, Is Mr. George’s book a land-nationalisationist or is it not? Is it
a confiscationist or not? In “Progress and Poverty” Mr. George explains
his meaning thus:
“I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate property in land.
The first would be unjust, the second needless. Let the individuals who
now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are
pleased to call _their_ land. Let them continue to call it _their_ land.
Let them buy and sell and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave
them the shell if we take the kernel. _It is not necessary to confiscate
land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent._”
The italics are by Mr. George; and a little farther on, he says;
“That is the first step upon which the practical struggle must be made.
When the hare is once caught and killed, cooking him will follow as a
matter of course.”
And several years afterwards, in “Protection or Free Trade,” page 302,
Mr. George describes the artful mechanism of the snare by which the hare
is to be caught and killed:
“Now it is evident that, in order to take for the use of the government
the whole income arising from land just as effectively as it could be
taken by formally appropriating and letting out the land, it is only
necessary to abolish, one after another, all taxes now levied, and to
increase the tax on land values till it reaches as near as may be the
full annual value of the land.”
In that paragraph “government” is merely another word for “nation,” and
the taking away from private owners all the lands of the country “for the
use of the government” is land-nationalisation, whether the taking be
done boldly by imperial decree, or furtively by taxing it up to its “full
value” and out of the hands of its owners.
The discrimination above made must apply to Herbert Spencer as well as
to Henry George. Mr. Spencer has a right to qualify and explain as much
as he pleases; he may properly say what he thinks now about the right of
land-ownership, but the question at issue is this, What are the opinions
of “Social Statics” upon the land question? Are they not in principle,
and very nearly in expression the opinions of “Progress and Poverty”?
It is not to be denied that “Progress and Poverty” found moral support
in “Social Statics.” In fact, the disciples of Henry George, whenever
their doctrines were assailed, brought Herbert Spencer into the field as
a reinforcement. This, at last, gave Mr. Spencer great annoyance, and
in a moment of irritation he determined even by a qualified recantation
to withdraw the reserve brigade on which “Progress and Poverty” had so
long depended for assistance. Hence, his letters to the _Times_ and the
_St. James’s Gazette_, and the modification of his views which appears
in “Justice.” He tried to do this by dropping Mr. George to the ground,
while endeavoring to stand on consistent feet himself; and this it is
that inspires the vehement criticism of Mr. George.
With a scalpel most logically keen Mr. George has dissected Mr. Spencer’s
philosophy of land, and with almost Indian exultation he exposes its
eccentricities and contradictions. As was inevitable, for we cannot
get along without it, the old familiar Galileo moral is brought in by
Mr. George to prove that “still it moves.” He is right; for if it is
ethically and politically true, as declared by Mr. Spencer in 1850, “that
equity does not permit property in land,” it will be true forever, and no
extremity of recantation can make it false. The attempt of Mr. Spencer
to show by duplicate metaphysics that his later opinions concerning land
are not inconsistent with the occult meaning of “Social Statics,” is
a failure. It cannot stand a moment before the searching analysis and
legible comparisons of Mr. George.
The attempt to resolve a concrete subject, such as government ownership
of land, into abstract terms of justice limited or expanded by the right
of some private person to the house on the land, and the barn, and the
well, and the fences, and the apple-trees, and other appurtenances,
corporeal and incorporeal, has involved Mr. George himself, as well as
Mr. Spencer, in some confusion of thought, and has entangled both of
them in varieties of statement not easy to reconcile. This might be due
to obscure definitions and multiplied explanations, or to changes of
opinion, but Mr. George asserts that Mr. Spencer’s inconsistencies are
the result of moral and intellectual dishonesty, prompting him to explain
away his principles to propitiate the landlords and other aristocratic
persons who admitted him into their high society after he became eminent,
and before they knew that his philosophy denied the right of private
property in land.
In his letter to the _Times_, apologising for “Social Statics,” Mr.
Spencer said:
“The work referred to—“Social Statics”—was intended to be a system of
Political Ethics—absolute political ethics, or that which ought to be, as
distinguished from relative political ethics, or that which is at present
the nearest practical approach to it.”
And then the philosopher becomes a politician and frames for the landed
and the landless a moral code, ambidextrous and elastic as a party
platform. Duty, justice, right, and truth, lose all their absolute
qualities, and become relative to expediency and our own convenience.
He teaches us to oppose wrongs until they become vested rights and then
defend them. He makes ethics changeable as our coats, and the man who can
afford two suits of clothes may have two suits of ethics, an “absolute”
suit for Sundays and a “relative” suit for every day; an “abstract”
suit for wearing about the house, and a “practical” suit for business
purposes. He may wear a suit of “pure” ethics when buying, and a suit
of “applied” ethics when selling; and so, at last, by those harlequin
morals, it happens that what we ought to do has no relation at all to
“that which ought to be.” Those pure subtleties and applied subterfuges
make Mr. Spencer an easy mark for the indignant sarcasm of Mr. George,
who shows what Mr. Spencer thought of absolute and relative ethics when
he said in “Social Statics”:
“When a man admits that an act is ‘theoretically just,’ he admits it to
be that which, in strict duty, should be done. By ‘true to principle’ he
means in harmony with the conduct decreed for us. The course which he
calls ‘abstractedly right,’ he believes to be the appointed way to human
happiness. There is no escape. The expressions mean this or they mean
nothing.”
The book is written in an angry vein, and the nicknames “traitor,”
“juggler,” “apostate,” and the like, add nothing to the value of its
argument; they only give bitterness to the censure. They are not to be
commended, although they ought to be excused, for they sprang out of “a
tempest of provocation.” Mr. George has been fighting under the banner of
Herbert Spencer, and he feels like a soldier whose general deserts him in
the battle and then disowns him altogether.
The only rational explanation of Mr. Spencer’s letters to the _Times_ and
the _St. James’s Gazette_ is that he has radically changed his opinions
about the private ownership of land: and his timid, uncertain, and
equivocal way of saying so makes him look very much like the “perplexed
philosopher” that Mr. George describes. At the same time it must be
noticed that Mr. George himself is not so radical in this last book
as he was in “Progress and Poverty.” His principles appear to be the
same, but in the application of remedies he is milder than he was about
fourteen years ago. When he reaches Mr. Spencer’s age he may be just as
conservative and “perplexed” as that philosopher is now.
M. M. TRUMBULL.
FOOTNOTES:
[85] Mr. Salter’s name for his theory.
[86] Says Mr. Salter: “Idealism (as here stated) is not, however, itself
a solution, being only a clear statement of what the problem is; and for
all that such idealism can say, the problem may be insoluble.”
PERIODICALS.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 4 and 5.
DIE GRUNDEMPFINDUNGEN IN NORMALEN UND ANOMALEN FARBENSYSTEMEN
UND IHRE ITENSITÄTSVERTEILUNG IM SPEKTRUM. By _Arthur König and
Conrad Dieterici_.
IST EINE CEREBRALE ENTSTEHUNG VON SCHWEBUNGEN MÖGLICH? By _Karl
L. Schaefer_.
UEBER EINIGE NEUERE FORTSCHRITTE IN DER ANATOMIE UND
PHYSIOLOGIE DER ARTHROPODENAUGEN. By _Sigmund Fuchs_.
LITTERATURBERICHT.
CONTENTS: Vol. IV. No. 6.
DAS TAPETUM LUCIDUM BEI DURCHLEUCHTUNG DES AUGES. By _Ziem_.
BERICHTIGUNG ZU PROFESSOR MÜNSTERBERGS BEITRÄGEN ZUR
EXPERIMENTELLEN PSYCHOLOGIE, HEFT 4. By _G. E. Müller_.
LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE.
CONTENTS: Vol. XXIX. No. 3 and 4.
DIE ÄLTESTE FASSUNG VON MELANCHTHONS ETHIK. By _H. Heineck_.
DIE MODERNE ENERGETIK IN IHRER BEDEUTUNG FÜR DIE
ERKENNTNISSKRITIK, II. By _K. Lasswitz_.
DIE SITTLICHE FRAGE EINE SOCIALE FRAGE, II. By _F. Staudinger_.
JOHANN EDUARD ERDMANN. By _B. Erdmann_.
LITTERATURBERICHT. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)
VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVI. No. 4.
DIE STATISCHEN FUNCTIONEN DES OHRLABYRINTHES UND IHRE
BEZIEHUNGEN ZU DEN RAUMEMPFINDUNGEN. (Part I.) By _R. Wlassak_.
UEBER VERSCHMELZUNG UND ANALYSE. Eine psychologische Studie.
(Part I.) By _H. Cornelius_.
DIE WICHTIGKEIT DER REPRODUCTIONSGEFÜHLE FÜR DIE ENTWICKLUNG
UND BILDUNG DES MENSCHEN. By _J. Zahlfleisch_.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 1.
UEBER DEN BEGRIFF DER WISSENSCHAFT BEI GALILEI. By _A. Riehl_.
DIE STATISCHEN FUNCTIONEN DES OHRLABYRINTHES UND IHRE
BEZIEHUNGEN ZU DEN RAUMEMPFINDUNGEN. (Concluded.) By _R.
Wlassak_.
UEBER VERSCHMELZUNG UND ANALYSE. Eine psychologische Studie.
(Concluded.) By _H. Cornelius_.
WERTHTHEORIE UND ETHIK. (Part I.) By _Chr. Ehrenfels_.
A. VOIGT’S “ELEMENTARE LOGIK” UND MEINE DARLEGUNGEN ZUR LOGIK
DES LOGISCHEN CALCULS. By _E. G. Husserl_. (Leipsic: O. R.
Reisland.)
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK.
CONTENTS: Vol. CI. No. 2.
DOXOGRAPHISCHES ZUR LEHRE VOM ΤΈΛΟΣ. By _A. Döring_.
ERNST PLATNER’S UND KANT’S ERKENNTNISSTHEORIE MIT BESONDERER
BERÜCKSICHTIGUNG VON TETENS UND AENESIDEMUS. By _Dr. Arthur
Wreschner_.
JAHRESBERICHT ÜBER ERSCHEINUNGEN DER PHILOSOPHISCHEN LITTERATUR
IN FRANZÖSISCHER SPRACHE AUS DEN JAHREN 1889 UND 1890. By
_Adolph Lasson_.
RECENSIONEN. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY.
CONTENTS: Vol. V. No. 2.
ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF VOLUNTARY MOTOR ABILITY. By _Wm. L.
Bryan_.
THE TRAINING OF ANIMALS. By _James E. LeRossignol_, Ph. D.
ON THE JUDGMENT OF ANGLES AND POSITIONS OF LINES. By _Joseph
Jastrow_, Ph. D.
STATISTICS OF “UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION.” By _Charles M. Child_.
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE. By _Mary Whiton
Calkins_. (Worcester: J. H. Orpha.)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS.
CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 2.
THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL PROGRESS. _Prof. Franklin H. Giddings._
DID THE ROMANS DEGENERATE? By _Mary Emily Case_.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PRACTICAL LIFE. By _Prof. William
Cunningham_.
GERMAN CHARACTER AS REFLECTED IN THE NATIONAL LIFE AND
LITERATURE. By _Richard M. Meyer_, Ph. D.
BOOK REVIEWS. (Philadelphia: _International Journal of Ethics_,
118 South Twelfth Street.)
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 1.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. By _Prof. Otto Pfleiderer_.
AN ANCIENT PESSIMIST. By _Prof. J. Clark Murray_.
THE CONCEPT OF LAW IN ETHICS. By _Prof. F. C. French_.
J. H. LAMBERT. By _Harold Griffing_.
CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 2.
KANT’S CRITICAL PROBLEM. By _J. G. Schurman_.
EPISTEMOLOGY IN LOCKE AND KANT. By _Prof. Andrew Seth_.
ANTHROPOMETRY AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. By _Prof. E. B.
Titchener_.
DISCUSSIONS: Reality and Idealism. By _David G. Ritchie_ and
_F. C. S. Schiller_.
BOOK REVIEWS. (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)
THE NEW WORLD.
CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 5.
THE PLACE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL IN THE NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE.
By _Orello Cone_.
THE FOLK-SONG OF ISRAEL IN THE MOUTH OF THE PROPHETS. By _Karl
Budde_.
COSMOPOLITAN RELIGION. By _C. A. Bartol_.
THE ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS. By _A. W. Benn_.
WHITTIER’S SPIRITUAL CAREER. By _John W. Chadwick_.
THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. By _Marvin R.
Vincent_.
ISRAEL IN EGYPT. By _C. H. Toy_.
THE BRIGGS HERESY TRIAL. By _C. R. Gillett_. (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin & Co.)
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 12.
LE MOUVEMENT PHILOSOPHIQUE EN RUSSIE: II. LA PHILOSOPHIE DE
HEGEL ET LES CERCLES PHILOSOPHIQUES. By _E. Lannes_.
LA COMPOSITION MUSICALE ET LES LOIS GÉNÉRALES DE LA
PSYCHOLOGIE. By _M. Paulhan_.
LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES (2nd article). By _L. Marillier_.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 1.
LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES (3d article). By _L. Marillier_.
LA CROYANCE MÉTAPHYSIQUE. By _J. Gourd_.
LA BEAUTÉ PLASTIQUE. By _L. Couturat_.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 2.
L’UNITÉ DE LA PHILOSOPHIE. By _P. Janet_.
L’EXPRESSION OBJECTIVE EN MUSIQUE D’APRÈS LE LANGAGE
INSTINCTIF. By _J. Combarieu_.
LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES. (Concluded.) By _L. Marillier_.
REVUE DES PÉRIODIQUES ÉTRANGERS. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 3.
RECHERCHES SUR LA SUCCESSION DES PHÉNOMÈNES PSYCHOLOGIQUES. By
_B. Bourdon_.
L’AMOUR EST-IL UN ÉTAT PATHOLOGIQUE? By _G. Danville_.
SUR UN EFFET PARTICULIER DE L’ATTENTION APPLIQUÉE AUX IMAGES.
By _André Lalande_.
BEAUTÉ ORGANIQUE ET BEAUTÉ PLASTIQUE. By _A. Naville_.
REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE.
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 1.
MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET MORALE. By _Félix Ravaisson_.
LE CONTINU MATHÉMATIQUE. By _H. Poincaré_.
ESSAI SUR QUELQUES PROBLÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE PREMIÈRE. By _F.
Rauh_. (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.)
VOPROSUI FILOSOFII I PSICHOLOGII.[87]
CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 15.
THE AIM OF HUMAN LIFE. By _W. Rosanoff_.
THE PROBLEM OF JUDGMENT. By _F. Charitonoff_.
THE POSITIVISM OF KANT. By _A. Kozloff_.
THE BASIS OF THE MORAL DUTY. By _N. Grote_.
A CRITICISM OF MORAL ALTRUISM. By _W. Preobrajensky_.
THE SENSE OF LOVE. By _W. Solowoff_.
THE FOUNDER OF TRANSCENDENTAL MONISM. By _A. Wedensky_.
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY IN
LONDON. By _W. Chige_.
THE QUESTION OF ZOÖPSYCHOLOGY. By _W. Wagner_.
THE LAW OF PERCEPTION. By _N. Lange_. (Moscow, 1892.)
PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH.
CONTENTS: Vol. VI. No. 1.
UEBER DIE ACTUALE BESTIMMTHEIT DES UNENDLICH KLEINEN. By
_Pohle_.
GASSENDI’S SKEPTICISMUS UND SEINE STELLUNG ZUM MATERIALISMUS.
By _Kiefl_.
DER BEGRIFF DES “WAHREN.” By _Franz Schmid_.
DER BEGRIFF DES UNBEWUSSTEN IN PSYCHOLOGISCHER UND
ERKENNTNISSTHEORETISCHER HINSICHT BEI ED. V. HARTMANN. By
_Achelis_.
DER SUBSTANZBEGRIFF BEI CARTESIUS IM ZUSAMMENHANG MIT DER
SCHOLASTISCHEN UND NEUEREN PHILOSOPHIE. (Continued.) By _Carl
Ludewig_, S. J. (Fulda, 1893.)
SPHINX.
CONTENTS: Vol. XV. No. 84.
NIRWANA. By _Menetos_.—DIE WIEDERVERKÖRPERUNGSLEHRE IM DRAMA.
By _Ludwig Deinhard_.—DIE GNADE. By _Maria Janitschek_.—DAS
FERNSEHEN ALS FUNKTION DES TRANSSCENDENTALEN SUBJEKTS.
By _Carl du Prel_, Ph. D. (Concluded.)—AN CARL DU PREL.
By _Martin Greif_.—SEHEN UND WAHRTRÄUMEN. By _Hermann
Haug_.—UEBER DIE SPIRITISTISCHEN PHÄNOMENE VOM PHYSIKALISCHEN
STANDPUNKT. By _Dr. Anton Lampa_.—SCHULD UND SÜHNE. Ein
Beitrag zur Frage der Telepathie. By _M. Const. Hoch_.
(Concluded.)—DIE GÖTTIN DES GENUSSES. Eine Traumphantasie.
By _Karl Friedr. Jordan_.—FEGFEUER. Nach François Coppée.
By _Rudolf Geering_.—GERETTET! By _Raphael von Koeber_, Ph.
D.—MELANCHOLIE. By _Carl Vanselow_.—DIE SECHS SCHWÄNE. Ein
Beitrag zum Nachweis des Esoterismus im Volksbewusstsein.
By _Gottschalk Thorsten_.—GEHEIMNISS. By _Adolf K. W.
Hochenegg_.—EINE GEISTERSTIMME. By _Hugo Gozdawa_.—DER BEGRIFF
DES ABSOLUTEN. By _O. Plümacher_.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVI, No. 85.
LEBE DEINEM HÖCHSTEN IDEAL GETREU!—A-U-M. By
_Menetos_.—PSALMEN. By _Franz Evers_.—MEISTER DER MYSTIK.
By _Wilhelm von Saintgeorge_.—AEGYPTENS GROSSE PYRAMIDE.
Ein Tempel der Einweihung in die Mysterien. By _Eduard
Maitland_.—DIE DEUTSCHE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR ETHISCHE KULTUR UND
HERR VON EGIDY. By _Hugo von Gizycki_.—DIE MYSTIK DES ISLAM. By
_Adolf Engelbach_.—EIN ECHTER DIENER GOTTES. By _Dr. Raphael
von Koeber_.—EIN GEGNER DES SPIRITISMUS. By _Carl du Prel_.—DIE
WISSENSCHAFT DER MAGIER. By _Ludwig Deinhard_.—HEBE DICH
WEG VON MIR, SATAN! By _H. v. M._—ANNA HENLE. Ein Erlebnis.
By _Hübbe-Schleiden_.—DER STERN DER SINTFLUT. By _Arthur
Stentzel_.—SELIGE GEGENWART. By _Maria Janitschek_.—SEHNSUCHT.
By _Carl Vanselow_.—DAS ELFLEIN, DAS AUSGING, DEN KÖNIG ZU
SUCHEN. By _Bernhard Fabler_.—DER BLINDE PASSAGIER. By _Ludwig
Ganghofer_.—FRÜHLINGS ERWACHEN. Für Väter und Erzieher. By _O.
Plümacher_.—DREI KNOSPEN. By _Hans von Mosch_. (Brunswick: C.
A. Schwetschke & Son.)
We cannot be accused of having any penchant for Theosophy or Spiritualism
and find little occasion to praise their productions, which are usually
crude and illiterate. But we must confess that Hübbe-Schleiden’s review,
the _Sphinx_, is greatly superior to anything in this field we have
ever seen. There is artistic taste about it; there is, so far as its
position admits of, a certain contact with positive science; there is an
attractive popularity without shallowness. All these means are skilfully
employed by the editor to impress his ideas, erroneous though they may
be, upon his public. If the magazine appeared in English, instead of
German, it would at once become the recognised leader in its field.
FOOTNOTES:
[87] _Questions of Philosophy and Psychology._
VOL. III. JULY, 1893. NO. 4.
THE MONIST.
NATIONALISATION OF EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITIES.[88]
A little more than a century ago it was universally believed that, in the
nature of things, the vitality of a republic and its size stand in an
inverse ratio. The inadaptability of a republican system of government to
a state of vast territorial expanse and with a very numerous population
was considered an almost axiomatic, i. e. self-evident, truth. When the
thirteen English colonies in North America had taken the bold resolution
to transform themselves into the United States of America, many an ardent
patriot often asked himself, not free from anxious foreboding, whether
the Union was within the limits laid down by irreversible political laws,
as the utmost extent of republics fit to endure. If it had not been
for the size of the country, the doubts as to whether the republican
experiment was likely to prove a success, would never have assumed a
character, which gave sufficient color to the charge of monarchical
tendencies, to make them appear well-founded in the eyes of so many
people. When afterwards a new empire was to be added to the Union by the
Louisiana purchase, the doubt, as to whether the republican system of
government would be equal to the strain put upon it by such an immense
enlargement of the area of the United States, played a not unimportant
part among the objections of the opposition. That experience has
definitively disposed of these ideas, by proving the apprehensions to
be unfounded, is no reason to think meanly of the political discernment
of those who entertained them. It will not be universally admitted, that
experience has thus far proved them to be wholly unfounded also as to
consolidated republics. And how can it be wondered at, that at that time
the essential difference was not fully realised and understood, which
exists between a federal and a consolidated republic with regard to the
peculiar dangers and evils apt to arise from this specific cause. Though
republican federations had been known to the world for two thousand
years, no instruction was to be derived from their history on this head.
As to the extent of territory, the consolidated Roman republic, which
had consumed its vitality with its growth, could alone be compared with
the United States; and as to many of the essential features of their
political structure, neither modern nor ancient history furnished an
analogy. In the soil of the New World, the germs of European institutions
had—adapting themselves to the new conditions—developed into a new type
of commonwealth.
It is conceded on all sides that, next to the capacity of the American
people for self-government, the United States owe it primarily to the
happy blending of the principles of National Union and State Independence
that, taking all in all, hitherto their history has been the most
striking and convincing vindication of republican institutions; and
it is hardly questioned that, but for the happy blending of these two
principles, a republic comprising half the North American continent and
possessed of all the requisites of vitality never would nor could have
existed. Upon their being “an indestructible Union of indestructible
States,” the vitality of the United States absolutely depends. That,
with this principle as the foundation, the domain of a republic _can_
be almost indefinitely extended, without thereby destroying its vital
energies, has been irrefutably demonstrated. But does that mean, that
the United States have definitively solved the problem of keeping the
vital forces of a republic covering a vast area unimpaired? By no means.
Only the preliminary question has been settled by them for all time to
come, what the indispensable prerequisite of its solution is, and they
have thus far succeeded in preserving their vitality. But even as to
themselves, the solution of the problem itself has to be repeated over
and over again, not only by generation after generation, but every year
and every day. The hour never will, never can come, when the American
people can, with impunity, say: the task is accomplished; let us rest
and enjoy the fruits. It never can come, because the problem itself is
in a continuous state of transformation. Though the changes be so slow,
that they are imperceptible to the keenest eye trying to follow them up
from year to year, they are none the less real, and if they are not duly
heeded, the penalty will have to be paid some time in one way or another.
While the fundamental principle, the blending of National Union and
State Independence, is irreversible, the attempt to make its application
immutable, would be fatal. I say the attempt, for actually to do it, is,
in the nature of things, impossible. The American people are not only
constitutionally a nation. The civil war did not result in the permanent
disruption of the Union, but in welding it more indissolubly together,
because, with the single exception of slavery, the facts coincided with
the law. In spite of the tremendous sectionalising influence exercised
by slavery, the nationalisation in feeling, thinking, and interests had
made such progress under the operation and protection of the law of the
land, that it could stand as severe a test, as any consolidated State can
boast of having stood. The causes, to which it was due, that the facts
were in conformity with the law, have been ever since unremittingly at
work,—the counter-tendencies have disappeared with the abolishment of
slavery,—and, independent of that, those causes are every year acquiring
a greater force. The actual nationalisation, therefore, goes steadily on,
whether we like it or not, and though the constitutional nationalisation
be allowed to remain unchanged. While the legal status under the
Constitution may not be altered for ever so long, we are confronted by
constantly changing conditions. If we do not conform in what we do and
leave undone to the irrepressible changes of this evolutionary process,
the maintenance of the principle of blending National Union and State
Independence will avail us but little. The vital energies will dry up
and ebb away, for while we have kept the form, we have become strangers
to the spirit which renders it a magic force. Nor ought the dividing
line between political parties to run, as in days of yore, on the
question of State rights and consolidation. All discriminating patriots
must be as well State rights men as consolidationists, respectively
conscious supporters and promoters of further nationalisation. Where and
how ought State independence to be strengthened, so as to prevent an
over-consolidation by the silent working of those nationalising causes,
which it is impossible to stem? and: Where and how ought consolidation,
respectively nationalisation, to be promoted, in order to make the
working of those nationalising causes conducive to the true interests
of the people and to the invigorating of republican institutions? These
are the two questions which the American people have constantly to ask
themselves. On the discretion and discernment displayed in trying to find
the correct answers must it depend, whether the federative principle will
work as well in the future, as it has done in the past.
If these propositions must be admitted, it can be proved that in no
respect is conscious and systematic nationalisation more imperatively
needed than in regard to education. At first sight this assertion may
seem worse than extravagant. I am, however, not afraid to submit my case
to the jury of the American people, if I am but conceded the legal right
of every criminal, to be heard ere I am judged.
Education is the bed-rock on which this republic rests. However
excellent its political institutions be, its decay and ultimate
downfall is inevitable, if the people fail to do their full duty by
themselves in this respect. For, in a democratic republic, political
institutions are live forces only so far as the people have the mental
and moral requirements for working them well, and these mental and moral
requirements can be attained only by education. It is, therefore, in the
strictest sense of the word, a _vital_ question for the republic that
every one of its sons and daughters receive not only some schooling, but
that the education of all be proper and adequate. That is a tremendous
task. It constantly grows in scope and intricacy, and at the same time,
it becomes of more and more import that it be well accomplished. With
the people rests the ultimate decision in everything, and the problems
confronting the commonwealth are assuming more and more a character,
taxing the highest statesmanship to the utmost. Thus the claims upon
the intelligence and the moral soundness of the people are fast being
strained far beyond anything ever known by any former generation in this
or any other country. And lack of the required intelligence and moral
soundness in any one State necessarily affects the whole Union. A State
that is derelict to its duty in the education of its people, wrongs not
only itself, but also the nation. By its share in the federal government,
every State is directly instrumental in laying down the law for the whole
country. All the States are thereby made to participate in the payment
of the penalty for its intellectual and moral deficiencies. This is,
however, by no means the only way in which they are made to suffer by
them. What the law does with regard to everything rendered federal by the
Constitution; commerce, travel, and interchange of population do in other
respects. They are unremittingly and with ever increasing intensity at
work, multiplying and rendering more close the organic relations between
all the parts of the vast domain, every water-way, railroad-track, and
telegraph line performing the functions of the veins in the animal
organism. If the blood be poisoned in one limb, the virus cannot be
prevented from working its way into the whole system.
To admit that education is in the highest degree a national
_interest_, and to deny its being a national _concern_, is, however, a
self-contradiction. To contest either the right or the duty of a nation
to acknowledge every national interest a national concern, and to deal
with it accordingly, is a palpable absurdity. Not as to the Whether, but
only as to the How, can the people be restricted by the Constitution. A
constitution imposing upon the people an injunction to minister to the
needs of the commonwealth, would be as great a political monstrosity as a
constitution providing for the dissolution of the state.
This doctrine will not be allowed to pass unchallenged. I shall be
asked whether I set myself against the universally accepted fundamental
principle of American constitutional law, that the federal government
has no powers but those granted to it by the Constitution. I do not.
“Where, then,” my interlocutor will go on, “do you find the express grant
or the implied power?” Nowhere. “Then you advocate a constitutional
amendment to the effect indicated by you?” I do not. I know that such an
amendment could not get the vote of a single state, and if there were a
possibility of its being adopted by the constitutional number of states,
I should be found, to the last, among those fighting it tooth and nail.
I can hardly conceive of a more suicidal measure than the adoption of
such an amendment. Just because education is the bed-rock on which the
republic rests, is it of vital importance that it does not become a
federal affair. Self-reliance and responsibility are the main pillars
supporting a democratic commonwealth. Kill, in the people of a state
and the population of its subdivisions, the habit of self-reliance and
the sense of responsibility in regard to the substratum of the whole
political and social structure, and they will wither and shrivel up in
regard to everything else. The compulsion to tax themselves directly for
the establishment and maintenance of schools and the being in close touch
with those entrusted with the direction of the educational work are an
inestimable boon to the people.
Even if it were economically possible to do without direct taxes,
political reasons would peremptorily forbid their abolishment. On
account of their moral effect, no state could dispense with them, and
least of all a democracy. All indirect taxes are paid more or less
unconsciously; the people, however, must be kept conscious that the
public purse means their own pockets. The more they lose sight of
this, the wider the door is opened to paternalism, and paternalism is
a more deadly enemy of liberty than despotism and tyranny. These, if
any vitality be left in the people, ultimately kindle the desire for
liberty, while paternalism acts upon it as an opiate and ends by killing
it through the systematic enervation of self-government. If this is
to be kept alive not only in form, but also in essence and in spirit,
the people must constantly be held to teach themselves in illustrating
by their own acts the irrefutable truth, that not the rights, but the
self-imposed duties are the vital principle of true democracy. Nothing,
however, is more apt to drive this all-important fact irresistibly
home, implanting it ineradicably in their whole feeling and in their
conscious thinking, than the necessity to vote, as directly as possible,
out of their own pockets the money required for preserving intact and
in vigor the prerequisite of _all_ that is needed for the preservation
of the nation’s vitality. If it be not deemed irreverent, I should
say that every dollar a man voluntarily votes out of his pocket to
provide for the educational needs of the community, preaches to him a
political “Sermon on the Mount.” “Liberty and self-government,” it says,
“must be paid for;—state and society are in their very essence ethical
conceptions;—they must totter, fall, and crumble to pieces, unless
they rest on an ethical foundation;—to preserve, broaden, and deepen
this foundation, by providing for the required intellectual and moral
equipment of the generations in whose hands the future destinies of the
commonwealth will lie, is the paramount duty of the people;—no one has
the right to exempt himself from doing his share in the fulfilment of
this duty, for the heirloom of the past, enjoyed by the present, is but a
trust to be left, with accrued interest, to the future;—the fulfilment of
this duty ought to be considered rather a privilege than a sacrifice, for
every farthing paid for the maintenance of the humblest village school is
an integral part of the nation’s life-insurance premium;—glory in this
responsibility to the whole country, for it constitutes you, with the
wealthiest and mightiest, a joint builder of its greatness;—glory in thus
bearing witness by the fruit of the sweat of your brow, that you, too,
are sworn in on the creed that man does not live by bread alone;—glory in
and render thanks for being thus held to keep ablaze in your own bosom
and help kindle in the bosom of the lowliest child of the community, the
sacred fire of idealism.”
That by many, perhaps by most people, this appeal is not heard in
distinct words, I do not contest. But that is no reason to make light of
it. Utterly lost it never is. Something of it sinks into the mind even
of the dullest and most hard-hearted, though it be but in the form of
a faint and vague feeling. To make them lose this, is to deprive them
of the best they have. Democracy is not a mill-pond, on which a fragile
boat can outride the wildest tempest. It is the open sea, on which the
proudest and stoutest craft is sure to be swamped, sooner or later,
if it be not properly ballasted. True idealism, however, never was a
more essential part of the ballast, than in these times and in this
country. It stands more in need of it than any other state, because its
unparalleled opportunities are appallingly powerful incentives to plunge
headlong into the materialistic tendencies of the age. Therefore, it is
ruthless to lay hands on anything tending to keep alive and foster true
idealism in the people. For this reason it would be, in my opinion,—not
in intention, but in effect,—a dastardly crime, under any plea whatever,
to release the people from the obligation to provide in their local
organisations for the education of their youths.
Therefore, I even deem it upon the whole more beneficial than detrimental
that many of the higher and most of the highest educational institutions
of the country are the free gift of high-minded men and women to the
people. I have never agreed with those who have contended in this country
that the duty of the commonwealth does not extend beyond providing for
primary and, at the most, to some extent for secondary education, and
that it would not be fair and proper to tax all for the establishment
and maintenance of colleges and universities, which, in the nature of
the case, only a small minority can frequent. It would be hard to name
a more promising sign of the times, than that this doctrine has of late
lost so much of its former hold upon public opinion, that one would
have to search long for an advocate of it in its original rigor. It
is eminently in the interest of all, that there be an ample number of
men and women who have received the highest education. Therefore, it
is evidently not only justified, but imperative, that the commonwealth
furnish the means for supplying its want. But if the views held in this
respect on the continent of Europe had prevailed in the United States,
the American people would have been the poorer of one of the vastest and
most grateful fields for manifesting idealistic public-spiritedness. An
inestimable loss, for idealistic public-spiritedness is not the least of
the causes to which it is due that American democracy has stood the test;
and idealistic public-spiritedness, like every virtue, grows stronger and
more fruitful by being practised. Every donation for educational purposes
prompts others to follow suit, and is, apart from its direct beneficent
effects, a most valuable object-lesson to the whole nation. With equal
impressiveness, the rich and the poor are reminded of the treasures which
“neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.” On every educational institution
brought into existence in such a way are indelibly inscribed the two
magic words to which this country owes it greatness: Help yourself,
and Public Spirit; every one of them is a living protest, as well
against paternalism—whether it present itself in the socialistic or
in any other garb—as against the setting up of the golden calf as the
idol of the republic. Therefore, everything tending to seriously check
these manifestations of idealism and public spirit in regard to higher
education would be deplorable, even if it were in itself commendable, for
paternalism and materialism are too rampant to leave anything undone that
is calculated to keep them down.
To contend that the existing decentralisation in regard to education must
be done away with, would, for these reasons, be a truly Quixotic charge
upon windmills: the venture must result in broken bones. It cannot, and,
if it could, ought not to be done, for this decentralisation is the
natural outgrowth of the whole historical development of the commonwealth
and in perfect accordance with the underlying principle of its political
and social structure. But it would be strange logic to conclude from
this that it can have worked no harm, or that the evil consequences it
may have had cannot be remedied. Can it be denied that, apart from the
primary schools, it sounds almost like mockery to speak of an American
system of education? If we look at the schools of a higher grade, we are
confronted by a bewildering chaos, and the nearer the top, the worse the
confusion becomes. That the effects of this are not altogether good, will
be universally admitted, though opinions will differ as to the weight
that ought to be attached to the bad consequences in the aggregate and
severally. To me, some of them seem to be of a very serious character,
and I hold that they must from year to year become of more consequence.
To say that somebody has been through a “high school,” does not convey
sufficiently definite information as to either the kind or the amount of
instruction he has received. To know that somebody is a graduate of an
“academy,” a “college,” a “university,” means to know next to nothing as
to his mental equipment. To gauge our man, we must inquire, What academy,
what college, what university? Having learned that, we are in hundreds
of cases not a whit wiser than before. We have to ask for the calendar
of the institution, and, after having read that, we shall often be still
pretty much at sea, for, as the Germans say, “paper is patient,” and the
printing of a first-class programme implies by no means of necessity
first-class instruction. This may be considered by some of little or no
moment, because the degrees confer no rights whatever. But they are,
nevertheless, not senseless gewgaws. If they be deemed such, their
abolishment must be insisted upon, for then they are as much out of place
in this country as orders or other meaningless titles. They are intended
to be certificates of knowledge and mental training. If they lose this
character, they are nothing, or worse than nothing. It is, however,
self-evident that they must be deprived of this character, exactly to
the extent that the educational institutions bearing the same name and
conferring the same degrees differ from each other. Do you not think it
more than likely that, if a law were passed making it obligatory to add
to the letters indicating a degree the name of the institution by which
it was conferred, an astounding number of ornamental tails to names would
be cut off forever?
This would not be done, if the degrees merely failed to be definite and
reliable certificates of knowledge and mental training. They do positive
harm, because the institutions conferring them have little more in common
than the name, their educational standard differing in the extremes,
as much as the crippled shrub and the sturdy oak. While the public do
not know what value to attach to the degree, a large percentage of the
recipients are betrayed into offensive and pernicious self-deception.
Upon the official averment of their _alma mater_, they lay the flattering
unction to their soul that they have received a much better intellectual
outfit than they really possess. These institutions practically reverse
the precept of the Greek sage: not “know thyself,” but “deceive thyself”
is the maxim imprinted on their diplomas. And this self-deception is a
subtle, contagious virus. It is at least doubtful, whether more will
take warning by looking through the false pretense, or be lured by it
into the same mistaken notions as to the requirements of genuine higher
education. To have practically no fixed standards for the different
grades of higher education must as inevitably have mischievous effects
upon the intellectual life of a people, as its economic life must be
demoralised by allowing everybody to coin money of the same outward
appearance, but of any alloy he pleases. Not that harm has been done by
the almost unlimited freedom enjoyed by the educational institutions
owing their existence to private munificence, is to be wondered at; it
is astonishing that the deleterious effects have not been much worse.
A premium is offered for sailing under a false flag. If a college may
be called a university, and an academy a college, it would be more
than surprising if the grander name were not frequently preferred, for
it flatters alike the vanity of the donors, the instructors, and the
pupils, and will—with more or less reason—be expected to work as a bait.
With the name goes the right to confer degrees, and the exercising of
this privilege is to serve the same purposes. But the name renders it
necessary to keep up appearances, and that is an expensive pleasure. The
masquerading in a pretentious guise cuts down the allowance of wholesome
food. Worthless universities instead of good colleges, inferior colleges
instead of satisfactory academies and fitting schools, are but too often
the result. No name will deprive the rose of its sweet scent; but the
buttercup cannot, with impunity, call itself a rose.
The worst, however, is, that even the best institutions of the higher
order are made to pay a heavy penalty for the shortcomings of those of
the lower rank. Not getting the proper material, they do not turn out
as good work as they in themselves might do. Much valuable time, which
ought to be devoted to going on with the building, must be spent in
mending and strengthening the deficient foundation, which, after all,
does not acquire the requisite solidity, because mending is necessarily
patchwork. Nor is the damage confined to the pupils that have been sent
up from inefficient schools. These act as a drag upon those who have
come adequately prepared. To render matters worse, the deficiencies are
neither the same with all, nor is it known beforehand where they will be
found and how far they will extend. Neither are the curricula the same,
nor is there any guaranty that the same curriculum means the same work
done. Here so many things have been taught, that everything has suffered
in regard to thoroughness. There, specialisation has commenced so early,
that the basis is too narrow and too shallow. Training for a special
purpose has encroached upon education. All these difficulties greatly
hamper the institution. But they do more. They exercise a strong pressure
upon it to stray from the right path, for they are powerful incentives to
yield to the evil tendency, more to measure, than to weigh the work done.
This is, in my opinion, the most deplorable of all the bad consequences
which the lack of a uniform system, resulting from the decentralisation
of education, has thus far had; and it is all the more dangerous, because
the measuring principle is so well fitted to be clad in the seductive
garb of a lucid and clear-cut system.
I do not expect that every one of my propositions will be universally
assented to. But can any unprejudiced observer dispute that there is
enough truth in what I have said to prompt the people seriously to
ponder the question, where this is going to end? If no conscious,
energetic, and concerted effort be made to counteract the evil effects
of decentralisation, the very fact of higher education having assumed
such a kaleidoscopic character renders inevitable its becoming more
and more kaleidoscopic. The founders, boards of trustees, presidents,
and faculties of new institutions are almost compelled to give their
individual notions on higher education, to a dangerous extent,
free scope. Having a hundred different patterns presented to their
consideration, the temptation is well-nigh irresistible not to adopt any
one of them, but to devise a new one. A new experimenting laboratory is
set up. That its experiments will be, positively or negatively, of some
value, is to be supposed. In most cases, however, the public interest
would have been better served by a good factory, renouncing the risky
ambition of dabbling with new inventions.
A European is struck with wonderment that, considering the extent to
which decentralisation in higher education has been carried, not
infinitely more harm has been done, and that the harm it does, seems to
impress the Americans comparatively so little. Neither can be understood,
unless one fully realises to what a degree the American commonwealth
is still in its formative period, and what an astounding educational
power there is in American life. To the former it is principally due,
that the deleterious effects mentioned are here in fact of much less
consequence, than they would be, where the advantages of an historical
development, counting by more than centuries, are paid for by the
rigidity of age; and the latter supplements and corrects the work of the
schools so effectively, that it is not surprising to find even many a
keen-sighted and highly accomplished American more or less blindfolded
as to this. Because the ultimate results are satisfactory, it is taken
for granted, that the educational conditions of the country must be
all right, while a searching critical examination irresistibly forces
upon one the question, whether a good deal is not achieved in spite of
them. If this be so, failure to promptly attend to what is defective
in them will surely be punished, for thanks to the rapidity with which
the United States are being filled up, their formative period is fast
drawing to a close, and with its close, the educational power of American
life will be, in some important respects, very sensibly diminished. The
peculiar advantages, they have thus far enjoyed, are steadily growing
weaker, while intellectually and morally, the difficulties confronting
the whole civilised world, and difficulties peculiar to them, are as
steadily making greater demands upon the people. Growth of population and
development of economical life, with all its attending circumstances,
constantly working at the further nationalisation of the American people,
and the problems to be solved growing more and more intricate, disaster
must become inevitable, if education does not keep abreast of this
double movement; and this it cannot do, if we do not energetically and
systematically go to work to nationalise education without consolidating
it. Nor have we any time to lose, for the task is by no means easy. Every
inch of ground gained will be the price of an arduous and protracted
struggle.
From the Federal Government no direct assistance is to be derived, for
the question is not within the province of its constitutional powers,
and if it were, we ought not to ask its interference, because, as I said,
to nationalise education without consolidating it, is to be the aim.
Public opinion, unaided by law, must effect the reform. Public opinion,
however, is in this country even more powerful than the law. It is sure
finally to overcome not only all active, but even all passive resistance,
which is always much harder to overcome. But is there any possibility of
ever inducing public opinion to take the question up in full earnest? I
am confident there is, and at all events it must be tried. The difficulty
of the task is no excuse for not undertaking it. It only admonishes us,
not to waste time, strength, and enthusiasm in vain attempts to carry
the fortress by assault. The works are so extended and so strong that
only a methodical siege requiring a great deal of skill, patience, and
determination, offers any chance of success. Two preliminary questions
must, therefore, be answered, ere operations can be commenced: who is to
conduct the campaign, and by what tactics can the approaches be pushed on
the fastest?
The answer to be given to the first question is plain. The instructors
are to be considered the experts, if anybody can claim the title. Upon
them, therefore, devolves the duty to take the lead. This they have
already commenced to do. The very existence of a National Educational
(Teacher’s) Association is in itself irrefutable proof that the opinions
advanced by me, have, in some way and to some extent, asserted themselves
for some time. How this has been done and what has been effected, I do
not feel called upon to discuss. I merely state that while I appreciate
what it has done and expect from it still more in the future, I am
firmly convinced that the goal can never be reached if we are to content
ourselves with what this organisation is capable of achieving. This
will be deemed the less disparaging, if I furthermore state that, in my
opinion, the end could no more be attained by any other organisation
acting singlehanded. Hunting for any one device which will as certainly
effect a cure as patent medicines claim to cure bodily ailments, is but
to waste time. The evil has to be attacked from many points and in many
ways, if sanitation is to set in.
While I am fully persuaded of this, I am, however, on the other hand as
firmly convinced that nothing will be of avail if the Universities do
not step forward, heading the column of attack and adding compulsion to
suasion. The reform has to be worked from the top downward. At present
the law is, to a great extent, dictated by the schools of the lower
grade to those of the higher. This must be reversed. The Universities
must insist upon getting the proper material for doing what in their
judgment is the proper work. They must cease fitting themselves to what
the schools are pleased to send them. By closing their doors against
all applicants whom they do not really deem adequately prepared, they
must compel the schools, either to take down from their portals the
inscription “fitting school,” or to mend their ways and furnish their
pupils the kind and the amount of instruction they ought. A University
that meekly submits to travel on whatever roads some hundreds of schools,
which all more or less follow their own notions, happen to think good
enough, never can be a University except in name. No institution has a
moral right to the proud name of University that does not, consciously
and determinately, do all that is in its power to direct its educational
policy solely by what the civilisation of the age and the true interests
of the nation require.
I wish the old maxim _ultra posse nemo obligatur_ did not compel me to
say “to do all that is in its power,” for I am but too well aware how
deplorably little that is in many cases. State Universities are subject
to another will, and this other will is apt to have very much its own
notions as to how much a University may be allowed to cost, and to
determine the standard of the University entirely by the local standard
of schools. Other Universities, though legally their own masters, are
practically restrained as much or even more by implacable facts. No
University can entirely dispense with students, and the endowment of more
than one University forbids its making light of the number of students it
can secure. Being to some extent dependent upon the students for their
maintenance, they cannot afford to be very fastidious in regard to the
standard of schools they try to enlist into their constituency. But there
is also a goodly number of Universities whose position is in absolutely
every respect so strong that they can enter the lists without any risk
whatever to themselves. Whether they stop growing for a while or even
decline in numbers for some years does not affect their future in the
least. They are so much in quest by students that the fitting schools
are sure to make haste to meet their requirements, if these rise above
their curriculum. To move on in wild leaps would, of course, be foolish.
But so long as these Universities do not do that they never need to look
backward in their onward march; their whole constituency of schools must
follow close upon their heels, because they cannot afford to bolt and
drop out. The more the leading Universities proceed upon a concerted
plan, the larger the circle would grow, within which their joint pressure
would be irresistible: the strength of each would be doubled by pressing
on, shoulder to shoulder with the others, on the same lines. At the same
time it will make it correspondingly easier for the weaker ones to follow
in their wake. How could it fail to make an impression upon those on
whom they depend, if they can back their pleas by urging the practical
unanimity of all the foremost institutions of the country as to the right
course to take? The more the leading Universities are united, not only
as to the scope and method of their own work, but also as to what is
to be considered the proper preparation for University work, the more
will deviations from the rules laid down by them come to imply to public
opinion inferiority of standard; and if there is a whip under which
American communities smart, it is this. As to this would be added the
missionary influences of the alumni sent from the leading Universities
into all parts of the republic, it would be strange indeed, if the idea
were not constantly to spread and to cast deeper root, that to adequately
provide for the educational needs of the country, it is necessary
consciously to create and systematically to foster a tendency, by the
free action of public opinion, more and more to harmonise education, in
developing it everywhere and in all its ramifications into a thoroughly
organic structure.
I am prepared to hear the opinions I have ventured to advance strenuously
contested and, perhaps, even mercilessly ridiculed by many. The open
antagonists, however, cause me but little uneasiness. I fear only one
thing, i. e. that those who more or less endorse my criticisms and agree
with me as to what is desirable, will be induced by the arduousness of
the work to persuade themselves that it is impossible to bring about such
a reform. To them I should say: Where there is a will, there is a way,
and the American people _must_ be brought to will this reform, because
every year a portentous word is becoming more true and of greater import:
“the age of perils is past, but the age of difficulties has set it.”
H. VON HOLST.
FOOTNOTES:
[88] Commencement address at the Nebraska State University, June 7, 1893.
MEANING AND METAPHOR.
Professor Huxley supposes[89] “that so long as the human mind exists, it
will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual
conceptions.” He finds that “the science of the present day is as full of
this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience
of ignorant ages.” The difference he sees is “that the philosopher who is
worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law,
and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the
ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality.”
He then goes on to warn us against dealing with symbols as though they
were “real existences.”
Few indeed are free from reproach in this matter, so far as reproach is
deserved at all in the general unconsciousness of what constitutes the
danger. Few see the question to be vital or the danger to be urgent;
and even those who do are apt to deny that the search for a remedy can
be a crusade worth attempting; the very idea seems Utopian or pedantic.
On the one hand, teachers as a rule do not take their own analogies and
metaphors seriously. Both the literary and scientific, as well as the
philosophic and historical instinct tell against their doing so. In their
eyes figures have either faded into indifferent abstractions, or they are
obviously pictorial and merely rhetorical. But the average reader is apt
to take them at the foot of the letter. He is usually unaware both of the
extent to which he literalises and of the curious inconsistencies which
his literalising involves. So he makes his inferences with alight heart,
and wonders, perhaps, at the resulting confusion without suspecting its
true cause.
Would that the real state of the case and its practical consequences
could be pressed home to all with such force, that whatever be our line
of work or thought or expression we should strive in earnest to mend
matters. At least, we might begin by learning better what part symbolism
plays in the rituals of expression, and ask ourselves what else is
language itself but symbolism, and what it symbolises. We should then
examine anew the relations of the “symbolic” to the “real”; of image,
figure, metaphor, to what we call literal or actual. For this concerns
us all. Imagery runs in and out, so to speak, from the symbolic to the
real world and back again. As matters stand, we never know where we are
because we know so little where our phrases or our words are; indeed,
perhaps they and we are “neither here nor there.” Or, if we do know
where we are, we cannot be sure that our hearer or reader knows where
he is. He, too, is probably “neither here nor there.” He often praises
or agrees with us in the wrong place or the wrong manner. That is worse
than being complained of or differed from; it is difficult to repudiate
approval. Nor can we take refuge in lucidity and fancy that the clear
must be the true. In the long run and in the cases which _signify_ most,
there is no escape through merely lucid style or method. The “luminous”
speaker or writer, the “forcible” orator or essayist, the moment he tries
to convey to the public mind a thought which is really new, will find
himself hampered by his very clearness itself. His ideas are controverted
on assumptions not really his; or he himself is misled in subtle ways by
what he assumes in others.
Thus, by an instructive paradox, the clearest writer is often the most
controversial; and he wonders at our perverseness as, while we admire
his power and his “style,” we wonder at the perverseness in him. We
possibly agree with him in ways we do not suspect; he possibly agrees
with us in senses he ignores. Such a writer may pride himself on a chary
use of metaphor, or on a carefully sharp distinction between “image”
and “thing” or “object.” But he is liable to forget the danger dogging
him even here. One is tempted to say that there is only one term more
figurative as well as more ambiguous than “metaphorical,” and that is
“literal.” Most certainly much that is called “literal” is tinged with
the figurative in varying degrees, not always easy to distinguish, even
with the help of context. The word “literal” itself is indeed a case in
point. It has rarely, if ever, any reference to writing.
The question is, whether this state of things is quite so inevitable
as most of us seem to think. Certainly, so long as we are content to
live in the fool’s paradise of supposing that only the perverse, the
prejudiced, the stupid, or the ignorant can possibly mistake our meaning,
and that our misreadings of others are simply due to their “obscurity,”
or “quibbling,” or literary incapacity, we shall ourselves contribute to
the hopelessness of the situation. But this is a subject which cannot be
dealt with in an incidental way; it is rather a hope for the future, that
one of the most practically serviceable of subjects—that of Meaning, its
conditions and its changes—shall be seriously taken up. Then, indeed,
we may get back to the first of all questions, and that which is most
pregnant of helpful answers; that which needs asking more than any other
if good work is to be done in this day of universal “unsettlement”:—What
do we really mean? On all sides dead calms are stirred and ruffled,
dead levels upheaved or depressed; nothing (happily) can hope to escape
the wave of quickening force. So before long we may well be asking this
question in good earnest; and when we do we can but be the better, even
if we must needs submit in some cases where we may have been prematurely
positive, to be content (for the moment) with the answer: We do not
really know.
The fact is, that we have been postulating an absolute Plain Meaning to
be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have been virtually
assuming that our hearers and readers all share the same mental
background and atmosphere. We have practically supposed that they all
look through the same inferential eyes, that their attention waxes and
wanes at the same points, that their associations, their halos of memory
and circumstance, their congenital tendencies to symbolise or picture,
are all on one pattern. Verily, we need a “Critique of Plain Meaning”!
Again we _quote_ on the same assumption. Unless the language of our
author is obviously archaic; unless his allusions unmistakably betray
a different life-context, a different social “milieu,” in short, a
different mental world, we claim him or we repudiate him on the same
principle. We take his words, we take his phrases, we fill them out with
the same content as our own, we make him mean precisely what we ourselves
mean. And be it noted that it is always what we mean _now_. That this in
any way varies from what we meant at some time when, e. g., our attention
was differently focussed, rarely enters our heads.
We shall, I suppose, admit that until lately there was one very good
reason for this state of things. Only the exceptional mind (if any);
only the mind which could not make itself fully understood by its
contemporaries, and would risk being reckoned crazy or criminal if it
spoke “plainly,” had any suspicion that this way of looking at things
was being gradually invalidated by the general extension of the critical
domain. The history of language, its relation to thought; the scope
of expression and representation, the function of the figurative and
symbolic; the growth of all means of mental communion from the simplest
rudiments of gesture or cry to the highest point of intellectual
complexity,—all this was either ignored or taken for granted on radically
insecure bases.
Again, while the underlying conditions of language must be looked for
in the domain of psycho-physics, that science had not yet come into
existence. Even now it is but feeling its way and putting forth tentative
hypotheses, warning us, as it does, so that they are liable to be
constantly modified and occasionally revolutionised. And what does it
realise, first and foremost? That our difficulties on the very threshold
of the inquiry are, as usual, largely those of language. On all sides we
have to use, as best we may, modes of expression that inevitably convey
ambiguous meanings even to the thoughtful, even to the trained mind,
which cannot but carry with them a background of outgrown or disproved
premises, vitiating more or less every conclusion that we draw from them.
The very phrases which are our only shorthand for the vast oratory of
nature and experience betray us in the using. We have taken them as
though they were like numerals invariable in meaning, thus supposing them
subject to a permanent uniformity. We have taken them as though they
were without a history, merely fortuitous labels or symbols of unanimous
consent; the accepted sense, we think, being easily ascertainable, always
persistent, and wholly sufficient for practical purposes. In any case we
strangely assume that we may safely play upon all the chords of imagery,
reserving without difficulty for serious use a body of terms which are
direct expressions of “fact.”
But the suggestion now made is that this is precisely one of the most
dangerous of presuppositions. It is not the man who has mystified
himself, or who wishes to mystify others; it is not the man who confounds
the reality of the logical with that of the actual; it is not the man who
takes emotion for proof and notion for fact; it is none of these, but
the man who is clear on such points and sees that they must be drawn out
into clues and followed up to the uttermost, if we would know where we
are—who is beginning to see that the paramount need of the moment is the
“torpedo-shock” of the question, What do we really mean? He knows that
the off-hand vagueness and ready-made confusion, which too often from
sheer ignorance usurp the name of common-sense, are in the long run its
most deadly enemies.
We may look forward then with a new hope to the rise of a systematic
inquiry on the subject of meaning and its changes. This would entail
the much-needed work of classifying metaphor, and might even be found
to point to the existence of a third value, neither wholly literal, nor
wholly figurative, as that of a large proportion of ordinary expression.
From this and like causes, in this age of rapid changes due mainly to
scientific conquest, we can all readily put to each other questions to
which either a “yes” or a “no” must be equally misleading. And men of
science have specially realised this, since many a time they have been
unjustly credited with evasion, or with untenable or immoral views,
because they either answered to a “plain question”: “In one sense, yes;
in another, no,” or else gave an answer which could not fail to be
misunderstood by a mind which was governed by unconscious survivals. So
far as we are in touch with modern culture, we no longer mean what we
must have meant in the days before Copernicus, when we say, for instance,
“the sun rises.” When we speak of infection, we no longer mean what we
used to mean before microbes had been heard of. When we talk of “heat,”
we no longer mean what we used to mean even fifty years ago. And when a
man says that he believes in the sun, the planets, the cosmos, in the
heavens and the earth, in mind and matter, in soul and body, in spirit
and flesh, he cannot, if he would, mean just what his forefathers meant,
or indeed anything at all absolutely and finally. Whether we will or
no, the meaning of such terms is changing on our very tongues, and ever
swaying between the extremes which we call literal and metaphorical;
“heaven,” e. g., ranging in value from sky to human destiny; “earth,”
from soil to the visible Home of Man. We may appeal, and are right
to appeal to “hard, dry” facts; but we perforce put something out of
ourselves even into these. They become “facts” under the quickening
touch of “mind,” while that emerges from a dim world of prepossession,
bequeathing us many a primitive legacy from pre-intelligent sentience,
and perhaps from little-suspected sources lying yet further back. For
instance, primitive terror in its “superstitious” forms tended to
represent man as inferior to and dependent on powers of some sort;—and
this was true to natural order in the fact that his very world was not
self-centred and was dependent for its best boons upon a greater than
itself. As language advanced, he began quite naturally to express his
meaning in “appropriate metaphors”; to use, e. g., the figures of light
and then of sight to describe what he had, as we now say, “in his mind,”
or what sense-messages, as we now say, had “put into his head.” For
“something told him” that light, as it had been the first pleasure, was
also the great means of life.[90] And he “saw,” in however grotesque a
guise, the unbroken continuity of the organic and the inorganic, and
perhaps even more clearly than most of us yet do, that of so-called
“matter” and so-called “mind.” Perhaps in some cases, therefore, he
chose his imagery better than (after long ages of dualism carried to the
splitting-point) we generally do now.
He knew again that the senses after all, stern masters though they were
while life was so hard to live, had very narrow limits; and that the
world was in some sense fuller and richer of life than it had seemed to
be as known directly through them.[91] And then he wondered,—and began
to ask. He was the first Questioner. As Prof. Max Müller says,[92] “the
greater the savagery, the dullness, the stupidity with which _Homo
sapiens_ began, the greater the marvel at what must have been from the
first, though undeveloped, in him, and made him in the end what we find
him to be in the men of light and leading of our own age.” The mere fact
of the question is the riddle to be solved. For certainly the beasts had
not taught him either to wonder or to ask. And not merely insatiable
questioning but something more here rises to challenge our attention and
to demand reflection. Man is the first critic because he is the first
idealist; the first to be discontented, to protest, to see life as a
“ravelled end,” as something which is incomplete and speaks of something
more. Surely in any case the step of all steps, the deepest yet the
narrowest line to cross is the step from something noticed or found, from
something which happens or appears, from something which somehow affects
us, excites us, to its significance.
Of course in one sense it is impossible to fix any definite moment
as that of the advent of this “significance.” Animals interpret each
other’s aspect and gestures, often indeed with a subtle precision which
to some extent we have lost. But interpretation in the intellectual
sense becomes, from our present point of view, that which makes us
really human. Our progress, our ascent, is mainly marked in this. The
root-question to ask in gauging levels of humanity is, how much can a
given man interpret or translate, of a world that teems with meaning? How
much can he truly classify and relate, how much can he rightly infer and
conclude, how much can he account for, explain, and fruitfully apply? For
after all, results must be our tests. Claims and credentials are nothing,
unless they can show this warrant; whereas truth which can use all facts
alike is the very means of survival. Man begins by doing, by acting
out impulse; then he learns to “think” little by little, observing,
questioning, pondering, testing his way onward and upward. And throughout
his patient, often painful journey, he is himself perpetually challenged.
Nature’s stimulating appeals rain upon him ceaselessly from every side;
she orders him to master all her meanings. He responds:—at first again,
“blindly,” but ever rising to higher grades of answer. Both deficiency
and error are no doubt more or less present in all mental response to
actual fact—that is, in all experience. But the essence of sanity from
the first lies in corrective power. Everywhere there is either absence of
notice, absence of response, or there is experimental activity (broadly
speaking) corrected at once; automatically or by the combined effect of
the related organic activities. For instance, in health, if in using
the hand, one finger accidentally goes astray, the coördinating muscles
promptly recall it to a “sense of duty.” We know how the same rule works
in speech and writing. Therefore, unless “voluntary” and “capricious”
(or “willing” and “wilful”) are synonyms, the advent of volition ought
not to mean the abrogation of this rule.
It is, however, obvious that “natural selection” can only operate
in cases where death or sterility is the consequence of failure in
adaptation and appropriate reaction, or segregation the consequence of
excessive variation. But the point here is, why does not a tendency
to correction, thus established, survive automatically in incipient
imagination and therefore in language? It seems almost a burlesque
of popular notions of “free will” to suppose that the moment the
death-penalty is taken off, the new-born intelligence, unique in adapting
power, should go astray persistently without let or hindrance. Many now
merely formal or even jocular customs still prevailing[93] testify, as
legacies from a remote time of danger needing to be averted, to the
strength of tendencies organised during myriads of generations under the
pressure of the struggle for life. Why does not this apply to language?
But sight gives us here perhaps the most suggestive lesson; for therein
the ascending series seems especially gradual and unbroken. The eye,
unlike the other organs of sense is an outgrowth of the very brain
itself; “the retina ... is in reality a part of the brain.”[94] We
may well therefore connect its functions specially with the thought
of significance; it is the main out-post of our central means of
interpretation.
Taking the stages in the evolution of the eye, and using a short summary
of these as a convenient means of testing the value of a conspicuous
group of metaphors, we find (1) a mere dint; (2) this dint deepening
into a pit which (3) gradually narrows. Hitherto we have had only light
and darkness; now we have an image, though but a dim one. (4) The pit is
closed by a transparent membrane; this is protection, not obstacle. (5)
The lens is formed by deposit of cuticle. Gain; increased distinctness
and increased brightness. The lens can focus a larger pencil of rays
from each part of the object to each part of the retina (corresponding
point). Finally, iris and eyelid protect the perfected eye more
completely, and enable it both to bear more light and to discern more
detail.
If mental development were in any way comparable to this physiological
development, we should expect to find (1) something which would
naturally be described as a vague or dim “impression”; gradually
deepening, becoming more distinctly localised as the stimulus became
more definitely “impressive.” (2) We should begin to find “reality” and
the “unreal”; “fact” and “fancy”; “truth” and “falsehood”; knowledge and
ignorance,—contrasted as “light” and “darkness.”[95] And this is what
actually happens.[96]
(3) Still our mental “impression” would not as yet afford us an image;
“imagination” only now comes upon the scene and begins to work (though as
yet “dimly”) upon the objects which more and more “incisively” “impress”
us. (4) Our deep “impression” is closed in one sense from direct contact
with the outward; mental vision becomes more delicately differentiated
from the emotional “touch,” however this may be specialised and
intensified. But what secludes this is transparent; it is protection, not
obstacle. We rightly speak of mental penetration; of “seeing through”
a superficial limit. The mental “lens” is formed from that “continuum”
on which the original “impression” was made. The gain now is increased
distinctness and brightness. More rays of “light,” of reality, of fact,
of truth, of knowledge, can now be focussed from each part of a given
object (or group of objects) of mental attention and interest; to each
part of the responsive “sensitive plate” of the mind. Finally we have,
so to speak, increased protective growth. The function of what are called
academic culture and scientific method, with their fastidious standards
of fitness and accuracy, may perhaps represent something not unlike that
of iris and eyelid, enabling the developing mind safely to bear intenser
illumination and also to discern more subtle detail.
It must be admitted that so far as it goes this is a significant
psychological parable. However slender its right to the position even
of a working clue to early stages of mind, it has at least better
credentials than many accepted analogies can claim. And throughout
its course what most “impresses” itself upon one’s mind is the steady
maintenance of invariable reaction to excitation, and of protection from
unfavorable stimulus.
“Mind,” as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson tells us,[97] “is a fiction of the
fancy.” Of course this is open to the retort that so is fancy a fiction
of the mind, or fiction a fancy of the mind.
Psychology is full of these see-saws of paradox, depending on
vicissitudes of linguistic usage or context. But mind is indeed a fiction
of the fancy when we endow it with a fanciful freedom from all ties with
what we call physical reality. For this, however plainly we may recognise
its genesis in our own sequences of sense-impression, does practically
through them rule us with an undeviating severity which neither fiction
nor fancy can tamper with. Therefore, if we think it absurd to suppose
that there may possibly be an undiscovered vein of authentic and really
indicative symbol or metaphor running through the arbitrary meshes of
fanciful custom or mythical term, we are in fact implying that all clues
from the original interactions of physical energy were entirely lost when
what we call “mind” issued first in language. But at all events we may be
sure that links between the “physical” and the “psychical” are everywhere
drawing closer and emerging clearer, however buried as yet in a mass of
the fantastic or the arbitrary.
It will probably be objected that we can never hope to find these. No
doubt such an attempt must mean the patient work of many lifetimes, and
at best we could not hope to lay bare the ultimate point of “origin.”
But yet it seems worth trying. For after all, even the results which
may appear so scanty in the tracing back of language, are already rich
far beyond what could have been hoped for a few generations back. And
if it were once realised that such a line of work might have practical
and far-reaching issues; if we really saw that thus some barren disputes
and speculations might cease to bar the way or to waste some precious
energies, we should be more than rewarded. In his “Dialogues of
Plato”[98] Professor Jowett warned us twenty years ago of our linguistic
dangers, repeating his warning with greater emphasis and in fresh forms
in the admirable essays added in the edition just published. He urges
that the “greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language
teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our
servants and not allowing them to be our masters.” “Words,” he tells
us, “appear to be isolated but they are really the parts of an organism
which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilisation,
harmonised by poetry, emphasised by literature, technically applied in
philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of
human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius,
and come with a new force and association to every lively-minded person.
They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions and yet are
always imperceptibly changing:—not the inventors of language, but writing
and speaking, and particularly great writers, or works which pass into
the hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, the German or English
Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry
with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of
a word in a striking and familiar passage, gives a complexion to its
use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has
also a peculiar power over us.” Then he reminds us of what we too often
forget; that “language is an aspect of man, of nature, and of nations,
the transfiguration of the world in thought, the meeting-point of the
physical and mental sciences, and also the mirror in which they are
reflected, an effect and partly a cause of our common humanity, present
at every moment to the individual and yet having a sort of eternal or
universal nature.”[99]
Nowadays, when we feel most scathingly superior, we often announce that
we fail to see and have yet to learn something which, bringing us, it
may be, a really fresh idea, unpleasantly stirs misgiving. Let us go
on with our greeting, meaning it in good earnest. For when we honestly
and without reservation consent to learn and succeed in seeing some
things now waiting for our study we may find more than we look for,
within reach. After all it may be that we have really failed to see
and have really yet to learn the part that meaning—whether of language
or of conduct—and its change or variations (successive or simultaneous)
have had throughout the mental history of man. It may be that while
the ordinary modern metaphor like the ordinary modern analogy is a
mere rhetorical device, some few images may be found to hail from an
altogether deeper and more authentic source. Many, however ancient, are
not of course any the more valid for their antiquity. On the contrary it
is obvious that such a figure for instance as “foundation” or “basis” to
express an ultimate necessity, is a survival from days in which the earth
was supposed to require and to possess such fixed and immutable base,
while the analogies, e. g. between the human and the inorganic orders are
now reversed. We import the idea of mechanism and invariable sequence
into the former instead of exporting conscious intention into the latter;
we level down where our forefathers levelled up. And we have to beware of
the subtle atmosphere of fallacy thus introduced.
But on the other hand it is conceivable that some may be found to belong
to that as yet mysterious energy on which natural selection plays and of
which variation is the outcome or the sign. What we find in language may
thus be, as it were, not merely the “scarred and weather-worn” remnant
of geogenic strata but sometimes the meteorite, the calcined fragment of
earlier worlds of correspondence, ultra-earthly, cosmical. We have no
right to do more than ask and seek and knock at the gates of fact in such
a matter as this. But until that has been done; until at least we have
tried the experiment; have looked for grades of validity in metaphor and
analogy in the light of modern science, and still more, have recognised
clearly the powerful though hidden effects upon us of organised mental
picture brought in surreptitiously with verbal imagery, or by comparison;
we cannot know whether such an effort is worth while or no, or what
harvest it may yield. For after all, whether we like it or no, we _are_
heliocentric; the world and all that is in it is cosmically generated.
As far as science—and experience—are concerned, anything which says “I
don’t admit that origin; I claim to have produced myself or to have
been originated by and on the earth in a final sense,” must make good
its geocentric or self-creating pretensions with overwhelming cogency
and rigorous proof. We appeal to the “light” of science, of reason, of
experience, against the “darkness” of superstition, myth, and mysticism.
And we are thus appealing not to the supersensuous or supernatural
but to the ultra-satellitic. Not only beyond the earth and touch but
beyond the atmosphere and hearing is the home of the light that lightens
our small world, calling forth in us the answer of sight. And the
manifold revelations through this sense—in its mental as well as bodily
character—press upon us, with greater and greater insistence, the wealth
of our relations with the universe.
In any case, _meaning_—in the widest sense of the word—is the only value
of whatever “fact” presents itself to us. Without this, to observe and
record appearances or occurrences would become a worse than wasteful
task. Significance is the one value of all that consciousness brings, or
that intelligence deals with; the one value of life itself. But perhaps
for this very reason we have taken it too much for granted. It may need a
more definite place in psychological inquiries. It may have unsuspected
bearings.
When we have realised better what manner of gift this is, we may find
answers of which we have prematurely despaired; answers coming not from
the “mystical” point of the horizon of experience, but rather from the
neural. And let us beware here of repeating the pre-scientific error of
postulating, for figurative purposes, a flat earth on which whatever lies
beyond “horizons” never meets! But, it may be said, why not? Why should
it signify? Why, but because Man is the one not merely who thinks, or
speaks, or writes, or looks upwards, but the one who _means_, the one
who _is_ the meaning of much, and makes the meaning of all; the one who
will not tolerate the unmeaning anywhere in experience. Nothing remains
but that he should interpret rightly; that he should apprehend nature and
experience in their true sense. It is the glory of science that she puts
this aim in the forefront of her labors. She tells us that nothing can
be done without assumption and hypothesis as to the meaning of things.
But that significance belongs to the very spring to which we owe her
dauntless energy and her accumulating triumphs.
Why should it signify? The very term answers us. To “signify” is the one
test of the important. The significant is alone worth notice. We inherit
a mode of thinking which we are at last becoming able to criticise in
the light of knowledge gained by observation and experiment. But if we
persist in using, without warning to hearer or reader, imagery which has
no longer either sense or relevance, or which tends to call up a false
mental picture or to perpetuate an else decaying error, we shall to that
extent forfeit the very gifts which science brings us, and must not
complain of the obstinate persistence of ideas which needlessly divide
us. At least, let us try to realise more clearly what we are losing in
this way. The danger even thus must needs be lessened; detected bogies
become powerless for mischief; but we need not leave their ancient home
empty, swept, and garnished; stores of verified analogy are waiting to
replace them. The figurative must not indeed be pressed, still less
literalised. But we may see that it conveys a true, rather than a false
impression; and harmonises with, instead of contradicting that which we
most surely know.[100]
It may be said in a true sense that the function of the hero, the saint,
the poet, is to bring the world to _life_. But the function of the
devoted servant of science, the critical scholar, the true philosopher,
is to bring the world to _truth_, in a sense only now becoming possible.
Through the last discipline alone, in its most thorough applications, can
we hope fully to master the scope of all significance and the laws of all
its workings. Then, indeed, we may further hope to read with a fresh eye
the Significance of Life.
VICTORIA WELBY.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] _The Nineteenth Century_, April, 1886. (Reprinted in _Essays on
Controverted Questions_.)
[90] “Light affects the new-born infant at an early stage, although in
this as in other respects individual differences immediately assert
themselves. The child seems to take pleasure in an excitation of light
and tries (even on the second day after birth) to turn towards it in
order to retain it.” (_Outlines of Psychology_, H. Höffding, p. 4.)
“Under the influence of light the conversion of inorganic matter into
more complex organic matter takes place, more particularly in the green
cells of plants.” (_Ibid._, p. 315.)
“It is certainly necessary to look further back than the visual
sensations to understand the great influence of light on all creatures
that have sensuous perception.... Light is thus one of the most
elementary conditions of life.” (_Ibid._, p. 229.)
[91] It must be borne in mind that I am using psychological terms in
a merely general sense. Among many examples of such use I may quote
Sachs (_Physiology of Plants_, p. 200) and F. Darwin (_Address to
Biological Section_, Brit. Assoc, August 1891), who speaks of the plant
as “perceiving” external change, as “recognising” the vertical line,
“knowing” where the centre of the earth is, “translating” stimulus, etc.
See also Darwin’s _Forms of Flowers_, p. 90.
Again Prof. M. Foster uses the word “will” in the same general (rather
than metaphorical) sense. (_Text Book of Phys._, Part 3, pp. 1059, 1062,
1063.) Modes of reaction are thus verbally linked with consciousness, and
we must remember that all our terms for the “mental” belong first to the
“physical,” and that many are reciprocally used in the two spheres.
[92] _Natural Religion_, p. 243.
[93] See Dr. Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, Vol. I, pp. 74-121; _Ibid._,
Vol. II, pp. 297-298, 404-428.
[94] Dr. M. Foster’s _Text-Book of Physiology_, Part 4, p. 1142.
[95] I am of course merely directing attention to the relative aptness
of metaphors of mental process familiarly in use in our own language. It
is obvious that before any inference could be made from them as to the
value of unconscious analogies of imagery, we should have to make appeal
to comparative philology and embark on a wide inquiry, for which the
English-speaking races must wait for Dr. Murray’s epoch-making Dictionary.
[96] It must be borne in mind that the whole process presupposes the
other senses or at least the temperature-sense, the “muscular sense”
and that of touch; that is, we should have “felt” simple stimuli
“emotionally” before we “saw” things intellectually. And hearing is
not now in question, though in that, too, we should find the same
character of development, i. e. the same prominence of the protective and
discriminative factors.
[97] _Brain_, June, 1891. P. 13.
[98] Vol. I, pp. 285-286, 293.
[99] The following, among many pregnant passages between which it is
difficult to choose, may be further quoted:
“The famous dispute between Nominalists and Realists would never have
been heard of, if, instead of transferring the Platonic ideas into a
crude Latin phraseology, the spirit of Plato had been truly understood
and appreciated. Upon the term substance at least two celebrated
theological controversies appear to hinge, which would not have existed,
or at least not in their present form, if we had ‘interrogated’ the word
substance, as Plato has the notions of Unity and Being. Those weeds of
philosophy have struck their roots deep into the soil, and are always
tending to reappear, sometimes in new-fangled forms; while similar words,
such as development, evolution, law, and the like, are constantly put in
the place of facts, even by writers who profess to base truth entirely
upon fact. In an unmetaphysical age there is probably more metaphysics in
the common sense (i. e. more _a priori_ assumption) than in any other,
because there is more complete unconsciousness that we are resting on
our own ideas, while we please ourselves with the conviction that we are
resting on facts. We do not consider how much metaphysics are required to
place us above metaphysics, or how difficult it is to prevent the forms
of expression which are ready made for our use from outrunning actual
observation and experiment.” (Vol. IV, p. 39-40.)
“To have the true use of words we must compare them with things; in using
them we acknowledge that they seldom give a perfect representation of our
meaning. In like manner when we interrogate our ideas we find that we are
not using them always in the sense which we supposed. (_Ibid._, p. 41.)
“Many erroneous conceptions of the mind derived from former philosophies
have found their way into language, and we with difficulty disengage
ourselves from them. Mere figures of speech have unconsciously influenced
the minds of great thinkers. Also there are some distinctions, as,
for example, that of the will and of reason, and of the moral and
intellectual faculties, which are carried further than is justified by
experience. Any separation of things which we cannot see or exactly
define, though it may be necessary, is a fertile source of error. The
division of the mind into faculties or powers or virtues is too deeply
rooted in language to be got rid of, but it gives a false impression. For
if we reflect on ourselves we see that all our faculties easily pass into
one another, and are bound together in a single mind or consciousness;
but this mental unity is apt to be concealed from us by the distinctions
of language.” (_Ibid._, p. 155.)
[100] I would gladly forward to any reader interested in a question of
such practical bearings, a small collection of _Witnesses to Ambiguity_
gathered from representative sources, and a pamphlet which was circulated
at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, held in London,
August, 1892, giving examples of the mischievous confusions suggested
by the use, even among writers of the first rank, of the metaphor,
_Inner and Outer_. Prof. H. Sidgwick, the president, in his opening
address, expressed the opinion that very important work of this kind
remained to be done, and added, “I have much sympathy with the view
urged in a pamphlet that I have received for distribution among members
of the Congress, which illustrates forcibly the confusion caused by
one established antithesis of terms.” Professor Sully and others have
expressed themselves strongly in the same sense.
REPLY TO THE NECESSITARIANS.
REJOINDER TO DR. CARUS.
§ 1. In _The Monist_ for January, 1891, and in the number for April,
1892, I attacked the doctrine that every event is precisely determined by
law. Like everybody else, I admit that there is regularity: I go further;
I maintain the existence of law as something _real and general_. But I
hold there is no reason to think that there are general formulæ to which
the phenomena of nature _always_ conform, or to which they _precisely_
conform. At the end of my second paper, the partisans of the doctrine of
necessity were courteously challenged and besought to attempt to answer
my arguments. This, so far as I can learn, Dr. Carus alone, in _The
Monist_ of July and October, 1892, has publicly vouchsafed to do. For
this I owe him my particular thanks and a careful rejoinder.
§ 2. I number the paragraphs of his papers consecutively. The following
index shows the pages on which those paragraphs commence, and the
numbered sections of this rejoinder in which they are noticed.
DR. CARUS REJOINDER
Vol. II, p. 560 ¶ 1
” ” 2 §28
” ” 3 29
” 561 4 23.27
” ” 5 21
” ” 6 18
” ” 7 18
” 562 8 18 _bis._
” ” 9 21
” ” 10
” 563 11 12.21.22
” ” 12 19
” ” 13 19
” 564 14 3.12 _bis._ 22
” ” 15 8 _ter_, 16
” 565 16 21
” ” 17 3
” ” 18 3
” ” 19 13 note
” 566 20 14
” ” 21 13, 14
” ” 22 3.12.22
” ” 23 12
” ” 24 3.13.14
” 567 25 8
” ” 26 8
” ” 27 8.22
” ” 28 20.22
” ” 29 12
” 568 30 22
” ” 31 22 _bis_
” ” 32 22
” 569 33 22
” ” 34 22
” ” 35 8
” ” 36 29
” ” 37
” 570 38
” ” 39
” ” 40
” 571 41
” ” 42
” ” 43
” 572 44 23
” ” 45
” ” 46 5.23
” 573 47
” ” 48 7
” ” 49 7
” ” 50 7
” 574 51 7.25
” ” 52
” ” 53 25
” ” 54
” ” 55 25 _bis_
” 575 56 17
” ” 57 17 _bis_
” ” 58 17.25
” ” 59 17
” ” 60 17
” 576 61 7.17.25 _bis_
” ” 62 17.21
” ” 63 17
” 577 64 17 _bis_
” ” 65 26
” ” 66 25
” ” 67 25 _bis_
” 578 68 6.7
” ” 69 17
” 579 70 6
” ” 71 3
” 580 72 3
” ” 73 3
” ” 74 3
” ” 75 3
” 581 76 3
” ” 77 3.11
” ” 78
” ” 79 21
” 582 80
” ” 81 29
” ” 82 29
” ” 83 29
Vol. III, 68 84 5
” ” 85 27
” ” 86
” 69 87 12
” ” 88 5.15 _bis_
” ” 89
” ” 90
” ” 91 5
” ” 92 5
” 70 93 5
” ” 94 5
” ” 95 3
” ” 96 4.11
” 71 97
” ” 98
” ” 99
” ” 100
” 72 101
” ” 102 11
” ” 103 6
” ” 104
” ” 105
” 73 106 11
” ” 107 6
” ” 108 6
” ” 109 6
” ” 110 6
” ” 111 6
” 74 112 6
” ” 113 6.11
” ” 114 6
” ” 115 6
” 75 116 6.7
” ” 117 6
” 76 118
” ” 119 9
” ” 120 6.16
” ” 121 14
” ” 122 11
” 77 123 3
” ” 124 10
” ” 125 7
” 78 126 8
” ” 127 8
” ” 128 29
” 79 129
” ” 130
” ” 131
” ” 132
” ” 133 27
” ” 134
” 80 135
” ” 136
” ” 137 15
” ” 138 15
” ” 139 5.15
” 81 140 15
” ” 141 15
” ” 142 15.25
” ” 143 15.24
” ” 144 15 _bis_
” ” 145 15 _bis_
” ” 146 15 _bis_
” ” 147 15 _ter_
” 82 148 15
” ” 149 12.15
” ” 150 15 _bis._ 25
” 83 151 15.24
” ” 152 15.24
” ” 153 15.24
” ” 154 15.24
” ” 155 15.24
” 84 156 15 _bis_
” ” 157 15
” ” 158 15.24
” 85 159 15.24
” ” 160 15.24
” 86 161 15 _bis_
” ” 162 15
” ” 163 5.14
” ” 164 14
” 87 165 4.14
” ” 166 14
” ” 167 14
” ” 168 27
” ” 169 27
” 88 170 27
” ” 171 27
” ” 172 27
” ” 173
” ” 174
” 89 175 27
” ” 176 27 _bis_
” ” 177 27
” ” 178 27
” ” 179
” ” 180 30
” ” 181
” ” 182
” 90 183 30
” ” 184
” ” 185 27
” ” 186 27
” 91 187 27
” ” 188
” ” 189
” ” 190
” 92 191 4
” ” 192 27 _bis_
” ” 193 20.27 _bis_
” 93 194
” ” 195 8
” ” 196 8
” 94 197
” ” 198 6
” ” 199 30
” ” 200
” ” 201
” 95 202
” ” 203 20.29
” ” 204 29
” 96 205 20
” ” 206
” ” 207
§ 3. Dr. Carus’s philosophy is hard to understand. Some phrases which
he frequently uses lead the reader to imagine that he is listening to
an old-fashioned Königsberg Kantian. What, then, is our surprise when
we find (¶ 14) that he sneers at the Kantian, Sir William Hamilton
(whom he calls Mr. Hamilton) as having “no adequate conception of the
_a priori_.” In his “Ursache, Grund und Zweck” (1883), an admirably
clear and systematic exposition of much of his thought, he takes a
Schleiermacherian view of the _a priori_. He admits it to be founded in
the universal conditions of cognition; but he thinks it is among the
objective rather than the subjective conditions. This is an opinion
to which Hamilton is also at times inclined. It is a weak conception,
unless the whole distinction between the inward and the outward world be
reformed in the light of agapastic and synechistic ontology. For to deny
that the _a priori_ is subjective is to remove its essential character;
and to make it both subjective and objective (otherwise than in the sense
in which Kant himself makes it objective) is uncalled for, and is cut off
by Ockham’s razor. But when synechism has united the two worlds, this
view gains new life.
Another thing which has astonished me is Dr. Carus’s extravagant
laudation (¶ 17) of Venn’s highly enlightened and remarkably
bright-thinking, yet blundering little book, “The Logic of Chance.”[101]
This is the way he speaks of it: “This admirable work, we will make
bold to say, marks a new epoch in the study of logic.” He adds that it
“paves the way which Mr. Peirce has actually followed.” But the question
of the nature of probability had long before that publication engaged
the attention of some of the most powerful intellects in England; and
my opinion concerning it was fully made up before I saw the book. I do
not think I learned anything from that except a classification of the
philosophies of probability. However, after all his eulogy, Dr. Carus
only uses the book to quote from it Mill’s rewording of Kant’s definition
of causation, which he would better have quoted direct.
Let me say, not to Dr. Carus, but to the younger generation of readers,
that if they imagine that Hamilton, because he is antiquated, is not
worth reading, they are much mistaken. The Scotistic elements of his
philosophy, and his method in the notes on Reid are especially worthy of
attention. As for Mill, though his philosophy was not profound, it is,
at least in his “Examination of Hamilton,” admirably set forth. Whoever
wishes to appeal to the American philosophical mind needs to be quite
familiar with the writings of these two men.
Dr. Carus himself accepts all that I hold for erroneous in Kant’s
definition of causation as universal and necessary sequence. Mill
merely substitutes the exacter words _invariable_ for “universal,”
and _unconditional_ for “necessary.”[102] In giving his form of the
definition, Mill shows why it is not applicable to the sequence of day
and night, namely, that that is not necessary. Yet Dr. Carus writes (¶
18) of this very same sequence as if it came under Mill’s definition![103]
Again, why should he make it “the immortal merit of the great Scotchman”
(¶ 22), that is, of Hume, that he admitted the truth of Leibniz’s
principle?
The famed puzzle of causation is peculiarly understood by Dr. Carus.
The difficulties which the perusal of Hume suggested to the mind
of Kant,[104] were such as belonged to all categories, or general
conceptions of the understanding. The precritical Kant inherited a very
decided nominalism from Leibniz and Wolf; and the puzzle for him was
simply the usual difficulty that plagues nominalism when it finds itself
confronted with a reality which has an element of generality. Necessity
is, I need hardly say, but a particular variety of universality. But
Dr. Carus (¶ 24) passes over this, to dwell upon an entirely different
objection to causation, namely, that it seems to be a creation out of
nothing, and a miracle.
I find myself equally at cross-purposes with him, when in ¶¶ 71-77, he
speaks of the prevalent views of logicians concerning _comprehension_.
This word, in logic, measures the amount of predicates or marks attached
to a conception; but Dr. Carus’s criticisms seem to be based upon the
idea that by comprehension is meant logical breadth, or the amount of
subjects to which the conception is applicable.
I am simply gravelled by his remarks (¶ 95) concerning sundry English
words.
No more do I know what to make of his praise (¶ 123) of the German
translation of a French phrase used in the theory of functions, meaning
_univocally determined_.
§ 4. One habit which goes far to obscure Dr. Carus’s meaning is that
whenever he finds his opinion at variance with a familiar saying, instead
of rejecting that formula, he retains it and changes the meaning. This is
calculated to throw the whole discussion into confusion. Thus, nothing is
more certain than that the so-called “law of identity,” or _A_ is _A_,
was intended to express the fact that every term is predicable of itself.
But Dr. Carus, simply because he finds that “meaningless and useless” (¶
96), thinks himself authorised to confuse the terminology of logic by
making this formula, _A_ = _A_, under the same old name, mean that things
to which the same name is applicable are for some purpose equivalent.
In like manner, he changes the meaning of the word _freedom_ (¶ 165),
so that the distinction between those who maintain and those who oppose
the freedom of the will may, in words, disappear. It seems scarcely
defensible for a thoroughgoing necessitarian, such as he is, to fly the
flag of Free Will.
He, also, changes the meaning of _spontaneity_ so far that, according to
him, “masses gravitate spontaneously” (¶ 191), and so pretends that his
doctrine does not suppress the spontaneity of nature!
§ 5. There are other questions of terminology in which I am unable to
agree with Dr. Carus. Thus, when I define necessitarianism as “the theory
that the will is subject to the general mechanical law of cause and
effect,” Dr. Carus (¶ 139) wishes to delete “mechanical.” But the result
would be to define a doctrine to which the advocates of free will would
generally subscribe, as readily as their opponents. In order properly to
limit the definition, it is quite requisite to exclude “free causation.”
By “mechanical” causation, I mean a causation entirely determinative,
like that of dynamics, but not necessarily operating upon matter.
Dr. Carus mentions (¶ 84) that there are several different ideas to
which the term necessity is applied. It seems to me that what lies at
the bottom of all of them is the experience of reaction against one’s
will. In the simplest form, this gives the sense of reality. Dr. Carus
himself admits (¶ 46) that reality involves the idea of inevitable fate.
Yet philosophical necessity is a special case of universality. But the
universality, or better, the generality, of a pure form involves no
necessity. It is only when the form is materialised that the distinction
between necessity and freedom makes itself plain. These ideas are,
therefore, as it seems to me, of a mixed nature. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 91-94)
insists that by the necessary, he wishes to be understood to mean in
all cases the _inevitable_. This is the idea of _fate_, and is not the
conception which determinists usually attach to the term necessity.
Yet he does not appear to be quite consistent. At one time (¶ 88), he
carefully distinguishes necessity from fate. At another time (¶ 163),
every element of compulsion is to be excluded from the conception of
necessity.
§ 6. One important key to Dr. Carus’s opinions is the recognition of the
fact that, like many other philosophers, he is a nominalist tinctured
with realistic opinions.
He says (¶ 103), that “there is no need of discussing the truism that,
properly speaking, there is no absolute sameness.” Now, upon the
nominalistic theory, there is not only no absolute or numerical identity,
but there are not even any real agreements or likenesses between
individuals; for likeness consists merely in the calling of several
individuals by one name, or (in some systems) in their exciting one idea.
On the other hand, upon the realistic theory, the fact that identity is
a relation of reason does not in the least prevent it from being real.
On that theory, it is real unless it is _false_ that anything is itself.
Thus, upon either theory, identity is just as real as similarity. But
Dr. Carus, being a nominalist leaning toward realism, is inclined to
make dynamical relations real, and second-intentional ones unreal. This
opinion, I think, is a transitional one.
The declaration (¶ 198) that “natural laws are simply a description
of nature as nature is,” and that “the facts of nature express the
character of nature,” are nominalistic. But in another place (¶¶
107-116), he says distinctly that uniformities are real.
He says (¶ 70), “Mr. Peirce attempts to explain natural laws as if they
were concrete and _single facts_.” This is eminently nominalistic. The
nominalist alone makes this sharp distinction between the abstract and
the concrete,[105] which must not be confounded with Hegel’s distinction
for which the same words are used. The nominalist alone falls into the
absurdity of talking of “single facts,” or _individual generals_. Yet
Dr. Carus says (¶ 68) that natural laws describe the facts of nature
_sub specie aeternitatis_. Now I understand Spinoza to be a realist.
In ¶117 he considers it “settled” “that there are samenesses.” This is
realistic. But in ¶ 120, he holds “the whole business of science to be to
systematise the samenesses of experience,” which is nominalistic.
§ 7. Dr. Carus seems to be in some doubt as to how far evolutionism ought
to be carried. In ¶¶ 48-51, he seems to side with my contention that it
should be thoroughgoing. In ¶116, he makes intellect an evolution from
feeling. Yet he is sometimes (¶ 125) “inclined” to say the world never
was a chaos; he sometimes (¶ 61) thinks it weak to suppose that real
chance begets order; and he sometimes (¶ 68) goes so far as to pronounce
eternity to be the _conditio sine qua non_ of natural law.
§ 8. Every reader of _The Monist_ knows that our good editor’s great word
is “formal law.” The clearest statement he has ever made of this doctrine
I find in the following two sentences (¶ 127):
“The _a priori_ systems of thought are ... constructions
raised out of the recognition of the formal, i. e. relational
samenesses that appear in experience. All possibilities of a
certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated in
theorems.”[106]
This is perspicuous. For example, of pairs, we can easily show that
there are but two forms _A_:_A_ and _A_:_B_. This proposition,—theorem
if you will,—exhausts the possibilities. If we make believe there is no
danger of falling into error in mathematical reasoning,—and one danger,
though not, perhaps, a very serious one, _is_ eliminated,—then this
proposition is absolutely certain. But I will say, at once, that such a
proposition is not, in a proper sense, synthetic. It is a mere corollary
from the definition of a pair. Moreover, its application to experience,
or to possible experience, opens the door to probability, and shuts out
absolute necessity and certainty, _in toto_.
Concerning points like this, Dr. Carus, in company with the general
body of thinkers, is laboring under a great disadvantage from not
understanding the logic of relatives. It is a subject I have been
studying for a great many years, and I feel and know that I have an
important report that I ought to make upon it. This branch of logic is,
however, so abstruse, that I have never been able to find the leisure to
translate my conclusions into a form in which their significance would
be manifest even to a powerful thinker whose thoughts had not long been
turned in that direction. I shall succeed in doing so, whenever I can
find myself in a situation where I need think of nothing else for months,
and not before. That may not be for thirty years; but I believe it is the
intention of providence that it should be. Meantime, I will testify, and
the reader can take my testimony for what he thinks it is worth, that
all deductive reasoning, except that kind which is so childishly simple
that acute minds have doubted whether there was any reasoning there,—I
mean non-relative syllogism,—requires an act of choice; because from a
given premise, several conclusions,—in some cases an infinite number,—can
be drawn. Hence, Dr. Carus is altogether too hasty in his confidence
(¶¶ 195, 196) that general thinking machines “are not impossibilities.”
An act of original and arbitrary determination would be required; and
it seems almost evident that no machine could perform such an act
except within narrow limits, thought out beforehand and embodied in
its construction. Moreover, positive observation is called for in all
inference, even the simplest,—though in deduction it is only observation
of an object of imagination. Moreover, a peculiar act which may properly
be called _abstraction_[107] is usually required, consisting in seizing
evanescent elements of thought and holding them before the mind as
“substantive” objects, to borrow a phrase from William James. At the
same time, the process I am describing, that is, relative deduction, is
perfectly general and demonstrative, and depends upon the truth of the
assumed premises, and not, like inductive reasoning, upon the manner in
which those premises present themselves.
But the application of the logic of relatives shows that the propositions
of arithmetic, which Dr. Carus usually adduces as examples of formal law
(¶ 15), are, in fact, only corollaries from definitions. They are certain
only as applied to ideal constructions, and in such application, they are
merely analytical.
The truth is our ideas about the distinction between analytical and
synthetical judgments is much modified by the logic of relatives, and
by the logic of probable inference. An analytical proposition is a
definition or a proposition _deducible_ from definitions; a synthetical
proposition is a proposition not analytical. Deduction, or analytical
reasoning, is, as I have shown in my “Theory of Probable Reasoning,” a
reasoning in which the conclusion follows (necessarily, or probably) from
the state of things expressed in the premises, in contradistinction to
scientific, or synthetical, reasoning, which is a reasoning in which the
conclusion follows probably and approximately from the premises, owing to
the conditions under which the latter have been observed, or otherwise
ascertained. The two classes of reasoning present, besides, some other
contrasts that need not be insisted upon in this place. They also present
some significant resemblances. Deduction is really a matter of perception
and of experimentation, just as induction and hypothetic inference are;
only, the perception and experimentation are concerned with imaginary
objects instead of with real ones. The operations of perception and of
experimentation are subject to error, and therefore it is only in a
Pickwickian sense that mathematical reasoning can be said to be perfectly
certain. It is so, only under the condition that no error creeps into
it: yet, after all, it is susceptible of attaining a practical certainty.
So, for that matter, is scientific reasoning; but not so readily. Again,
mathematics brings to light results as truly occult[108] and unexpected
as those of chemistry; only they are results dependent upon the action
of reason in the depths of our own consciousness, instead of being
dependent, like those of chemistry, upon the action of Cosmical Reason,
or Law. Or, stating the matter under another aspect, analytical reasoning
depends upon associations of similarity, synthetical reasoning upon
associations of contiguity. The logic of relatives, which justifies these
assertions, shows accordingly that deductive reasoning is really quite
different from what it was supposed by Kant to be; and this explains how
it is that he and others have taken various mathematical propositions
to be synthetical which in their ideal sense, as propositions of pure
mathematics, are in truth only analytical.
Descending from things I can demonstrate to things of which various
facts, in the light of those demonstrations, fully persuade me, I
will say that in my opinion there are many synthetical propositions
which, if not _a priori_ in Dr. Carus’s sense, are, at least, innate
(notwithstanding his frequent denials of this, as in ¶ 15) though he
is quite right in saying that their abstract and distinct formulation
comes very late (¶ 126). But turn the facts as I will, I cannot see that
they afford the slightest reason for thinking that such propositions are
ever absolutely universal, exact, or necessary in their truth. On the
contrary, the principles of probable inference show this to be impossible.
Dr. Carus adduces the instance of a geometrical proposition, namely,
“that two congruent regular tetrahedrons, when put together, will form a
hexahedron.” (¶ 25.) This, he says, seems to be “a very wonderful thing”;
for why should not a larger tetrahedron be formed, just as two heaps of
flour make a large heap of flour? Yet, he continues, the probability
that the two tetrahedrons do always make a hexahedron is 1, “which
means certainty” (¶ 27). But as it happens, the proposition, in the
form stated is quite erroneous. What is true is this. If two tetrahedra
are so placed that one face of each is coincident with one face of the
other, while all the other faces are inclined to one another, and if of
the 8 faces, the 2 that are coincident are not counted, there remain to
be counted 8-2=6 faces. But there is nothing more wonderful about this
than that 8-2=6, which is an easy corollary from definitions. Very few
propositions in mathematics that appear “marvellous” will hold water; and
those few excite our astonishment only because the real complexity of the
conditions are masked in an intuitional presentation of them.
Dr. Carus holds (¶ 15) that formal knowledge is absolutely universal,
exact, and necessary. In some cases, as where he says that, given the
number of dimensions of space, the entire geometry could be deduced (¶
35), the boasted infallibility will prove on examination to be downright
error. In all other cases, the propositions only relate to ideal
constructions, and their applicability to the real world is at the best
doubtful, and, as I think, false; while in their ideal purity, they are
not synthetical.
Thus, my good friend and antagonist holds that the combination of oxygen
and hydrogen to produce water is not “different in principle” from that
of the tetrahedra to produce a hexahedron (¶ 26). There is all the
difference between the ideal and the real; which to my Scotistic mind is
very important. But this is not the only passage in which he speaks as if
form were the principle of individuation.
§ 9. Dr. Carus’s position is even weaker than that of Kant, who makes
space, for example, a necessary form of thought (in a broad sense of that
term). But Dr. Carus appears to consider space as an absolute reality.
For he says (¶ 119) that “every single point of space has its special
and individual qualities.” Here again form is made the principle of
individuation; whence the queer phrase, “individual qualities.”
§ 10. Dr. Carus argues that whatever is unequivocally determinate is
necessary. (¶ 124.) Were the determination spoken of real dynamic
determination, this would be a mere truism. But the expression used,
_eindeutig bestimmt_, merely expresses a mathematical determination, and
therefore no real necessity ensues. The equation
(Transcriber’s Note: Italics have been removed from the
formulæ for readability.)
x² - 23x + 132¼ = 0
determines _x_ to be either 11·477 or 11·523. In this sense, _x_ has
necessarily one value or the other. The equation
x² - 12x + 6 = 0
determines _x_ to be either 11·477 or 0·523. Together, the two equations
uniquely determine _x_ to be 11·477. This shows how much that argument
amounts to.
§ 11. By “sameness,” Dr. Carus means equivalence for a given purpose. (¶¶
102, 106.) By the “idea of sameness,” he means (¶¶ 77, 96) the principle
that things having a common character are for some purpose equivalent.
This, he says, “has a solid basis in the facts of experience.” By a
“world of sameness” (¶ 113), he seems to mean one in which any two given
concrete things are in some respect equivalent. He argues (¶ 122) that
a “world of sameness is a world in which necessity rules.” I do not see
this. It seems to me so bald a _non sequitur_, that I cannot but suppose
the thought escapes my apprehension. If there were anything in the
argument, it would seem to be a marvellously expeditious way of settling
the whole dispute; and therefore it would have been worth the trouble of
stating, so as to bring it within the purview of minds like mine.
§ 12. My candid opponent sometimes endorses emphatically the Leibnizian
principle. “Necessitarianism must be founded on something other than
observation. Observation is _a posteriori_; it has reference to single
facts, to particulars; yet the doctrine of necessity ... is of universal
application. The doctrine of necessity ... is of an _a priori_ nature.”
(¶ 11.) “Millions of single experiences ... cannot establish a solid
belief in necessity.” (¶ 14.) “No amount of experience is sufficient to
constitute causation by a mere synthesis of sequences.” (¶ 22.) “Millions
of millions of cases” constitute “no proof” that a proposition “is always
so.” (¶ 29.)
Nevertheless, he holds that the law of “the conservation of matter and
energy” so conclusively proves necessary causation, that the obstinacy
of Hume, himself, could not have withstood the argument. (¶ 23.) One
wonders, then, what is supposed to prove this “law of the conservation of
matter and energy,” if no amount of experience can prove it.
But the _a priori_ itself can “be based on the firm ground of
experience.” (¶ 14.) In that case, it is not prior to experience, after
all! “The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness,
and ... the existence of sameness is a fact of experience.” (¶ 87.)
If absolute necessity can be irrefragably demonstrated from the fact
that two things are alike, it is a pity Dr. Carus should not state
this demonstration in a form, that I, and men like me, can understand.
That would be more to the purpose than merely saying it can be proved.
Absolute chance is rejected as “involving a violation of laws well
established by _positive evidence_.” (¶ 149.)
All these _denials_ that absolute necessity can be established and
absolute chance refuted by experiential evidence, mixed with as clear
_assertions_ of the same things, when taken together, have the appearance
of an attempt, as the politicians say, to “straddle” the question.
§13. But the ingenious Doctor seeks to bolster up necessity by
introducing the confused notion of “causation.”
I do not know where the idea originated that a cause is an instantaneous
state of things, perfectly determinative of every subsequent state. It
seems to be at the bottom of Kant’s discourse on the subject; yet it
accords neither with the original conception of a cause, nor with the
principles of mechanics. The original idea of an efficient cause is
that of an agent, more or less like a man. It is prior to the effect,
in the sense of having come into being before the latter; but it is not
transformed into the effect. In this sense, it may happen that an event
is a cause of a subsequent event; seldom, however, is it the principal
cause. Far less are events the only causes. The modern mechanical
conception, on the other hand, is that the relative positions of
particles determine their accelerations at the instants when they occupy
those positions. In other words, if the positions of all the particles
are given at _two_ instants (together with the law of force), then
the positions at all other instants may be deduced.[109] This doctrine
conflicts with Kant’s second analogy of experience, as interpreted by
him, in no less than four essential particulars. In the first place, far
from involving any principle that could properly be termed generation, or
_Erzeugung_, which is Kant’s word for the sequence of effect from cause,
the modern mechanical doctrine is a doctrine of persistence, and, as I
have repeatedly explained, positively prohibits any real growth. In the
second place, one state of things (i. e. one configuration of the system)
is not sufficient to determine a second, it is two that determine a
third. To whomsoever may think that this is an inconsiderable divergence
of opinions, let me say, study the logic of relatives, and you will think
so no longer. In the third place, the two determining configurations,
according to mechanics, may be taken at almost any two instants, and the
determined configuration be taken at any third instant we like. _There is
no mechanical truth in saying that the past determines the future, rather
than the future the past._ We habitually follow tradition in continuing
to use that form of expression, but every mathematician knows that it is
nothing but a form of expression. We continue, for convenience, to talk
of mechanical phenomena as if they were regulated, in the same manner
in which our intentions regulate our actions (which is essentially a
determination of the future by the past), although we are quite aware
that it is not really so. Remark how Kant reasons:
“If it is a necessary law of our sensibility, and consequently
a _formal condition_ of all perceptions, that the preceding
time determines the following, (since I can only come to
the following through the preceding,) then is it also an
indispensable _law of the empirical representation_ of the
time-series that the appearances of the preceding time
determine every occurrence in the following.”
What this leads to is a causality like that of mental phenomena, where it
_is_ the past which determines the future, and _not_ (in the same sense)
the reverse; but the doctrine of the conservation of energy consists
precisely in the denial that anything like this occurs in the domain of
physics. Had Kant studied the psychological phenomena more attentively
and generalised them more broadly, he would have seen that in the mind
causation is not absolute, but follows such a curve as is traced in my
essay towards “The Law of Mind” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, 550). Does our
judicious editor deem it ungracious to find fault with Kant for not doing
so much more than he did, considering what that hero-like achievement
was? We must seem to carp, as long as thinkers can hold that achievement
for sufficient. In the fourth place, Kant’s “Analogy” ignores that
continuity which is the life-blood of mathematical thought. He deals
with those awkward chunks of phenomenon, called “events.” He represents
one such “event” as determined by certain others, definitely, while
the rest have nothing to do with it. It is impossible to cement such
thought as this into hermetic continuity with the refined conceptions of
modern dynamics. The statement that every instantaneous state of things
determines precisely all subsequent states, and not at all any previous
states, could, I rather think, be shown to involve a contradiction.
The notion which Dr. Carus holds of a cause seems to be that it is a
state, embracing all the positions and velocities of all the masses at
one instant, the effect being a similar state for any subsequent instant.
(¶¶ 21, 24.) This breaks at once with common parlance, with dynamics,
and with philosophical logic. In common parlance, we do not say that
the position and upward velocity of a missile is the cause of its being
at a subsequent instant lower down and moving with a greater downward
velocity.[110] In dynamics, it is the fixed force, gravitation, or
whatever else, together with those relative positions of the bodies that
determine the intensity and direction of the forces, that is regarded
as the cause. But these causes are not previous to, but simultaneous
with, their effects, which are the instantaneous accelerations. Finally,
logic opposes our calling one of two states which equally determine one
another (as any two states of a system do, if the velocities are taken to
be included in these states) _the_ determinator, or cause, simply because
of the circumstance that it precedes the other in time,—a circumstance
that is upon the principles of dynamics plainly insignificant and
irrelevant.
Everybody will make slips in the use of words that have been on his lips
from before the time when he learned to think; but the practice which
I endeavor to follow in regard to the word _cause_, is to use it in
the Aristotelian sense of an _efficient cause_, in all its crudeness.
In short, I refuse to use it at all as a philosophical word. When my
conception is of a dynamical character, I endeavor to employ the accepted
terminology of dynamics;[111] and when my idea is a more general and
logical one, I prefer to speak of the _explanation_.
§ 14. Dr. Carus thinks the element of necessity in causation can be
demonstrated by considering the process as a transformation. “It is a
sequence of two states which belong together as an initial and final
aspect of one and the same event.” (¶ 21. Compare ¶¶ 20, 24.) He neglects
to explain how he brings under this formula the inward causation of the
will and character, as set forth by him in ¶¶ 163-167.
It is unnecessary for me to reply, at length, to an argument so
manifestly inconclusive. On the one hand, it conflicts with the principle
that absolute necessity cannot be proved from experience; and on the
other hand, it leaves room for an imperfect necessity.
Professor Tait has done an ill office to thought in countenancing the
idea that the conservation of energy is of the same nature as the
“conservation,” or rather perduration, of matter. Dr. Carus says (¶ 121)
that
“The law of the conservation of matter and energy rests upon
the experience (corroborated by experiments) that causation
is transformation. It states that the total amount of matter
and the total amount of energy remain constant. There is no
creation out of nothing and no conversion of something into
nothing.”
The historical part of this statement contains only a small grain of
truth; but that I will not stop to criticise. The point I wish to make
is that the law of the conservation of energy is here represented under
a false aspect. The true substance of the law is that the accelerations,
or rates of change, of the motions of the particles at any instant depend
solely on their relative positions at those instants. The equation which
expresses the law under this form is a differential equation of the
second order; that is, it involves the rates of change of the rates of
change of positions, together with the positions themselves. Now, because
of the purely analytic proposition of the differential calculus that
Dₜ²s = ½Dₛ(Dₜs)²,
the first integral of the differential equation of the second order, that
is, the differential equation of the first order which expresses the same
state of things, equates half the sum of the masses, each multiplied by
the square of its velocity, to a function of the relative positions of
the particles _plus_ an arbitrary constant.[112] In order to fix our
ideas, let us take a very simple example, that of a single particle
accelerated towards an infinite plane, at a rate proportional to the
_n_ᵗʰ power of its distance from the plane. In this case, if _s_ be the
distance, the second differential equation will be
Dₜ²s = -asⁿ,
and the first integral of it will be
(Dₜs)² = -(²ᵃ⁄ₙ₊₁)sⁿ⁺¹ + C.
By the first law of motion, and the Pythagorean proposition, the part
of the velocity-square depending on the horizontal component is also
constant.
The arbitrary constant, _C_, plainly has its genesis in the fact that
forces do not determine velocities, but only accelerations. Its value
will be fixed as soon as the velocity at any instant is known. This
quantity would exist, just the same, and be independent of the time, and
would therefore be “conserved” whether the forces were “conservative,”
that is, simply positional, or not. Now, this constant is the energy;
or rather, the energy is composed of this constant increased by another
which is absolutely indeterminable, being merely supposed large enough to
make the sum positive.
Thus, the law of energy does not prescribe that the total amount of
energy shall remain constant; for this would be so in any case by virtue
of the second law of motion; but what it prescribes is that the total
energy diminished by the living force shall give a remainder which
depends upon the relative positions of the particles and not upon the
time or the velocities. It is also to be noticed that the energy has
no particular magnitude, or quantity. Furthermore, in transformations
of kinetical energy into positional energy, and the reverse, the
different portions of energy do not retain their identity, any more
than, in book-keeping, the identity of the amounts of different items
is preserved. In short, the conservation of energy, (I do not mean the
_law_ of conservation,) is a mere result of algebra. Very different is
it with the “conservation” of matter. For, in the first place, the total
mass is a perfectly definite quantity; and, in the second place, in all
its transformations, not only is the _total_ amount constant, but all the
different parts preserve their identity. To speak, therefore, of “the
conservation of matter and energy,” is to assimilate facts of essentially
contrary natures; and to say that the law of the conservation of energy
makes the total amount of energy constant is to attribute to this law
a phenomenon really due to another law, and to overlook what this law
really does determine, namely, _that the total energy less the kinetic
energy gives a remainder which is exclusively positional_.
§ 15. Dr. Carus does not make it clear what he means by _chance_. He
does, indeed, say (¶¶ 145, 146):
“What is chance?
“Chance is any event not especially intended, either not
calculated, or, with a given and limited stock of knowledge,
incalculable.”
This defines what he means by a chance event, in the concrete; what he
understands by probability, we are left to conjecture. But from what he
says in ¶ 147, I infer that he regards it as dependent upon the state of
our ignorance, and therefore nothing real.
I am, therefore, much puzzled when I find him expressing a conviction
(¶¶ 88, 156) that chance plays an important part in the real world. He
explains very distinctly that “when we call a throw of the dice pure
chance, we mean that the incidents which condition the turning up of
these or those special faces of the dice have not been, or cannot be,
calculated.” (¶ 147.) This is the commonest, because the shallowest,
philosophy of chance. Even Venn might teach him better than that.
However, according to that view, when he writes of “the important part
that chance plays in the world,—not absolute chance ... but that same
chance of which the throw of the die is a typical instance” (¶ 88), he
can be understood to mean no more than that many things happen which we
are not in condition to calculate or predict. This is not playing a part
_in the world_, one would say—at least, not in the natural world; it is
only playing a part in our ignorance.
Dr. Carus frequently uses phrases which make us suspect he penetrates
deeper. Thus, he says, “we do not believe in absolute chance, but we
believe in chance” (¶ 144); and again, “Every man is the architect of
his own fortune—but not entirely. There are sometimes coincidences
determining the fates of men.” (¶ 161.) But when we remark the
consecution of ¶¶ 137-162, we feel pretty sure he really sees no
further. To do so would have been to perceive that indefinitely varied
specificalness _is_ chance.
For a long time, I myself strove to make chance that diversity in the
universe which laws leave room for, instead of a violation of law, or
lawlessness. That was truly believing in chance that was not absolute
chance. It was recognising that chance does play a part in the real
world, apart from what we may know or be ignorant of. But it was a
transitional belief which I have passed through, while Dr. Carus seems
not to have reached it.
As for absolute chance, Dr. Carus makes the momentous admission that
it is “not unimaginable” (¶ 150). If so, its negation, or absolute
necessity, cannot be a formal principle.
§ 16. But it is time for me to leave the consideration of Dr. Carus’s
system and to take up his strictures upon mine. His philosophy is one
eminently enlightened by modern ideas, which it synthetises to an
unusual extent. It is distinguished for its freedom from the vice of
one-sidedness, and displays every facet of the gem of philosophical
inquiry, except the one on which it rests, the question of absolute
law. Its prominent faults, which I feel sure must have struck every
competent reader, are that it shows little trace of meditation upon the
thoughts of the great idealists, and that there is a certain want of
congruity between different elements of it. How strangely it sounds,
for instance, to find an apriorian, and one who is dinging “formal
laws” so perpetually into our ears, one who holds that “in order to
weave the woof of the _a posteriori_ elements into coherent cloth, we
want the warp of the _a priori_” (¶ 15), to find this man declaring for
a positivism “which accepts no doctrine, theory, or law, unless it be
a formulation of facts,” and proclaiming that “the whole business of
science is to systematise the samenesses of experience, and to present
them in convenient formulas” (¶ 120). Now there is just one way of
bringing such warring elements into harmony, and curing the greatest
defect of the system,—and it is a way which would also bring the whole
into far better concordance with natural science. It is to lop off the
heads of all absolute propositions Whose subject is not the Absolute,
and reduce them to the level of probable and approximate statements.
Were that defalcation performed, Dr. Carus’s philosophy would, in its
general features, offer no violent opposition to my opinions. Moreover,
the Doctor has at heart the conciliation of religion and science. I
confess such serious concern makes me smile; for I think the atonement
he desires is a thing which will come to pass of itself when time is
ripe, and that our efforts to hasten it have just that slight effect
that our efforts to hasten the ripening of apples on a tree may have.
Besides, natural ripening is the best. Let science and religion each have
stout faith in itself, and refuse to compromise with alien and secondary
purposes, but push the development of its own thought on its own line;
and then, when reconcilement comes,—as come it surely will,—it will have
a positive value, and be an unmixed good. But since our accomplished
editor thinks himself called upon to assist in this birth of time, let
me ask him whether of all the conditions of such peace, the first is not
that religious thought should abandon that extravagant absoluteness of
assertion which is proper to the state of intellectual infancy, but which
it has so long been too timid to let go? This pragmatical and unneeded
absoluteness it is which is most deeply contrary to the method, the
results, and the whole spirit of science; and no error can be greater
than to fancy that science, or scientific men, rest upon it or readily
tolerate it.
§ 17. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 56-64) condemns my method of investigation as
contrary to that by which science has been advanced; and holds that a
radically different, and thoroughly positivistic method is requisite,—a
method so intensely positivistic as to exclude all originality. I suppose
he will not object to my forming an opinion concerning the methods of
science. I was brought up in an atmosphere of scientific inquiry, and
have all my life chiefly lived among scientific men. For the last thirty
years, the study which has constantly been before my mind has been upon
the nature, strength, and history of methods of scientific thought. I
have no space here to argue the question. In its logical aspect, I have
partly considered it in various publications; and in its historical
aspect, I have long been engaged upon a treatise about it. My critic says
(¶ 57) that 1 am “very positivistic in my logic of science.” This is a
singular misapprehension. Few of the great scientific minds with whom
I have come into personal contact, and from whom I endeavored to learn
were disposed to contemn originality or the ideal part of the mind’s work
in investigation; and those few, it was easy to see, really breathed an
atmosphere of ideas which were so incessantly present that they were
unconscious of them. Were I to name those of my teachers who were most
positivistic in theory, a smile would be excited. My own historical
studies, which have been somewhat minutely critical, have, on the whole
confirmed the views of Whewell, the only man of philosophical power
conjoined with scientific training who had made a comprehensive survey
of the whole course of science, that progress in science depends upon
the observation of the right facts by minds _furnished with appropriate
ideas_. Finally, my long investigation of the logical process, of
scientific reasoning led me many years ago to the conclusion that science
is nothing but a development of our natural instincts. So much for my
_theory_ of scientific logic. It is as totally opposed as anything can
be to Dr. Carus’s theory (¶ 69, note; and “Ursache, Grund und Zweck,” p.
2) that originality is out of place in science.
But in my _practice_ of scientific reasoning, Dr. Carus accuses me of
being what he calls a “constructionist”; that is, a theoriser unguided by
indications from observation or accepted facts. To a mind upon whom that
celebrated and splendid chapter of Kant upon the architectonical method
failed to make a deep impression, I may appear so; but _travesty_ is in
truth hardly too strong a word to describe the account of my method by
Dr. Carus.
Perhaps exaggeration is not without its value. If so, let me sum up the
method Dr. Carus recommends. Eschew originality, is its pious formula;
do not think for yourself, nor countenance results obtained by original
minds. Distrust them; they are not safe men. Leave originality to
mathematicians and their breed, to poets, and to all those who seek the
sad notoriety of having unsettled belief.[113] Flee all philosophies
which smack of this aberrant nineteenth century.[114] This theory of Dr.
Carus condemns itself; for it is highly original, and soars into the free
ether untrammelled by historic facts.
Keppler comes very close to realising my ideal of the scientific method;
and he is one of the few thinkers who have taken their readers fully into
their confidence as to what their method really has been.[115] I should
not feel justified in inflicting upon mine an autobiographical account
of my own course of thought; but some things Dr. Carus’s accusation
forces me to mention. My method of attacking all problems has ever been
to begin with an historical and rational inquiry into the special method
adapted to the special problem. This is the essence of my architectonical
proceeding upon which Dr. Carus has commented very severely. To look an
inch before one’s nose involves originality: therefore, it is wrong to
have a conscious method. But further, in regard to philosophy, not only
the methods, but the elementary ideas which are to enter into those
methods, should be subjected to careful preliminary examination. This,
especially, Dr. Carus finds very unscientific. (¶ 64, and elsewhere.)
It is, undoubtedly, the most characteristic feature of my procedure.
Certainly it was not a notion hastily or irreflectively caught up; but
is the maturest fruit of a lifetime of reflection upon the methods of
science, including those of philosophy; and if it shall be found that one
contribution to thought on my part has proved of permanent service, that,
I expect, will be the one. This method in no wise teaches that the method
and materials for thought are not to be modified in the course of the
study of the subject-matter. But instead of taking ideas at haphazard, or
being satisfied with those that have been handed down from the good old
times, as a mind keenly alive to the dangers of originality would have
done, I have undertaken to make a systematic survey of human knowledge
(a very slight sketch of which composed the substance of my paper on
the “Architecture of Theories,”) in order to find what ideas have, as a
fact, proved most fruitful, and to observe the special utilities they
have severally fulfilled. A subsidiary object of this survey was to note
what the great obstacles are to-day in the way of the further advance of
the different branches of science. In my “Architecture of Theories,” I
never professed to do more than make a slight sketch of a small portion
of my preliminary studies, devoting thirteen lines to some hints as to
the nature of the results. In the four following papers I have given
a selection of a few of these results. Among those which remain to be
reported are some of much more immediate importance than any of those
hitherto set forth. If anybody has been surprised to find my subsequent
papers developing thoughts which they were unable to foresee from my
first, it is only what I warned people from the outset that they would
find to happen. Nor have the greatest of these surprises yet been
reached.[116]
The next series of facts reviewed was that of the history of philosophy.
I waded right into this fearful slough of “originality,” in order to
gather what seemed to throw a light upon the subject. Finally, I reviewed
the general facts of the universe.
I now found myself forced by a great many different indications to
the conclusion that an evolutionary philosophy of some kind must be
accepted,—including among such philosophies systems like those of
Aristotle and of Hegel. From this point the reasoning was more rapid.
Evolution had been a prominent study for half a generation; and much
light had been thrown upon the conditions for a fruitful evolutionary
philosophy. The first question was, how far shall this evolution go back?
What shall we suppose _not_ to be a product of growth? I fancy it is this
cautious reflectiveness of my procedure which especially displeases Dr.
Carus. It is not positivistic: it is architectonic. But the answer to the
question was not far to seek. If an evolutionary explanation is to be
adopted, philosophy, logic, and the economy of research all dictate that
in the first essay, at least, that style of explanation be carried as far
back as explanation is called for. What elements of the universe require
no explanation? This was a simple question, capable of being decided
by logic with as much facility and certainty as a suitable problem is
solved by differential calculus. Being, and the uniformity in which being
consists, require to be explained. The only thing that does not require
it is non-existent spontaneity. This was soon seen to mean absolute
chance. The conclusion so reached was clinched by a careful reëxamination
of the office of chance in science generally, and especially in the
doctrines of evolution. Arrived at this point, the next question was,
what is the principle by which the development is to proceed? It was a
difficult inquiry, and involved researches from different points of view.
But I will not trouble the reader with further autobiographical details.
I have given enough to show that my method has neither been in theory
purely empirical, nor in practice mere brain-spinning; and that, in
short, my friend Dr. Carus’s account of it has been as incorrect as can
be.
§ 18. The learned doctor (¶¶ 6, 7, 8) pronounces me to be an imitator of
David Hume, or, at least, classes my opinions as closely allied to his.
Yet be it known that never, during the thirty years in which I have been
writing on philosophical questions, have I failed in my allegiance to
realistic opinions and to certain Scotistic ideas; while all that Hume
has to say is said at the instance and in the interest of the extremest
nominalism. Moreover, instead of being a purely negative critic, like
Hume, seeking to annul a fundamental conception generally admitted,
I am a positive critic, pleading for the admission to a place in our
scheme of the universe for an idea generally rejected. In the first
paper of this series, in which I gave a preliminary sketch of such of my
ideas as could be so presented, I carefully recorded my opposition to
all philosophies which deny the reality of the Absolute, and asserted
that “the one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective
idealism, that matter is effete mind.” This is as much as to say that I
am a Schellingian, of some stripe; so that, on the whole, I do not think
Dr. Carus has made a very happy hit in likening me to Hume, to whose
whole method and style of philosophising I have always been perhaps too
intensely averse. Yet, notwithstanding my present disclaimer, I have
little doubt apriorians will continue to describe me as belonging to the
sceptical school. They have their wonderful ways of arriving at truth,
without stooping to confront their conclusions with facts; and it is
amusing to see how sincerely they are convinced that nobody can have
science at heart, without denying all they uphold.[117]
My opponent has a habit of throwing out surprising opinions without
the least attempt to illuminate them with the effulgence of reason.
Thus he says (¶ 8): “If Kant’s answer to Hume had been satisfactory,
Mr. Peirce would probably not have renewed the attack.” What attack?
All that Hume attacked I defend, namely, law as a reality. How could a
defence of that which I defend as essential to my position, cause me to
surrender that position, namely, that real regularity is imperfect? In
any sense in which Hume could have admitted the possibility of law, it
must be precisely followed; since its existence could consist only in
the conformity of facts unto it. But perhaps Dr. Carus means that if one
question had been completely settled, I should probably have confined
myself to talking about that, instead of broaching a new one.
§ 19. Another misunderstanding of my position on the part of Dr. Carus
(¶¶ 12, 13) is simply due to “boldly” having been twice printed where
the reading should have been “baldly,” in my paper on “The Doctrine of
Necessity.” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, p. 336, lines 20 and 25.) I wish
printers would learn that I never use the word _bold_. I have so little
of the quality, that I don’t know what it means. As I read the “revise,”
as usual, it was presumably my fault that the _erratum_ occurred. At any
rate, had my meaning been clearly expressed, the proof-reader would not
have been misled by my defective chirography. What I was trying to say
was, in substance, this: Absolute chance is a hypothesis; and, like every
hypothesis, can only be defended as explaining certain phenomena.[118]
Yet to suppose that an event is brought about by absolute chance is
utterly illogical, since as a hypothesis it could only be admitted on
the ground of its explaining observed facts; now from mere non-law
nothing necessarily follows, and therefore nothing can be explained; for
to explain a fact is to show that it is a necessary, or, at least, a
probable, result from another fact, known or supposed. Why is not this a
complete refutation of the theory of absolute chance? _Answer_: because
the _existence_ of absolute chance, as well as many of its characters,
are not themselves absolute chances, or sporadic events, unsubject to
general law. On the contrary, these things _are_ general laws. Everybody
is familiar with the fact that chance has laws, and that statistical
results follow therefrom. Very well: I do not propose to explain
anything as due to the action of chance, that is, as being lawless. I
do not countenance the idea that Bible stories, for instance, show that
nature’s laws were violated;—though they may help to show that nature’s
laws are not so mechanical as we are accustomed to think. But I only
propose to explain the regularities of nature as consequences of the only
uniformity, or general fact, there was in the chaos, namely, the general
absence of any, determinate law.[119] In fact, after the first step is
taken, I only use _chance_ to give room for the development of law by
means of the law of habits.
§ 20. In ¶ 28, I read: “Mr. Peirce does not object to necessity in
certain cases; he objects to necessity being a universal feature of
the world.” This is correctly stated, and so it is in ¶ 203. I object
to necessity being universal, as well as to its ever being exact. In
short, I object to absolute universality, absolute exactitude, absolute
necessity, being attributed to any proposition that does not deal with
the Α and the Ω, in the which I do not include any object of ordinary
knowledge. But it is careless to write (¶ 193) that I “describe the
domain of mind as the absence of law.” Is not one of my papers entitled
“The Law of Mind”? It is true that I make the law of mind essentially
different in its mode of action from the law of mechanics, inasmuch as
it requires its own violation; but it is law, not chance uncontrolled.
That it is not “an undetermined and indeterminable sporting” should have
been obvious from my expressly stating that its ultimate result must
be the entire elimination of chance from the universe. That directly
negatives the adjective “indeterminable,” and hence also the adjective
“undetermined.” Still more unwarranted is the statement (¶ 205) that
I deny “that there are samenesses in this world.” If the slightest
excuse for such an accusation can be found in all my writings I shall be
mightily surprised.
§ 21. Dr. Carus fully admits (¶ 9) the justice of my first reply to the
argument that necessity is postulated in all scientific reasoning, which
reply is that to postulate necessity does not make it true. As this
reply, if correct is complete, Dr. Carus was bound after that admission
to drop the postulate-argument in favor of necessity.[120] But he takes
no notice, at all, of my four-page argument to show that scientific
reasoning does _not_ postulate absolute universality, exactitude, or
necessity (_The Monist_, Vol. II, pp. 324-327); but calmly asserts,
four or five times over (¶¶ 5, 11, 16, 62, 79), without one scintilla
of argumentation, that that postulate _is_ made, and uses this as an
argument in favor of necessity.
§ 22. He also fully admits (¶¶ 11, 14, 22) the justice of my argument
that the absoluteness of universality, exactitude, and necessity, cannot
be proved, nor rendered probable, by arguments from observation. That
argument consisted in assuming that all arguments from observation are
probable arguments, and in showing that probable inferences are always
affected with probable errors.
Had I deemed it requisite, I might easily have fortified that argument
by a more profound analysis of scientific reasoning. Such an analysis I
had formerly given in my “Theory of Probable Inference” (in “Studies in
Logic,” Boston: Little and Brown).
But, notwithstanding his admissions, Dr. Carus sets up his _ipse dixit_
against my argumentation. “We deny most positively,” says the editorial
Elohim, “that the calculus of probabilities is applicable to the order of
the world, as to whether it may or may not be universal.” (¶¶ 27, 31.)
To support this, he cites (¶¶ 31-34) four passages from articles written
by me sixteen years ago. I hope my mind has not been stationary during
all these years; yet there is little in those old articles which I now
think positively erroneous, and nothing in the passages cited. My present
views had, at that time, already begun to urge themselves on my mind;
but they were not ripe for public avowal. In the first of the passages
cited, I express the opinion, which I first uttered in my earlier
lectures before the Lowell Institute, in 1866, afterwards in the _Popular
Science Monthly_ in 1877, in still fuller elaboration in my “Theory
of Probable Inference” in 1882, and maintain now as strongly as ever,
that no definite probability can be assigned to any general arrangement
of nature. To speak of an _antecedent_ probability would imply that
there was a statistical science of different universes; and a _deduced_
probability requires an antecedent probability for one of its data.[121]
This consideration only goes to fortify my present position, that we
cannot conclude from observed facts with any degree of probability,
and therefore _a fortiori_ not with certainty, that any proposition is
absolutely universal, exact, or necessary. In the absence of any weight
of probability in favor of any particular exact statement, the formal
presumption is altogether against any one out of innumerable possible
statements of that kind.
The second passage cited is one in which I argue that the universe is
not a chaos, or chance-medley. Now Dr. Carus admits (¶ 28) that I do not
to-day maintain that it is a chance-medley.
The third passage cited is this: “A contradiction is involved in the
very idea of a chance-world.” This is in entire harmony with my present
position that “a chaos ... being without connection or regularity would
properly be without existence.” (“Architecture of Theories,” _The
Monist_, Vol. I, p. 176.)
The fourth passage is to the effect that “the interest which the
uniformities of nature have for an animal measures his place in the scale
of intelligence.” This I still believe.
So much for my supposed contradictions. If I am not mistaken, our
amiable editor, whose admirable editorship springs so largely out of his
amiability, in copying out these passages was really not half so much
intent on showing me to be wrong at present, as on showing me to have
been right formerly. However hard he hits, he contrives to honey his
sockdologers, and sincerely cares more to make the reader admire his
antagonist when he is right than to condemn him when he is wrong. There
is a touch of art in this that proclaims the born editor, and which I can
hardly hope to imitate.
Though Dr. Carus admits over and over again that necessity cannot be
based on observation, he often slips back to the idea that it can be so
based. He says, (¶ 30) that “form is a quality of this world, not of some
samples of it, but throughout, so far as we know of existence in even the
most superficial way.” But does he not see that all we _do_ know, and all
we _shall_ to-morrow, or at any date know, is nothing but a sample of our
possible experience,—nay, is but a sample of what we are in the future
to have already experienced? I have characterised inductive inference as
reasoning from samples; but the most usual way of sampling a class is by
examining _all_ the instances of it that have come under our observation,
or which we can at once collect.
§ 23. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 44, 46) holds that from my social theory of reality,
namely, that the real is the idea in which the community ultimately
settles down, the existence of something inevitable is to be inferred.
I confess I never anticipated that anybody would urge that. I thought
just the reverse might be objected, namely, that all absoluteness was
removed from reality by that theory, and it was many years ago that, in
my “Theory of Probable Inference,” I admitted the obvious justice, as
it seemed to me, of that objection. We cannot be quite sure that the
community ever will settle down to an unalterable conclusion upon any
given question. Even if they do so for the most part, we have no reason
to think the unanimity will be quite complete, nor can we rationally
presume any overwhelming _consensus_ of opinion will be reached upon
every question. All that we are entitled to assume is in the form of a
_hope_ that such conclusion may be substantially reached concerning the
particular questions with which our inquiries are busied.
Such, at least, are the results to which the consideration of the
doctrine of probability brings my mind irresistibly. So that, the social
theory of reality, far from being incompatible with tychism, inevitably
leads up to that form of philosophy. Socialistic, or as I prefer to term
it, agapastic ontology seems to me likely to find favor with many minds
at an early day, because it is a natural path by which the nominalist may
be led into the realistic ways of thought, ways toward which many facts
and inward forces impel him. It is well, therefore, to call attention
to the circumstances that the realism to which it leads is a doctrine
which declares general truths to be real,—independent of the opinions
of any particular collection of minds,—but not to be destined, in a
strictly universal, exact, and sure acceptation, to be so settled, and
established. Now to assert that general truths are objectively real,
but to deny that they are strictly universal, exact, and certain, is to
embrace the doctrine of absolute chance. Thus it is that the agapastic
ontologist who endeavors to escape tychism will find himself “led into”
that “inextricable confusion” which Dr. Carus (¶ 4) has taken a contract
to show that I am led into.
§ 24. Conservatism is wholesome and necessary; the most convinced radical
must admit the wisdom of it, in the abstract; and a conservative will
be in no haste to espouse the doctrine of absolute chance. I, myself,
pondered over it for long years before doing so. But I am persuaded, at
length, that mankind will before very long take up with it; and I do not
believe philosophers will be found tagging on to the tail of the general
procession.
My little dialogue between the tychist and the necessitarian (_The
Monist_, Vol. II, pp. 331-333) seems to have represented pretty fairly
the views of the latter; for Dr. Carus, in ¶¶ 151-155, does little more
than reiterate them, without much, if at all, reinforcing them. His ¶¶
158-160 merely work out, in a form perhaps not quite clear, what is
manifest from the elementary principles of dynamics, and was considered
in my dialogue.
His arguments in this connection, apart from those already noticed, are
that absolute chance is something which if it existed would require
explanation, that the manifold specificalness of nature is explained by
law without any aid from chance, and that absolute chance if it existed,
in the sense in which it is supposed to exist in my chaos, could not
possibly breed law as supposed by me. To the consideration of these
arguments I proceed to apply myself.
§ 25. One of the architectonic—and, therefore, I suppose, by Dr.
Carus considered as highly reprehensible—features of my theory, is
that, instead of saying off-hand what elements strike me as requiring
explanation and what as not doing so, which seems to be his way, I
have devoted a long time to the study of the whole logical doctrine of
explanation, and of the history of explanations, and have based upon the
general principles so ascertained my conclusions as to what things do and
what do not require to be explained.
Dr. Carus (¶ 67) defines _explanation_ as a description of a special
process of nature in such a way that the process is recognised as a
transformation. This I cannot quite grant. First, I cannot admit that
“special processes of nature” are the only things to be explained.
For instance, if I were to meet a gentleman who seemed to conform
scrupulously to all the usages of good society, except that he wore to
an evening party an emerald satin vest, that would be a fact calling for
explanation, although it would not be a “special process of nature.”
Second, I cannot admit that an explanation is a description of the fact
explained. It is true that in the setting forth of some explanations,
it is convenient to restate the fact explained, so as to set it under
another aspect; but even in these cases, the statement of _other_ facts
is essential. In all cases, it is _other facts_, usually hypothetical,
which constitute the explanation; and the process of explaining is a
process by which from those other facts the fact to be explained is
shown to follow as a consequence, by virtue of a general principle, or
otherwise. Thus, a “special process of nature” calling for explanation
is the circumstance that the planet Mars, while moving in a general way
from west to east among the fixed stars, yet retrogrades a part of the
time, so as to describe loops in the heavens. The explanation is that
Mars revolves in one approximate circle and we in another. Again, it has
been stated that a warm spring in Europe is usually followed by a cool
autumn, and the explanation has been offered that so many more icebergs
than usual are liberated during a warm spring, that they subsequently
lower sensibly the temperature of Europe. I care little whether the
fact and the explanation are correct or no. The case illustrates, at
any rate, my point that an explanation is a special fact, supposed or
known, from which the fact to be explained follows as a consequence.
Third, I cannot admit that every description which recognises the fact
described as a transformation is an explanation; far less that “it is
complete and exhaustive” (¶ 67). A magician transforms a watch into a
dove. Recognise it as a transformation and the trick is explained, is
it? This is delightfully facile. Describe the change from a caterpillar
to a butterfly as a transformation, and does that explain it? Fourth, I
cannot admit that every explanation recognises the fact explained as a
transformation. The explanation of the loops in the motion of Mars is not
of that nature. But I willingly recognise in Dr. Carus’s definition an
attempt,—more or less successful,—to formulate one of the great offices
of scientific inquiry, that of bridging over the gap between the familiar
and the unfamiliar.
_Explanation_, however, properly speaking, is the replacement of a
complex predicate, or one which seems improbable or extraordinary, by
a simple predicate from which the complex predicate follows on known
principles. In like manner, a _reason_, in one sense, is the replacement
of a multiple subject of an observational proposition by a general
subject, which by the very conditions of the special experience is
predicable of the multiple subject.[122] Such a reason may be called an
explanation in a loose sense.
Accordingly, that which alone requires an explanation is a coincidence.
Hence, I say that a uniformity, or law, is _par excellence_, the thing
that requires explanation. And Dr. Carus (¶ 51) admits that this “is
perfectly true.”
But I cannot imagine anything further from the truth than his statement
(¶ 66) that “the only thing in the world of which we cannot and need not
give account is the existence of facts itself.” I should say, on the
contrary, that the existence of facts is the only thing of which we need
give account. Forms may indulge in whatever eccentricities they please in
the world of dreams, without responsibility; but when they attempt that
kind of thing in the world of real existence, they must expect to have
their conduct inquired into. But should Dr. Carus reply that I mistake
his meaning, that it is only “being in general” (¶ 66) that he holds
unaccountable, I reply that this is simply expressing scepticism as to
the possibility and need of philosophy. In a certain sense, my theory of
reality, namely that reality is the dynamical reaction of certain forms
upon the mind of the community, is a proposed explanation of being in
general; and be it remarked that the mind of the community, itself, is
the thing the nature of whose being this explanation first of all puts
upon an idealistic footing.
Chance, according to me, or irregularity,—that is, the absence of any
coincidence,—calls for no explanation. If _law_ calls for a particular
explanation, as Dr. Carus admits it does, surely the mere absence of law
calls for no further explanation than is afforded by the mere absence of
any particular circumstance necessitating the result. An explanation is
the conception of a fact as a necessary result, thereby accounting for
the coincidence it presents. It would be highly absurd to say that the
absence of any definite character, must be accounted for, as if it were a
peculiar phenomenon, simply because the imperfection of language leads us
so to talk of it. Quite unfounded, therefore, is Dr. Carus’s opinion that
“chance needs exactly as much explanation as anything else” (¶ 53);—an
opinion which, so far as I can see, rests on no defensible principle.
Equally hasty is his oft repeated objection (¶ 55, 58, 61) that my
absolute chance is something ultimate and inexplicable. I go back to
a chaos so irregular that in strictness the word existence is not
applicable to its merely germinal state of being; and here I reach a
region in which the objection to ultimate causes loses its force. But
I do not stop there. Even this nothingness, though it antecedes the
infinitely distant absolute beginning of time, is traced back to a
nothingness more rudimentary still, in which there is no variety, but
only an indefinite specificability, which is nothing but a tendency to
the diversification of the nothing, while leaving it as nothing as it
was before. What objectionable ultimacy is here? The objection to an
ultimate consists in its raising a barrier across the path of inquiry,
in its specifying a phenomenon at which questions must stop, contrary
to the postulate, or hope, of logic. But what question to which any
meaning can be attached am I forbidding by my absolute chance? If
what is demanded is a theological backing, or rational antecedent,
to the chaos, that my theory fully supplies. The chaos is a state of
intensest feeling, although, memory and habit being totally absent,
it is sheer nothing still. Feeling has existence only so far as it is
welded into feeling. Now the welding of this feeling to the great whole
of feeling is accomplished only by the reflection of a later date. In
itself, therefore, it is nothing; but in its relation to the end, it is
everything.
More unreasonable yet is Dr. Carus’s pretension, that the manifold
specificalness, which is what I mean by chance, is capable of explanation
(¶¶ 142, 143) by his own philosophic method. He may explain one
particularity by another, of course; but to explain specificalness
itself, would be to show that a specific predicate is a necessary
consequence of a generic one, or that a whole is without ambiguity a
part of its part. Remark, reader, at this point, that chance, whether
it be absolute or not, is not the mere creature of our ignorance. It
is that diversity and variety of things and events which law does not
prevent. Such is that real chance upon which the kinetical theory of
gases, and the doctrines of political economy, depend. To say that it is
not absolute is to say that it,—this diversity, this specificalness,—can
be explained as a consequence of law. But this, as we have seen, is
logically absurd.
Dr. Carus admits that absolute chance is “not unimaginable” (¶ 150).
Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of all, things
the most obtrusive. That it is absolute, is the most manifest of all
intellectual perceptions. That it is a being, living and conscious, is
what all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can scarce
muster hardihood to deny.
Almost as unthinking is the objection (¶ 61) that absolute chance could
never beget order. I have noticed elsewhere the historic oblivescence
of this objection. Must I once again repeat that the tendency to take
habits, being itself a habit, has _eo ipso_ a tendency to grow; so that
only a slightest germ is needed? A realist, such as I am, can find
no difficulty in the production of that first infinitesimal germ of
habit-taking by chance, provided he thinks chance could act at all. This
seems, at first blush, to be explaining something as a chance-result. But
exact analysis will show it is not so.
In like manner, when the eminent thinker who does me the honor to notice
my speculation, objects that I do not, after all, escape making law
absolute, since the tendency to take habits which I propose to make
universal is itself a law, I confess I can find only words without ideas
in the objection. Law is a word found convenient, I grant, in describing
that tendency; but is there no difference between a law the essence
of which is to be inviolable (which is the nominalistic conception of
mechanical law, whose being, they say, lies in its action) and that
mental law the violation of which is so included in its essence that
unless it were violated it would cease to exist? In my essay, “The Law
of Mind,” I have so described that law. In so describing it, I make it a
law, but not an absolute law; and thus I clearly escape the contradiction
attributed to me.
§ 26. In my attack on “The Doctrine of Necessity,” I offered four
positive arguments for believing in real chance. They were as follows:
1. The general prevalence of growth, which seems to be opposed to the
conservation of energy.
2. The variety of the universe, which is chance, and is manifestly
inexplicable.
3. Law, which requires to be explained, and like everything which is to
be explained must be explained by something else, that is, by non-law or
real chance.
4. Feeling, for which room cannot be found if the conservation of energy
is maintained.
In a brief conversation I had with him, my friend remarked (and it was an
inconsiderate concession, I certainly do not wish to hold him to it) that
while the theory of tychism had some attractive features, its weakness
consisted in the absence of any positive reasons in its favor. I infer
from this that I did not properly state the above four arguments. I
therefore desire once more to call attention to them, especially in their
relations to one another.
Mathematicians are familiar with the theorem that if a system of
particles is subject only to positional forces, it is such that if at any
instant the velocities were all suddenly reversed, without being altered
in quantity, the whole previous history of the system would be repeated
in inverse succession. Hence, when physicists find themselves confronted
with a phenomenon which takes place only in one order of succession
and never in the reverse order,—of which no better illustration could
be found than the phenomena of growth, for nobody ever heard of an
animal growing back into an egg,—they always take refuge in the laws of
probability as preventive of the velocities ever getting so reversed.
To understand my argument number 1, it is necessary to make this method
of escape from apparent violations of the law of energy quite familiar
to oneself. For example, according to the law of energy, it seems to
follow (and by the aid of the accepted theory of light it does follow)
that if a prism, or a grating, disperses white light into a spectrum,
then the colors of the spectrum falling upon the prism or grating
at the same angles, and in the same proportions, will be recombined
into white light; and, everybody knows that this does in fact happen.
Nevertheless, the usual and prevalent effect of prisms and gratings is to
produce colored spectra. Why? Evidently, because, by the principles of
probability, it will rarely happen that colored lights converging from
different directions will fall at just the right angles and in just the
right proportions to be recombined into white light. So, when physicists
meet with the phenomena of frictional and viscous resistance to a body
in motion, although, according to their doctrine, if the molecules were
to move with the same velocities in opposite directions the moving body
would be accelerated, yet they say that the laws of probability, applied
to the trillions of molecules concerned, render this practically certain
not to occur. I do no more, then, than follow the usual method of the
physicists, in calling in chance to explain the apparent violation of
the law of energy which is presented by the phenomena of growth: only
instead of chance as they understand it, I call in absolute chance. For
many months, I endeavored to satisfy the data of the case with ordinary
_quasi_ chance; but it would not do. I believe that in a broad view of
the universe, a simulation of a given elementary mode of action can
hardly be explained except by supposing the genuine mode of action
somewhere has place. If it is improbable that colored lights should
fall together in just such a way as to give a white ray, is it not an
equally extraordinary thing that they should all be generated in such
a way as to produce a white ray? If it is incredible that trillions of
molecules in a fluid should strike a solid body moving through it so as
to accelerate it, is it not marvellous that trillions of trillions of
molecules all alike should ever have got so segregated as to create a
state of things in which they should be practically certain to retard
the body? It is far from easy to understand how mere positional forces
could ever have brought about those vast congregations of similar atoms
which we suppose to exist in every mass of gas, and by which we account
for the apparent violations of the law of energy in the phenomena of the
viscosity of the gas. There is no difficulty in seeing how sulphuric acid
acting on marble may produce an aggregation of molecules of carbonic
anhydride, because there are similar aggregations in the acid and in
the marble, but how were such aggregations brought about in the first
place? I will not go so far as to say that such a result is manifestly
impossible with positional forces alone; but I do say that we cannot
help suspecting that the simulated violation of the law of energy has a
real violation of the same law as its ultimate explanation. Now, growth
_appears_ to violate the law of energy. To explain it, we must, at least,
suppose a simulated, or _quasi_, chance, such as Darwin calls in to
produce his fortuitous variations from strict heredity. It may be there
is no real violation of the law, and no real chance; but even if there
be nothing of the sort in the immediate phenomenon, can the conditions
upon which the phenomenon depends have been brought about except by real
chance? It is conceivable, again, that the law of the conservation of
forces is not strictly accurate, and that, nevertheless, there is no
absolute chance. But I think so much has been done to put the law of the
conservation of forces upon the level of the other mechanical laws, that
when one is led to entertain a serious doubt of the exactitude of that,
one will be inclined to question the others.
Besides, few psychologists will deny the very intimate connection which
seems to subsist between the law, or _quasi_-law, of growth and the
law of habit, which is the principal, if not (as I hold it to be) the
sole, law of mental action. Now, this law of habit seems to be quite
radically different in its general form from mechanical law, inasmuch as
it would at once cease to operate if it were rigidly obeyed; since in
that case all habits would at once become so fixed as to give room for no
further formation of habits. In this point of view, then, growth seems to
indicate a positive violation of law.
Let us now consider argument number 3: and remark how it fortifies number
1. Physical laws that appear to be radically different yet present some
striking analogies. Electrical force appears to be polar. Its polarity is
explained away by Franklin’s one-fluid theory, but in that view the force
is a repulsion. Now, gravitation is an attraction, and is, therefore,
essentially different from electricity. Yet both vary inversely as the
square of this distance. Radiation, likewise follows the same formula.
In this last case, the formula, in one aspect of it, follows from the
conservation of energy. In another aspect of it, it results from the
principle of probability, and does not hold good, in a certain sense,
when the light is concentrated by a lens free from spherical aberration.
But neither the conservation of energy nor the principle of probability
seems to afford any possible explanation of the application of this
theory to gravitation nor to electricity. How, then, are such analogies
to be explained? The law of the conservation of energy and that of the
perduration of matter present so striking an analogy that it has blinded
some powerful intellects to their radically different nature. The law
of action and reaction, again, has often been stated as the law of the
conservation of momentum. Yet it is not only an independent law, but is
even of a contrary nature, inasmuch as it is only the algebraical sum of
opposite momenta that is “conserved.”[123] How is this striking analogy
between three fundamental laws to be explained? Consider the still more
obvious analogy between space and time. Newton argues that the laws of
mechanics prove space and time to be absolute entities. Leibniz, on
the other hand, takes them as laws of nature. Either view calls for an
explanation of the analogy between them, which no such reflection as
the impossibility of motion without that analogy can supply. Kant’s
theory seems to hint at the possibility of an explanation from both
being derived from the nature of the same mind. Any three orthogonal
directions[124] in space are exactly alike, yet are dynamically
independent.
These things call for explanation; yet no explanation of them can be
given, if the laws are fundamentally original and absolute.
Moreover, law itself calls for explanation. But how is it to be explained
if it is as fundamentally original and absolute as it is commonly
supposed to be? Yet if it is not so absolute, there is such a phenomenon
as absolute chance.
Thus, the chance which growth calls for is now seen to be absolute, not
_quasi_ chance.
Now consider argument number 2. The variety of the universe so far as
it consists of unlikenesses between things calls for no explanation.
But so far as it is a general character, it ought to be explained. The
manifold diversity or specificalness, in general, which we see whenever
and wherever we open our eyes, constitutes its liveliness, or vivacity.
The perception of it is a direct, though darkling, perception of God.
Further explanation in that direction is uncalled for. But the question
is, whether this manifold specificalness was put into the universe at the
outset, whether God created the universe in the infinitely distant past
and has left it to its own machinery ever since, or whether there is an
incessant influx of specificalness. Some of us are evolutionists; that
is, we are so impressed with the pervasiveness of growth, whose course
seems only here and there to be interrupted, that it seems to us that
the universe as a whole, so far as anything can possibly be conceived or
logically opined of the whole, should be conceived as growing. But others
say, though parts of the universe simulate growth at intervals, yet there
really is no growth on the whole,—no passage from a simpler to a more
complex state of things, no increasing diversity.
Now, my argument is that, according to the principles of logic, we
never have a right to conclude that anything is absolutely inexplicable
or unaccountable. For such a conclusion goes beyond what can be
directly observed, and we have no right to conclude what goes beyond
what we observe, except so far as it explains or accounts for what we
observe. But it is no explanation or account of a fact to pronounce it
inexplicable or unaccountable, or to pronounce any other fact so. Now,
to say no process of diversification takes place in nature leaves the
infinite diversity of nature unaccounted for; while to say the diversity
is the result of a general tendency to diversification is a perfectly
logical probable inference. Suppose there be a general tendency to
diversification; what would be the consequence? Evidently, a high degree
of diversity. But this is just what we find in nature. It does not answer
the purpose to say there is diversity because God made it so, for we
cannot tell what God would do, nor penetrate his counsels. We see what
He _does_ do, and nothing more. For the same reason one cannot logically
infer the existence of God; one can only know Him by direct perception.
It is to be noted that a general tendency to diversification does not
explain diversity in its specific characters; nor is this called for.
Neither can such a tendency explain any specific fact. Any attempt to
make use of the principle in that manner would be utterly illogical. But
it can be used to explain universal facts, just as quasi-chance is used
to explain statistical facts. Now, the diversity of nature is a universal
fact.
To explain diversity is to go behind the chaos, to the original
undiversified nothing. Diversificacity was the first germ.
Argument No. 4 was, upon its negative side, sufficiently well presented
in my “Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” Mechanical causation, if
absolute, leaves nothing for consciousness to do in the world of matter;
and if the world of mind is merely a transcript of that of matter, there
is nothing for consciousness to do even in the mental realm. The account
of matters would be better, if it could be left out of account. But the
positive part of the argument, showing what can be done to reinstate
consciousness as a factor of the universe when once tychism is admitted,
is reinforced in the later papers. This ought to commend itself to Dr.
Carus, who shows himself fully alive to the importance of that part of
the task of science which consists in bridging gaps. But consciousness,
for the reason just stated, is not to be so reinstated without tychism;
nor can the work be accomplished by assigning to the mind an occult
power, as in two theories to be considered in the section following
this. As might be anticipated, (and a presumption of this kind is rarely
falsified in metaphysics,) to bridge the gap synechism is required.
Supposing matter to be but mind under the slavery of inveterate habit,
the law of mind still applies to it. According to that law, consciousness
subsides as habit becomes established, and is excited again at the
breaking up of habit. But the highest quality of mind involves a great
readiness to take habits, and a great readiness to lose them; and this
implies a degree of feeling neither very intense nor very feeble.
I have noticed above (§ 7) Dr. Carus’s dubious attitude toward the first
argument. I considered in the last section his attempted reply to the
second. To the third argument, he replies (¶ 65) that law ought to be
accounted for by the principle of sufficient reason. But, of course, that
principle cannot recommend itself to me, a realist; for it is nothing
but the lame attempt of a nominalist to wriggle out of his difficulties.
Reasons explain nothing, except upon some theistic hypothesis which may
be pardoned to the yearning heart of man, but which must appear doubtful
in the eyes of philosophy, since it comes to this, that Tom, Dick, and
Harry are competent to pry into the counsels of the Most High, and can
invite in their cousins and sweethearts and sweethearts’ cousins to look
over the original designs of the Ancient of Days.
§ 27. My fourth argument it is which seems to have made most impression
upon Dr. Carus’s mind (¶ 85), and his reply is rather elaborate.
While embracing unequivocally the necessitarian dogma, equally for
mind and for matter (¶ 193), Dr. Carus wishes utterly to repudiate
materialism and the mechanical philosophy (¶ 133). To facilitate his,
thus, walking the slack-rope, he makes (¶ 168) a division of events into
“(1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4) physiological, and (5)
psychical events.” The first three (¶¶ 169-171) are merely distinguished
by the magnitude of the moving masses, so that, for philosophical
purposes, they do not differ at all. As for physiological events, though
he devotes a paragraph (¶ 172) to their definition, he utterly fails
to distinguish them from the mechanical (including the physical and
chemical) on the one hand, or from the psychical on the other. Dr. Carus
seems to think (¶ 176) that by this division he has separated himself
entirely from the materialists; but this is an illusion, for nobody
denies the existence of feelings.
The truth is, he distinctly enrolls himself in the mechanical army when
he asserts that mental laws are of the same necessitarian character
as mechanical laws (¶ 193). The only question that remains as to his
position is whether he is a materialist or not. He instances (¶ 185)
the case of a general receiving a written dispatch and being stimulated
into great activity by its perusal, and causing great motions to be
made and missiles to be sped in consequence. Now, the dilemma is this.
Will Dr. Carus, on the one hand, say that the motion of those missiles
was determined by mechanical laws alone, in which case, it would only
be necessary to state all the positions and velocities of particles
concerned, a hundred years before, to determine just how those bullets
would move and, consequently, whether the guns were to be fired or not,
and this would constitute him a materialist, or will he say that the laws
of motion do not suffice to determine motions of matter, in which case,
since they formally certainly do so suffice, they must be _violated_, and
he will be giving to mind a direct dynamical power which is open to every
objection that can be urged against tychism?
Now admire the decision with which he cuts the Gordian knot!
“THERE ARE NO PURELY MECHANICAL PHENOMENA.” (¶ 175.)
That is,
“_The laws of motion ARE applicable to and will explain all
motions_.” (¶ 177.)
But hold!
“The mechanical philosopher ... feels warranted in the hope
that ... the actions of man ... can be explained by the laws of
motion .... We may anticipate that this conclusion will prove
ERRONEOUS. _And so it is._” (¶ 176.)
At the same time,
“NO OBJECTION CAN BE MADE _to the possibility of explaining the
delicate motions in the nervous substance of the brain by the
laws of molar or molecular mechanics_.” (¶ 178.)
Yet,
“_The simplest_ psychical reflexes, including those
_physiological reflexes_ which we must suppose to have
originated by conscious adaptation ... CANNOT _be explained
from mechanical_ or physical _laws_ alone.” (¶ 186.)
However,
“_We do NOT say that there are motions_ ... in the brain ...
_which form exceptions to the laws of mechanics_.” (¶ 187.)
Nevertheless,
“The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as
the atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there is present an
additional feature; there are present states of awareness....
Neither states of awareness nor their meanings can be weighed
on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they
determinable in foot-pounds.” (¶ 192.)
Clearness is the first merit of a philosopher; and what ¶ 192 comes
to is crystal-clear. Dr. Carus wants to have the three laws of motion
always obeyed; but he wishes the forces between the molecules to be
varied according to the momentary states of awareness. All right: he
is entitled to suppose whatever he likes, so long as the supposition
is self-consistent, as this supposition is. It conflicts with the law
of energy, it is true; for that law is that the forces depend on the
situations of the particles alone, and not on the time. It is liable
to give rise to perpetual motion. It was intended, no doubt, to be an
improvement on my molecular theory of protoplasm, earlier in the same
number. It escapes materialism. It supposes a direct dynamical action
between mind and matter, such as has not been supposed by any eminent
philosopher that I know of for centuries. I am sorry to say that it shows
a dangerous leaning toward originality. The argument for thus rejecting
the law of the conservation of energy, I leave to others to be weighed.
It seems to suppose a much larger falsification of that law than my
doctrine; but it is a pretty clever attempt to escape my conclusions. It
rejects what has to be rejected, the law of the conservation of energy;
and is far more intelligent than the theory of those (like Oliver and
Lodge) who wish to give to mind a power of deflecting atoms, which would
satisfy the conservation of energy while violating the law of action
and reaction. If it can have due consideration, I doubt not it will
accelerate the acceptance of my views. Meantime, I do not see where that
“inextricable confusion” into which I was to be led is to come in. (¶ 4.)
§ 28. Little more requires to be noticed in Dr. Carus’s articles. He
admits (¶ 2) that indeterminism is the more natural belief, which is no
slight argument in its favor.
§ 29. The remarks upon the theological bearings of the theories, if they
are found somewhat wide of the mark, are explained by the haste of the
editor to show just what all the affiliations of my views were, before
I had had time to explain what those views are. The remarks to which I
refer will be found in ¶¶ 3, 36, 81, 82, 83, 128, 203, 204. They are
worth putting together.
§ 30. The doctrine of symbolism, to which Dr. Carus has recourse,
seems to be similar to that of my essay “Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities” (_Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, II.) (¶¶ 180, 183,
199.) On this head, I can only approve of his ideas.
§ 31. It is true that I wrote many definitions for one of the
“encyclopedic lexicons.” But they were necessarily rather vaguely
expressed, in order to include the popular use of terms, and in some
cases were modified by proof-readers or editors; and for reasons not
needful here to explain, they are hardly such as I should give in a
Philosophical Dictionary proper.
C. S. PEIRCE.
FOOTNOTES:
[101] J. S. Mill had in the first edition of his _Logic_ decisively taken
an objective conception of chance and probability; but in his second
edition he had become puzzled and had retracted, leaving that chapter,
and with it his whole logic, a melancholy wreck, over which the qualified
reader sighs, “And this once seemed intelligible!” Venn in the first
edition of his book set forth the same objective conception with great
clearness, and for that he was entitled to high praise, notwithstanding
his manifest inadequacy to the problems treated. But in his second
edition, he too has fallen away from his first and correct view, and has
adopted a theory which I shall some day show to be untenable. Venn’s
whole method in logic, as well as his system, is in my opinion of the
weakest.
[102] Mill often did good service in substituting precise terms for
ambiguous ones; as when in speaking of mathematical conclusions he
prefers to say they are legitimate deductions rather than that they are
necessary.
[103] In his _Ursache, Grund and Zweck_, Dr. Carus alludes to this
passage. But he prefers the treatment of the question by Reid, whom he
calls Mill’s opponent (_Gegner_).
[104] It is of comparatively little consequence what Hume really meant.
The main interest is in what Kant thought he meant.
[105] Along with the distinction, I would of course do away with this
use of the words _abstract_ and _concrete_ to which no clear idea can be
attached, as far as I can see.
[106] I cannot but disapprove of this use of the word “construction” to
mean a studied theory, because the word is imperatively required in the
theory of cognition to denote a mathematical diagram framed according to
a general precept.
[107] I apply this term because it is essentially like the passage from
the concrete “virtuous” to the abstract “virtue,” or from the concrete
“white” (adjective) to the abstract “whiteness,” or “white” (substantive).
[108] I can never use this word without thinking of the explanation of
it given by Petrus Peregrinus in his _Epistole de Magnete_. He says that
physical properties are occult in the sense that they are only brought
out by experimentation, and are not to be deduced from admixtures of
_hot_ and _cold_, _moist_ and _dry_.
[109] It follows as a corollary from this that if the positions of the
particles at any one instant, together with the velocities at that
instant, and the law of force, are given, the positions at all instants
can be calculated. Of course, to give the positions and velocities at
one instant, is a special case of the giving of the positions at two
instants. The two instants may be such that there will be more than one
solution of the problem; but this is an insignificant detail.
[110] It would seem to follow from his notion that in uniform motion each
minute’s motion is the cause of that of the next. Yet he says (¶ 19)
“there is no cause that is equal to its effect.”
[111] But, as I have elsewhere said, I should like to persuade
mathematicians to speak of “positional energy” as _Kinetic potency_, the
_vis viva_ as _Kinetic energy_, and the total “energy” as the _Kinetic
entelechy_.
[112] The differential equation being an ordinary, not a partial one,
this is an absolute constant, determined by initial (or final, or any
instantaneous) conditions.
[113] Dr. Carus calls attention to the connection between my doctrine of
the fixation of opinion and his anti-originalism.
[114] Dr. Carus passes a sweeping judgment on Post-Kantian philosophy, as
being original.
[115] This was a remark of my father’s.
[116] A person in the last _Monist_, breaks in upon my series of articles
to foretell what the “issues of synechism” will be. Were he able to do
so, it would certainly be the height of ill-manners thus to take the
words out of my mouth.
[117] As I am writing, I am shown a letter, in which the writer says:
“Peirce with all his materialistic ideas, yet,” etc I never promulgated
a materialistic idea in my life. The writer simply assumes that science
is materialistic. As I am correcting the proofs, I notice that Mr. B.
C. Burt, in his new _History of Modern Philosophy_, sets me down as
sceptical, though doubtfully. There are a good many inaccuracies in the
work. This was inevitable in a first edition. But the ingenious plan of
the book admirably adapts it to the wants of just that class of students
who cannot understand that no repertory of facts ever can be trusted
implicitly.
[118] Its being hypothetical will not prevent its being established with
a very high degree of certainty. Thus, all history is of the nature of
hypothesis; since its facts cannot be directly observed, but are only
supposed to be true to account for the characters of the monuments and
other documents.
[119] Somebody may notice that I here admit a proposition as absolutely
true. Undoubtedly; because it relates to the Absolute.
[120] Indeed, to admit that reply is all but to admit the non-absolute
grade of necessity.
[121] I rightly go somewhat further in my _Theory of Probable Inference_;
but that has no bearing on the present discussion.
[122] Dr. Carus, in his _Ursache, Grund und Zweck_, well says that
_reasons_ are discovered by induction, in the strict sense. It is often
admitted that _causes_ can only be inferred by hypothetic reasoning.
[123] The conservation of a vortex, which consists of the preservation of
a certain character of motion by the same particles, though derived from
the coöperation of other laws, is, in form, quite different.
[124] In speaking of directions, we assume the Euclidean hypothesis that
the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.
THE FOUNDER OF TYCHISM, HIS METHODS, PHILOSOPHY, AND CRITICISMS.
IN REPLY TO MR. CHARLES S. PEIRCE.
INTRODUCTORY AND PERSONAL.
Soon after I had received Mr. Peirce’s manuscript he wrote me in a
private letter as follows:
“You have not found, I trust, that in my rejoinder I have
anywhere overstepped the limit of amiable disputation. If
anything of that kind did, unconsciously to me, in the heat
of composition, slip from my pen, I am most anxious to have
it pointed out to me, so that there may be no feeling in the
matter of a disagreeable kind. For if you should not mention
it, I should at some future time discover it, and it would be a
source of real unhappiness to me.”
This is a very amiable disposition of mind. Mr. Peirce presses me very
hard in the struggle for truth: he does not hesitate to take advantage of
even the smallest weak point which he espies or rather which he believes
he espies. He does not shrink from using plain terms, such as “absurd,”
“unthinking,” “weak,” “hasty,” “irrational.” Yet he preserves in the
heat of the controversy a friendly spirit towards his antagonist, which
I cannot but appreciate and wish publicly to acknowledge. But I would
not have him change a word or soften the language of his article in the
least, _for my sake_. If Mr. Peirce is wrong, I will take care of myself;
if he is right, let the truth come out.
We are both, as it were, by profession champions of truth; so we need not
mind an occasional fling if in the end the cause of truth be promoted.
Especially, in the present case, I need not mind the hard blows which
Mr. Peirce deals with such assurance, for all the points at which he
strikes are well protected. The fiercer the onslaught, the better the
test. I feel satisfied that his severe scrutiny only serves to prove the
strength of the position which I defend.
I shall speak my mind as freely and unreservedly as does Mr. Peirce, and
hope he in his turn will resent plain words as little as I do. As offense
is not intended, so offense should not be taken.
Let me add here in these introductory remarks that I am always open
to conviction. The views which I uphold have been well considered and
thought out in their most important consequences. They are consistent
and well guarded in spite of Mr. Peirce’s thinking the contrary, so that
I feel no need of changing them. But should some unforeseen difficulty
arise which would oblige me to revise the whole system of my ideas, I
shall not hesitate publicly to confess it and allow myself to be lead by
truth whithersoever it be.
* * * * *
The issue of our controversy is the problem of chance—not of chance as it
occurs, for instance, in the throw of dice, but of “absolute chance,” or
perfect lawlessness. Mr. Peirce makes absolute chance the corner-stone of
his philosophy; he propounds a radical and sweeping indeterminism, while
I reject the idea, not of chance, but of absolute chance as incompatible
with the philosophy of science.
I. DIFFERENCES OF METHOD.
Mr. Peirce calls himself a Scotist and professes to represent mediæval
Realism, speaking at the same time of me as a Nominalist. We find,
however, that the inverse statement would be nearer the truth.
Before discussing Mr. Peirce’s philosophy itself, we must examine his
methods. Difference of method will produce important divergencies of
opinion.
1. ATTENTION TO DETAIL.
Mr. Peirce takes up in his rejoinder many incidental points, which have
little or no bearing upon the main issues between us. On the one hand,
things of no consequence, such as my granting that “absolute chance”
like the impossibilities of fairy tales, is not unimaginable, and my
saying that tychism is attractive but weak for lack of arguments, are
adduced as “momentous admissions,” and “inconsiderate concessions.”
On the other hand, Mr. Peirce catches at straws to prove a lack of
information on my part. He cannot forbear calling attention to the little
breach of etiquette committed in not giving an English baronet his proper
title.
Mr. Peirce shows on all these and other occasions a love of the
incidental, and if I were to allow myself to follow his example the
battle would soon be broken up into innumerable skirmishes.
It is noteworthy that Mr. Peirce’s procedure appears to be a nominalistic
tradition. Nominalists, regarding universals as mere names of many
particular things, have always showed a great preference for the single,
the incidental, the scattered; while realists viewing universals as
real things were in the habit of laying perhaps too much stress upon
universalities and generalities to the neglect of the particular and
individual.
Indeed, Mr. Peirce’s favorite idea, which is a belief in absolute chance,
is in my opinion the most nominalistic and anti-realistic proposition I
have ever met with. Regularity, or natural law, is to him the product
of evolution. Thus he demolishes the eternity of the universal, and
eternity is only universality in time. Now suppose that eternity (i. e.
universality in time) could be proved an error; then, the universality
of the universal in space also will become illusory. If those abiding
features of nature which we call natural laws have indeed originated from
a general sporting, from chance, from a chaotic lawlessness, by a gradual
habit taking, who can assure us that nature has not taken different
habits in other parts of the universe?
I look upon Mr. Peirce as an extreme nominalist, or, if he prefers it, as
a nominal realist soaked with nominalistic opinions. He professes to be a
realist, but he rescinds the foundation of realism.
Like the bear of the hermit Mr. Peirce throws the stone at the fly of
necessary connection, and in doing so kills the philosophy of realism
itself.
2. ORIGINALITY.
Originality, wherever we find it, is pleasing; but a hankering after
originality is dangerous. Experience teaches us to regard a thinker’s
love of originality as one of the main causes of his going astray. Let
the poet be original, but not the scientist, not the philosopher, not the
searcher for truth. The conceit of being original flatters our vanity,
and original ideas in philosophy are tantamount to original errors.
I do not deny the value of originality, but I do deny that it is a
criterion of truth.
Originality consists in the free exercise of our imagination, and a vivid
imagination is very valuable to the thinker. But it so happens that every
dreamer cherishes with a mother’s love the children of his fancy. And it
is, therefore, necessary to be especially critical with the offspring of
one’s own brain.
Kepler (“who,” Mr. Peirce says, “comes very close to realising my ideal
of the scientific method”) was endowed with an extraordinarily vivid
imagination. He invented an extremely original scheme of explanation for
the solar system, and expounded it with great poetical fervor in his
“Mysterium Cosmographicum.”[125]
Kepler at once became famous by his “Mysterium Cosmographicum” and was
generally admired for his originality. But his bent for hatching original
ideas did not alone make Kepler what he is to us now in the history
of science. A greater quality than his poetical fervor and original
imagination was his rigorous self-criticism. He took notice of every
little fact that did not agree with his theories, and for the sake of
truth, of objectively provable truth, that is, the agreement of his views
with positive facts, he sternly slew all those creatures of his fancy
which he foresaw could not survive.
Having myself a good deal of imagination, and having tried myself
many original ideas, I can appreciate the self-denial and discipline
of Kepler. I have come to the conclusion that originality is only an
important means of attaining truth. Our ways of reaching the truth,
our methods of finding it, may deserve the praise of originality, but
truth itself is never original; for truth is the faithfulness of a copy
which in our representations we make of reality, and to praise ideas as
original is certainly no argument that they are true.
There is no need of showing that Mr. Peirce is not just in his statement
of my view of originality, by maintaining that I have advised people
“think not for yourself.” Confessedly he exaggerates, but in truth he
misrepresents.
Mr. Peirce does not relish what I have to say on the subject, and,
to pacify his mind, he does not tire of praising originality as the
high-water mark of genius.
Mr. Peirce’s love of originality is a nominalistic feature of his mind. A
nominalist who denies the existence of universals cannot understand that
everything in science must be sacrificed to truthfulness. The question,
Does this idea correctly represent its respective reality? has no sense
to a nominalist. The nominalist is only interested in what a thinker
makes of things. The subjective conception, in his opinion, exhausts the
subject. I can understand that a nominalist should be greatly pleased
with originality, but a realist should not allow himself to be seduced by
its charms.
Mr. Peirce’s penchant for, and my distrust of, originality, have a direct
influence upon our respective methods of thought. It naturally makes him
bolder and me more cautious.[126]
3. A MODERN PROCRUSTES.
There was a man in ancient Greece named Procrustes, who had two beds;
one long, the other short. He used to lay his tall guests upon the short
bed, and his short guests upon the long bed, cutting off the limbs of the
former and stretching out the bodies of the latter, until they fitted
the size of their unpleasant resting places. In the same way Mr. Peirce
treats philosophical views.
There is the bed of the materialist and, as all processes to the
materialist are purely mechanical, necessitarianism is stretched in the
materialist’s bed to mechanicalism. I plead, since ideas and feelings
are not motions, that mental processes cannot be explained by the laws
of motion, but can, for that reason, be none the less determined; but I
plead in vain. That view of necessitarianism does not suit the bed upon
which my Procrustes places me. Other views, however, are cut down without
further ado because they are said to be nominalistic. Anything that does
not appeal to Mr. Peirce’s realistic mind is dismissed with a shrug.
I am neither a realist nor a nominalist, or rather, I am both realist
and nominalist. I am convinced that to some extent both sides were right
and both sides were wrong, and regard it as our duty to sift their
propositions and accept the truth whether it be nominalistic or realistic.
We must follow the principle of hearing both sides, and not consider
at all whether a statement agrees or disagrees with certain party
principles.[127]
4. OCCAM’S RAZOR.
The most brilliant disciple of Duns Scotus was William of Occam, whose
fame almost rivalled that of his master. Occam became an adversary of
realism; he became a nominalist, and after him was named a method known
as Occam’s razor, especially useful to nominalists in their warfare
against realists.
Occam’s razor is expressed in the sentence: “_Entia non sunt
multiplicanda præter necessitatem_,” which means: Only in cases
of extremest necessity are we allowed to assume the existence of
hypothetical facts. If assumed facts are not absolutely indispensable,
cut them off!
Occam’s razor was invented for a special purpose, that of cutting off the
realistic hypostatisation of abstract ideas.
I do not know which is more startling, that a realist in name, such as
Mr. Peirce, should use a weapon forged by nominalists against realism,
or that he whom in other respects we found in such a close contact with
nominalistic methods, should not understand how to handle a nominalistic
weapon.
Mr. Peirce censures me for making the statement that the formal is
subjective as well as objective. This, he says, is cut off by Occam’s
razor.
The formal is subjective, for our sensation is possessed of form and our
mind is in possession of formal thought. It is objective, for reality is
not void of form and the things are such as they are by virtue of their
peculiar shape.
The proposition that the formal is objective and subjective at the
same time is as little cut off by Occam’s razor as, for instance, the
proposition that there is air inside and outside of us, viz. in our lungs
and in the surrounding atmosphere.
Mr. Peirce’s usage of the beds of Procrustes is cruel, but his usage of
Occam’s razor is inconsiderate. He should be careful in handling such a
sharp knife, lest he do himself harm.
Mr. Peirce uses Occam’s razor to cut off statements and facts which make
his pet theories dispensable; but he forgets that Occam’s razor cuts off
ideas only, and when it comes in contact with facts its edge is turned.
Occam’s razor is an excellent instrument to dispose of such hypotheses as
absolute chance, for it declares that if their assumption is not quite
indispensable, we must cut them off.
Now it either is or is not a fact that the formal is objective and
subjective at once. It cannot be untrue in my philosophy while it is
true in Mr. Peirce’s system. My proposition of the formal being at once
objective and subjective is, according to Mr. Peirce, “cut off by Occam’s
razor.” “But,” adds he, “when synechism has united the two worlds this
view gains new life.” So long as I say so, it is wrong; but should I
adopt Mr. Peirce’s system, it will pass as right.
5. THE APPLICATION OF LEARNING.
Philosophers should make it a rule not to encumber their thoughts
unnecessarily with learning. The great problems of philosophy are, in my
opinion, much simpler than they are generally supposed to be. The art
mainly consists in stating them in the simplest possible manner.
It is indispensable for a philosopher to be familiar, at least in a
general way, with all the most important sciences, especially with
psychology, physiology, logic, physics, mathematics, and mechanics. But
he should not for that reason introduce any more than he can help their
complicated details into his expositions.
Every specialist is inclined to look at things through the spectacles of
his own speciality. But the philosopher who takes a higher standpoint
should be on his guard. He should always endeavor to simplify matters and
avoid introducing into philosophy issues which belong to a special field,
and derive their peculiarities from special conditions. To confound the
methods of the various sciences, or to generalise without sufficient
discrimination, will throw everything into confusion.
Mr. Peirce, as we well know, has greatly distinguished himself in
logic by valuable discoveries and independent investigations. We have
repeatedly taken occasion to pronounce unreservedly our admiration of his
achievements in this field. But we cannot approve of his application of
certain methods of his speciality to philosophy in general. Mr. Peirce
is inclined to look at the world through the spectacles of that new and
extremely specialised branch of logic which he is at present about to
invent.
One hindrance to properly appreciating his doctrines, says Mr. Peirce,
lies in my “laboring under the great disadvantage of not understanding
the logic of relatives,” which, he adds (p. 533):
“Is a subject I have been studying for a great many years, and
I feel and know that I have an important report that I ought
to make upon it. This branch of logic is, however, so abstruse
that I have never been able to find the leisure to translate my
conclusions into a form in which their significance would be
manifest even to powerful thinkers, whose thoughts had not long
been turned in that direction.”
I shall be glad to sit at Mr. Peirce’s feet as an attentive student, as
soon as he has worked out his logic of relatives, or any other subject.
But I cannot now accept any of his theories on the credit of some
half-developed science, be it ever so profound or intricate, until I see
plainly its connection with the present issues.
Mr. Peirce trusts that his favorite ideas will find support in his
peculiar conception of the logic of relatives. Judging from the
quiddities which he now so confidently propounds as weighty arguments,
we cannot share his sanguine hopes. His arguments, to be derived from
the logic of relatives, are like promises to pay out of the returns of a
gold-mine, just discovered and boomed by the owners. There may be gold in
the mine, but I do not as yet take any stock in it.
Mr. Peirce promises to prove by the logic of relatives what, if it were
true, he should be able to demonstrate in plain language.
I have an idea that the logic of relatives can be worked out into as
clear a science as is mathematics or algebra. But what shall we say when
told that the logic of relatives is really abstruse, and that he who
labors under the disadvantage of not understanding this abstruse science
is not prepared to grasp Mr. Peirce’s philosophy? The abstrusity, in my
mind, counts against Mr. Peirce’s philosophy, as much as against his
logic of relatives.
In my childhood I was much plagued with Latin, but as soon as I had
acquired a smattering of it, I began to talk Latin to the servants, and
when they did not understand me I thought that they were “laboring under
the great disadvantage” of not speaking Latin. Since then I have learned
to translate my Latin into the language of the people with whom I have to
deal.
Mr. Peirce seems to rely on his learning in proportion to its abstrusity;
he likes to walk on stilts.
Mr. Peirce is scholarly to excess. He has a special talent of rendering
issues involved. Not even his references to my articles in _The Monist_
are made directly by quoting the pages on which they appear. That method
would be too common. He invents a ponderous system, necessitating the
reader to look twice when he wishes to find a passage,—a scheme which
is original and very dignified in appearance, but makes quotation
unnecessarily complicated.
Learning is a virtue, but even virtues should be used with discretion.
6. THE PRINCIPLE OF POSITIVISM.
Says Mr. Peirce in confirmation of Whewell (p. 546):
“Progress in science depends upon the observation of the right
facts by minds _furnished with appropriate ideas_.”
To rely on the observation of facts is, in my opinion, a principle
of positivism. That facts must be observed “by minds furnished with
appropriate ideas” is undeniable, but ideas, in order to be appropriate,
must be true; they must be representations of facts.
Because he relies on facts I have characterised Mr. Peirce’s method as
positivistic. But he indignantly repudiates “the charge” as “totally
unfounded.”
Positivism (which I have always carefully distinguished from Comtism,
the latter being a special kind of positivism[128]) is not a peculiar
philosophy, but a most important principle of science.
Mr. Peirce seems to use the term positivism in a different sense from
that in which I use it. Be it so. I shall not nominalistically quarrel
about words so long as there are more urgent subjects under discussion.
Noticing that Mr. Peirce does not state that all ideas should be
ultimately reducible to facts, he is to be acquitted.
7. LOPPING OFF THE ABSOLUTE.
Mr. Peirce thinks that an agreement between us could be arrived at. He
says (p. 545):
“Dr. Carus’s philosophy would, in its general features, offer
no violent opposition to my opinions” (§ 16).
But the condition is (p. 545):
“To lop off the heads of all absolute propositions whose
subject is not the Absolute.”
As a matter of fact I have lopped off all absolutes. If Mr. Peirce
were more familiar with my views he would have known that. Thus, on
my part, I had done all I could to come to an agreement with him long
before he asked me to do it. But I fear that having also lopped off the
Absolute itself, I did too much of a good thing, for Mr. Peirce carefully
records his opposition to all philosophies which deny the reality of the
Absolute. (See § 18.)
I wish to improve this occasion for conciliation, by turning the tables.
Mr. Peirce’s views would, upon the whole, offer no violent opposition to
my opinions if he would only consent to lop off the absolute-property
of his absolute chance. I would even swallow his Absolute if he would
promise to designate by that name some real quality of the world, or the
world itself as a whole, or something that is thinkable without making
one’s head swim.[129]
Every predication of absolute, changes a real and useful idea into its
caricature. To, say that a complicated calculation is “absolutely true,”
that is, true without stipulating the condition that the methods are
right, and that the execution is made without any mistake, is ridiculous;
and thus the phrase “in a Pickwickian sense” (which we gratefully borrow
from Mr. Peirce) would always form a drastic but adequate substitute
for the term absolute. “Absolutely true” is “true in a Pickwickian
sense” only. There are no absolute truths which are in this sense
unconditionally true. In the same way, “absolute chance” is different
from that real chance known to us in experience and instanced by the
throw of the dice. Absolute chance is “chance in a Pickwickian sense.”
Strange Mr. Peirce speaks of real chance when he means an imaginary
absolute chance. He apparently uses the word “real” in this connection
not to denote something that is a fact of experience but to express the
idea of its being perfect or complete. Thus we may speak of a “real”
perpetual motion, stating at the same time that it is neither real nor
realisable.
8. THE THEORY OF PROBABLE INFERENCE.
Mr. Peirce applies his theory of probable inference to everything; also
to those cases which are unequivocally determined. He granted in a
private conversation that 2 × 2 = 4 admits of no exception. But of other
purely formal statements which are in the same predicament, for instance,
that the sum of the angles of a triangle in a plane measures 180°, he
states as probable that they are either somewhat less or somewhat more
than 180°, adding, “that they are exactly that amount is what nobody
can ever be justified in concluding.” To determine the sum of the
angles of a plane triangle by measuring the parallaxes of stars rests
upon a fundamental misconception of the principles of formal sciences.
It would be consistent for Mr. Peirce to say, that 2 × 2 = 4 is true
only according to the definitions or axioms of arithmetic. But in order
to know whether 2 × 2 = 4 in reality, we ought to apply the theory of
probable inference. Until we had verified the statement 2 × 2 = 4 by
applying this formula to the farthest solar systems, we should not be
justified in concluding that it is exactly true. The theory of probable
inferences is supposed to help us out of this perplexity, “and within
another century our grandchildren will surely know whether the three
angles of a triangle are greater or less than 180°.”[130]
There is always danger in the application of abstract ratiocination; and
the theory of probable inference forms no exception to the rule. On the
contrary, it is especially liable to lead one astray. There is the case
of the doctor who said to his patient: “I am sure you will be cured, for
I had ninety-nine patients who died during the operation, and statistics
prove beyond doubt that one among a hundred will survive it. You are the
hundredth.”
The theory of probable inferences is often misapplied, but can it be
worse misapplied than by introducing it into the province of that which
is certain? There is no sense in applying the theory of probabilities to
what is certain. We may doubt whether the rays of light travel in exactly
straight lines, but we cannot doubt the straightness of lines in plane
geometry. We cannot doubt that all the radii in a circle are equal, or
that the sum of the angles of a Euclidean triangle are 180°.
9. ZWEIDEUTIG BESTIMMT.
Mr. Peirce very kindly informs me that the term _eindeutig bestimmt_ is a
translation of a French phrase. Very well, I do not deny it. I know very
well that the phrase has a long history, but I do not consider myself
bound to present the whole pedigree of every term I use.
Does Mr. Peirce perhaps suppose that the French phrase is the original?
If we have to go back to the original beginning at all, why does he not
tell us that the French _univoque_ is a translation from the mediæval
Latin _univoce_, which was coined and used by the schoolmen in opposition
to _æquivoce_. Neither the term _eindeutig_, as Mr. Peirce asserts,
nor its scholastic original _univoce_, is an exclusively mathematical
expression.
Although the term _eindeutig_ is a translation of the French _univoque_,
there is after all a great difference between the French term and the
German term, and I have a good reason to prefer the German expression.
The French term is nominalistic or even vocalistic, the German one
is realistic. _Univoque_ and _univocal_ mean that there is only one
name or one _vox_, while _eindeutig_ lays no stress on the name but
on the meaning of the name, denoting that which admits of but one
interpretation. This is a sufficient reason for me to prefer it, and it
ought to appeal to Mr. Peirce’s realistic mind.[131]
Mr. Peirce, maintaining that _eindeutig bestimmt_ is only a mathematical
term, adduces two equations, each one of which, taken singly, admits,
he says, of two possible determinations.[132] Mr. Peirce uses these
equations as an argument against my application of the term, adding,
sarcastically: “This shows how much that argument amounts to.” But his
example proves at best only that there are incomplete determinations;
some problems allow of several solutions. In a German township in which
blue hussars are garrisoned, children used to propose to another this
profound problem: “It lies under a plum-tree and is blue; what is it?”
If the child questioned argues, “It is a plum,” he is corrected “No, it
is a hussar.” But if he argues, “It is a hussar,” he is corrected, “No,
it is a plum.” So he has no chance of guessing right. The result of Mr.
Peirce’s first equation, which may be either 11·477 or 11·523, is like
the conundrum of the plum-tree: it amounts to the same, viz. to nothing,
and proves only that there are determinations which are _zweideutig
bestimmt_.
10. EXPLANATION.
The differences of method become very serious when we disagree on the
very meaning of “explanation” itself. How can two debaters accept or
reject one another’s arguments, if their ideas of explanation are
radically different?
Mr. Peirce’s definition of the term “explanation” appears to me very
unsatisfactory. He says (p. 57):
“I cannot admit that explanation is description of the fact
explained. It is true that in the setting forth of some
explanations it is convenient to restate the fact explained so
as to set it under another aspect, but even in these cases the
statement of other facts is essential. (!) In all cases it is
_other facts_, (!) usually hypothetical, which constitute the
explanation; (!) and the process of explaining is a process by
which from those other facts the fact to be explained is shown
to follow as a consequence by virtue of a general principle or
otherwise.”
“To explain a fact is to show that it is a necessary or
at least a probable result from another fact (!) known or
supposed.”
My definition of “explanation,” as a description in which the process
described is recognised as a transformation is sneered at. Says Mr.
Peirce (p. 558):
“A magician transforms a watch into a dove. Recognise it as
a transformation and the trick is explained, is it? This is
delightfully facile.”
Indeed, the magician’s trick is explained as soon as we know all the
changes that have taken place. Take the whole number of objects handled
by the magician, those which he shows and those which he conceals. Let
us observe how he hides the watch and how he produces the dove, and the
trick is explained. Is it not?
Explanation is, as the word suggests, a making plain, so that we can look
over the whole field before us, and leave nothing hidden from sight. This
whole field, the survey of which is needed for the recognition of the
transformation, is called the system of the explanation. After we have
seen how the changes take place, and after we have described in exact
formulas their modes of action, our desire for explanation is completely
satisfied.
The instances adduced by Mr. Peirce prove plainly that his objections
cannot be maintained. Every one of them is an instance of transformation
(with the exception of the emerald vest, which, however, is not stated
with sufficient completeness). Take, for instance, the following example
adduced by Mr. Peirce (p. 557):
“A ‘special process of nature,’ calling for explanation, is the
circumstance that the planet Mars, while moving in a general
way from west to east among the fixed stars, yet retrogrades a
part of the time, so as to describe loops in the heavens. The
explanation is, that Mars revolves in one approximate circle
and we in another.”
Can any one deny that this explanation is a description? We draw the
two orbits as correctly as possible for the required demonstration
and combine the points representing the earth with those representing
Mars at their successive positions. Considering the fact that we do
not perceive the motion of the earth, we have to construct a diagram
in which the directions of these lines are described as viewed from a
stationary point. This is a description of changes that take place. It is
a portrayal of the transpositions of two bodies, and the appearance which
the change of this relation presents to one of them.
Mr. Peirce has neither the grace nor good-will to, understand my
proposition, that _explanation is always a tracing of form_. He says (p.
558):
“Forms may indulge in whatever eccentricities they please, in
the world of dreams, without responsibility.”
In the world of dreams, yes! But not in the world of reality. And even
the irresponsible eccentricities of dreams take place according to law.
Feeling that he mistakes my position, Mr. Peirce adds:
“Should Dr. Carus reply that I mistake his meaning, that it is
only ‘being in general’ (§ 66), that he holds unaccountable,
I reply that this is simply expressing scepticism as to the
possibility and need of philosophy.” (P. 558.)
Of course, I mean “being in general.” As to the scepticism imputed to me,
I answer, that any attempt at explaining how matter and energy, which I
take to be eternal, came into being, is a wrongly formulated problem.
Mr. Peirce might as well call me a sceptic, because I recognise that we
cannot square the circle. (Compare “Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed., pp.
283-285 and 291.)
Mr. Peirce’s gravest mistake is his belief that
“In all cases it is _other facts_ which constitute the
explanation.” (P. 557.)
The practical application of this mistake becomes fatal to his philosophy.
It is by no means necessary to pass beyond that system of facts which
contains the phenomenon to be explained. We must, as a matter of course,
keep completing the facts of a phenomenon until we have acquired a survey
of what we call the whole system of the facts, but we have never to
resort to other facts.
We are confronted every day with hundreds of facts of which we never
see the whole system to which they belong, but we readily supply these
deficiencies from the stock of our experience. We refer the unknown to
the known. The single case under observation is referred to something
with which we are familiar. Those systems of explanation which are known
to us serve as patterns for others that are only partially known, and we
fill out, with their assistance, the gaps of our observation.
The readiness and reliability of our explanation thus depends upon the
stock of knowledge we have. The more we know, the easier shall we conquer
the unknown; the more incomplete our knowledge is, the greater the number
of hypothetical facts that will have to be introduced; and this always
weakens the reliability of our explanations. Hypothetical facts should
be introduced only in cases of urgent necessity. However, if they are
admitted at all, they have to be thought of as parts of the system under
investigation, for they have been invented only because we are compelled
to assume that without them it would be incomplete.
Mr. Peirce adduces the following example to prove that “other facts” are
required in an explanation:
“It has been stated that a warm spring in Europe is usually
followed by a cool autumn, and the explanation has been offered
that so many more icebergs than usual are liberated during
a warm spring, that they subsequently lower sensibly the
temperature of Europe. I care little whether the fact and the
explanation are correct or no. The case illustrates, at any
rate, my point that an explanation is a special fact, supposed
or known, from which the fact to be explained follows as a
consequence.” (P. 557.)
When, as in this instance, we recognise that one fact is the necessary
result of another fact, we view them both as parts of one set or system
of facts in which a transformation is taking place, and, unless we
see the connection of the two facts as constituting one process of
transformation, we cannot say that the problem is explained. When we
observe changes which are the results of transformations taking place
beyond the horizon of our knowledge, we are, as a matter of course,
unable to give an explanation.
Mr. Peirce had perhaps in mind a special and more complex kind of
explanation, which we define as “comprehension.” He says (p. 557):
“The fact to be explained is shown to follow as a consequence,
by virtue of a general principle or otherwise.”
Take as an instance the law of gravitation. There are the facts of
falling stones and the motions of celestial bodies. Both sets of
facts are explained, according to Mr. Peirce, “by virtue of a general
principle,” i. e. gravitation, while we say, both sets of facts are
comprehended under a common formula. Mr. Peirce’s conception of
“explanation” rests on the antiquated view that gravitation is a
principle behind the gravitating masses which compels the stone to fall.
Gravitation, however, is not “another fact” foreign to the facts under
consideration. It is not a principle called in from the outside. On the
contrary, it is the essence and extract of the very facts that are to be
explained.
Principles which have not been derived either from the facts to be
explained, or from the additional facts which belong to their system, do
not and cannot explain the phenomena.
* * * * *
Comprehension is, as it were, an explanation of a higher degree. The
term means a grasping together, and it actually consists in viewing two
or several facts in such a way as to recognise their common features.
Comprehension is a reduction of our patterns of explanation; it unites
two or several of them in one formula.
For instance, it has been observed that certain objects float in water
while others sink to the bottom. The observations do not seem to agree,
they present two incoherent facts. When we find out that the weight of
a floating body is equal to the weight of water which it displaces,
we understand at once why bodies whose specific gravity is greater
than water sink while those of a lighter specific gravity float.
Comprehension, in this as in every other case, is the description of a
process which comprises all the facts that belong to a special class in
a common formula. The description must be applicable to all single cases
however different they may be.
This conception of comprehension has a great advantage over Mr. Peirce’s
view. While he has to bring in some “other fact” from the outside, we
need not introduce any foreign element. Comprehension, as we understand
it, can rise from the statement of particular facts to more and more
general formulations, until finally we arrive at universal laws. All
the laws thus formulated to satisfy our cravings for comprehension, are
found to belong to one great system of laws, and our scientists are
constantly engaged not only in widening the range of our experience by
new discoveries, but also in revising our statements of the uniformities
of nature and, where they appear to be in collision, in bringing them
into harmony.
This conception of comprehension is monistic, Mr. Peirce’s is dualistic.
We need not, in order to explain the facts of existence, go beyond them
into a supernatural realm. Mr. Peirce must go outside of the world
into non-existence when he attempts to understand the world by the
principles of his philosophy. It is very doubtful whether explanations,
the “essential” nature of which is to consist of “other facts usually
hypothetical,” will be satisfactory to anybody except himself.
Otherness makes any fact unfit to serve as a factor of an explanation and
indeed I cannot think of any instance, real or imaginary, in which the
explanatory facts, be they real or hypothetical, do not form parts of the
system under consideration.
There is only one instance to which Mr. Peirce’s method of explanation
has been applied, and I am under the impression that it has been invented
solely for this purpose. Mr. Peirce’s philosophy is too original to
be explained by the usual methods; it must have an original method of
its own. In order to explain “law” Mr. Peirce calls in “chance.” His
explanation must be an “other fact” and the only fact different from
law is not-law, lawlessness, or absolute chance. According to my idea
of explanation, law can never be explained by chance. According to Mr.
Peirce, it is the only possible thing that can be called in as that
“_other_ fact” which is supposed to be the essential constituent of an
explanation.
If Mr. Peirce’s method of explanation were sound, we should have to
explain order from chaos, possibility from impossibility, and sense from
nonsense.
II. MR. PEIRCE’S PHILOSOPHY.
Mr. Peirce’s constant references to scholastic philosophy remind me of
happy years long past when I was extremely interested in the theories
of such men as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Occam, Abelard, Tauler,
and others. Together with my chum, now a sober Professor of physics at
a German University, I freely indulged in the construction of various
world-theories, which, alas! were quickly overthrown one after another by
the slightest puff of wind. I have not lost my interest in the schoolmen,
but it is considerably weakened.
Mr. Peirce’s repeated praise of scholastic realism and his condemnation
of any theory that he brands as nominalistic, seems to me like the method
of some of our politicians who, eager to revive toryism, should censure
all evils of the politics of to-day as whiggish. This comparison is not
exaggerated, for there are a few Hamiltonians who miss the refining
influence of an aristocratic class and regret that the historical
tradition of toryism has been so completely broken. I would not deny that
there is some truth in it, and there is some truth, too, in mediæval
realism, which has been neglected by the, first violently suppressed and
then triumphant, nominalism. But in reviving realism the Scotists should
be very careful to avoid a resurrection of its errors.
1. DUNS SCOTUS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PATRON SAINT.
Johannes Duns Scotus, a Franciscan, honored since his successful defense
of the Blessed Virgin’s Immaculate Conception by the title Doctor
Subtilis, and the very same man after whom, on account of the narrowness
of his later disciples during the time of the Reformation, a blockhead
is to-day called a dunce, was one of the most characteristic figures of
scholastic philosophy. He lived at the end of the thirteenth Century when
the authority of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas who had died March 7th,
1274, was all but universally recognised. Scotus appeared as the most
powerful opponent of Thomas. Ingenious, original, bold, and buoyant in
his attacks he had a short but brilliant career and died comparatively
young at Cologne, in November, 1308.
While Thomas, surnamed Dr. Universalis, or Dr. Angelicus, is regarded by
his order, the Dominicans, as the greatest authority in philosophical
matters, Scotus succeeded in impressing his mode of thought upon the
Franciscans; yet Thomas is universally regarded in the Roman church and
also among Protestant theologians as the more orthodox Christian.
Almost all the ideas of Scotus were set forth in opposition to the views
of others and mainly of Thomas. Thomas was a determinist, Scotus an
outspoken indeterminist. Thomas says that man’s action is necessarily
determined by what he thinks is best. Scotus avers that man thinks in a
certain way because he wills in a certain way. Man’s ideas are fashioned
to suit his character. His motto is, “_voluntas superior est intellectu_”
and his idea of will is identified with the indetermined arbitrariness of
a perfect _liberum arbitrium_. According to Thomas, God commands us to do
the good because it is good. Scotus calls good that which God commands
simply because God commands it. The will of God, like the will of man is,
in Scotus’s opinion, undetermined, it is arbitrary. Thus God created the
world not because his will was determined by some motive, but because
it so pleased him; and Christ’s passion and death were not really an
atonement; they simply were accepted as such by God.
Without entering into this controversy of _anno olim_ we might say
that we side neither with Thomas nor with Scotus, but would modify the
statement of the former by the criticism of the latter. Thomas goes
too far when he says that whatever is recognised as the best will of
necessity be done. He overlooks the power of passions. Thomas’s statement
would be right, if every passion were regarded as a will which has its
own and independent but mistaken ideas about good. A soul whose passions
are more powerful than rational considerations will necessarily be
inclined to obey its irrational impulses. There is something in Scotus’s
criticism, but his view is no improvement. In speaking of will as
superior to the intellect, did he ever ask himself the question, What his
own will would be independent of his intellect? Further, when God is said
to command the good because it is good, Thomas separates in a logical
consideration two ideas which are identical. Scotus is right in defining
good as the will of God. From our standpoint we should say, the will of
God, viz., the moral order of the universe, is of a definite kind which
can be ascertained by experience. To speak of the will of God as good is
an anthropomorphic expression. Good is that which agrees with the will of
God; bad, that which opposes it. Suppose the moral order of the universe
were different, goodness and badness would change with it.
We have sketched the views of Scotus only to show the points of
contact between him and Mr. Peirce. Mr. Peirce is also an outspoken
indeterminist. He identifies feeling with chance, and his free will is a
_liberum arbitrium_. Mr. Peirce, like Scotus, also separates theology,
and, with it, religion, from philosophy.[133] Scotus ridicules those
who confound both, clearly indicating that he is aiming at Thomas, to
whose fervent faith their conciliation was a matter of momentous and all
important consequence. Scotus goes so far as to aver that something might
be true in philosophy which is wrong in theology (see Ed. “Wadding” Fol.
4, p. 848)—a statement that to an honest searcher for truth must almost
appear as frivolous.[134]
How much more imbued with true religiosity was his great namesake John
Scotus Erigena the venerable founder of scholasticism when saying: “_Non
est alia philosophia, i. e. sapientiae stadium, et alia religio_.”
2. MR. PEIRCE’S ORIGINAL THEORIES.
Mr. Peirce as a controversalist and critic is like Scotus, brilliant,
versatile, and powerful. But he is more; he is also constructive.
Mr. Peirce’s style of architecture reminds us of neo-Platonism, and this
is quite in harmony with Scotism, for Scotus, through Avicebron, derived
many of his ideas from the Neo-Platonists. Mr. Peirce proposes a modern
view of emanation, which starts the world from that βῦθος of nothingness
which at the same time is the womb of all existence. The primeval state
of being, says Mr. Peirce, “Was mere nothing from a physical aspect,”
but, if it was not really nothing, what, then, was it?
It was chance.
Here lies the essential difference between Mr. Peirce and the
neo-Platonists. The neo-Platonists (whose speculations, if they are
treated not as philosophy, but as poetical effusions, are very profound
and thoughtful) look to the Logos, or world-reason, as the beginning
of the world emanation, while Mr. Peirce shows a certain contempt for
reason. To the neo-Platonist, reasons _are_ explanations, while to our
modern Scotist, reasons explain nothing. He says:
“Reasons explain nothing, except upon some theistic hypothesis
which may be pardoned to the yearning heart of man, but must be
doubtful in the eyes of philosophy....” (P. 567.)
Mr. Peirce goes so far as to speak of “the dullness of ratiocination’s
self.”
Mr. Peirce’s gospel would deviate in the very first verse from that of
St. John, for it would read
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ἡ τυχή.—In the Beginning was Chance!
And this chance which was in the beginning actually is, to Mr. Peirce,
God, a personal God, an anthropomorphic deity endowed with consciousness.
He says:
“That primeval chaos in which there was no regularity was
mere nothing from a physical aspect. Yet it was not a blank
zero; for there was an intensity of consciousness there, in
comparison with which all that we ever feel is but as the
struggling of a molecule or two to throw off a little of the
force of law to an endless and innumerable diversity of chance
utterly unlimited.” (_The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 19.)
And in another passage he says of chance:
“That it is a being living and conscious is what all the
dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can scarce muster
hardihood to deny.” (P. 560.)
Mr. Peirce’s argument that all the dullness that belongs to
ratiocination’s self can scarcely muster hardihood to deny his
proposition, sounds strange in the mouth of a scientist. But it is not
strange; for I have found that enthusiastic defenders of improbable
theories always fill the holes of their argumentation with abuse of those
who dare to discover these holes. Call a person who doubts the truth
of your statements dull, and you will frighten many a weak mind into a
patient acceptance of your view.
We may rest assured that whenever a philosopher scolds he is at his wit’s
end. For why should he lose patience if he can prove his proposition?
Thus diatribes are always symptoms that there is some flaw in one’s logic
and the louder one chides the sorer is the spot.
Mr. Peirce is serious in the statement that chance is a conscious being.
He actually identifies chance and feeling. He says:
“Chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself
is feeling.”
The primordial chance, the existence of which, according to Mr. Peirce,
“calls for no explanation,” has “a primordial habit-taking tendency.”
Whence this tendency gets into the universe of absolute chance, Mr.
Peirce is unable to disclose. The deviations from the mechanical order
in the present course of things, which, by the by, are by no means
proved, suggest to him and justify, in his opinion, this assumption.
Thus, assumes he, primordial chance ceased to be chance; it changed by
a gradual habit-taking into regularities. Consciousness ceased to be
consciousness and became crystallised into natural laws. Mind ceased to
be an arbitrary sporting, and by becoming effete it begot, through a
summation of minute effects, this material universe of ours. Accordingly,
real existence or thing-ness consists merely in the regularities thus
produced, and “physical events are but the degraded ... forms of
psychical events.”
This is in brief Mr. Peirce’s cosmogony, which, as the prophet of
Tychism, he reveals to us in axiomatic aphorisms.
By gradual habit-taking, Mr. Peirce declares (_The Monist_, Vol. I,
No. 2, p. 176), mind will at last be “crystallised in the infinitely
distant future.” This rather sad outlook is, in another passage, modified
by a counter-oracle, which announces that “an element of pure chance
survives.” Why, he does not say. Irregularities, not being entirely
suppressed, can increase again, and as such they are “undeveloped forms
of psychical events.” Says Mr. Peirce (_The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p.
18):
“There are almost insensible fortuitous departures from
regularity; these will produce, in general, equally minute
effects.... Protoplasm is in an excessively unstable
condition.... In the protoplasm these habits are to some slight
extent broken up, so that, according to the law of mind, ...
feeling becomes intensified.
“This breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity
will, according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an
intensification of feeling.”
This is the gist of Mr. Peirce’s mental philosophy, which proclaims that
“consciousness is not to be reinstated without tychism.” The reappearance
of chance is said to explain the origin of mind!
Our conception of mind is different. We see mind develop out of sentiency
by the recognition of the regularities of the surrounding world. Reason
is almost a synonym of man’s ability to form generalisations, of his
having and operating with concepts, of his thinking ideas. Not the
arbitrariness of a wilful mind is the properly mental of man’s soul,
but his reason; and man’s reason originates under the influence of the
uniformities of the surrounding world, which impress themselves, in what
we call experience, upon his existence. The more a creature recognises
the regularities of existence, and the more its soul becomes an image of
this world-order, which is the prototype of his reason, of the divine
Logos, the higher it rises in the scale of evolution.
If chance, as Mr. Peirce declares, is but the outward aspect of that
which within is feeling, we should henceforth have to look upon the
roulette and dice as sentient beings.
3. THE FOUR POSITIVE ARGUMENTS OF TYCHISM INSUFFICIENT.
Mr. Peirce adduces four positive arguments for believing in absolute
chance. They are: (1) the prevalence of growth; (2) the variety of the
universe; (3) the necessity of explaining law; and (4) the existence of
feeling.
By growth, Mr. Peirce does not understand the growth of crystals, or
trees, or organisms. That kind of growth is a mere transformation.
Mr. Peirce’s idea of “real” growth is “opposed to the conservation
of energy.” It is not an increase of the thing growing through the
assimilation of substances taken from the surrounding world; it is an
actual increase of energy, not a mere change; it is a growth of the
universe itself. Granted the possibility of this so-called “real” growth,
and we can easily explain the evolution of the world out of the tiniest
beginning. But, of course, one thing has to go: either the conservation
of energy or “real growth.” Mr. Peirce lets go the former, I the
latter.[135]
The variety of the universe is, in my world-conception, sufficiently
explained by the variety of forms, for form is indeed the _principium
individuationis_; a doctrine, which, but for Mr. Peirce’s philosophy,
I should regard as almost universally accepted. Among its advocates we
find also Mr. Peirce’s great master, Duns Scotus, and Scotus’s teacher,
Avicebron. In so far as various formations are possible, (exactly as the
die can show six different surfaces,) chance plays an important part in
the diversification of nature, but this chance is not to be thought of as
a violation of the law, but appears to be a special case only, and a true
manifestation of the law under complicated conditions.
Chance and probability are not mere subjective ideas, creatures of our
ignorance, playing a rôle simply in our limited knowledge of the world.
The words signify a certain condition of objective existence.
For instance, the probability of throwing 1 with one die is 1/6.
This means, the die is so constructed that it can show six different
positions, one among them being 1; and these six possibilities are as
real a quality of the die, as its weight or its color.
The die has six possible positions. Now I take a die and throw 3. Are we
not entitled to believe that the throw was sufficiently determined by all
the innumerable conditions which accompany the act? We confidently think
so, and feel no need of assuming any absolute chance. Now I throw again.
What is now the probability of throwing 1? We answer again, 1/6. And, lo!
there it is! It came at the second throw, and we ask, was our statement
of the probabilities wrong? We say, no! it was not wrong, for it remains
true even now. The statement does not mean that we shall throw a 1 at
each sixth throw, but that (supposing the die to be perfect) 1/6 among
all the possible throws will be 1, so that supposing all the possible
throws realised in an infinite series of throws, the average number of
1’s among them will be the one-sixth part of the whole.
The enormous importance of chance (viz., of that real chance which is
no violation of the law) has been recognised since Democritus and has
received a fresh illustration from the investigations of Darwin, which I
need not here recapitulate.
The theory of probabilities teaches, that whatever can happen in the long
course of an infinite number of events, actually will happen, and that
whatever, according to the nature of things, has a greater probability,
will in an infinite number of cases occur with proportionately greater
frequency.
The lesson which we have to draw from this statement is, that that which
we wish not to happen, should be made impossible. And this can be done,
perhaps not perfectly, but approximately. According to Mr. Peirce, the
evolution of mind is due to the reappearance of chance; we say that the
evolution of mind is marked by man’s increasing power in the restriction
of chance.
The identification of chance with feeling, or even with mind, is to me an
idea so grotesque, that I am inclined to regard it as a relic of gnostic
speculations.
Mr. Peirce, instead of attempting to comprehend laws, as we do, seeks to
trace their origin. He tries to explain their existence by growth, as if
they were beings that evolve like the forms of planetary systems or the
organisms of living creatures. Considering the fact that Mr. Peirce is a
realist only in name, and that his philosophy is soaked with nominalistic
traditions, we should say (and Mr. Peirce will pardon me that I quote the
expression from him) that:
“The puzzle for him is simply the usual difficulty that plagues
nominalism when it finds itself confronted with a reality which
has an element of generality.”
The assumption of absolute chance might be used to account for any
otherwise inexplicable event, but Mr. Peirce does not countenance this
idea. He warns us to be cautious in its use, like the druggist who labels
his poisons “handle with care”; “I only use chance,” he says, “to give
room for the development of law.” Having used absolute chance to start
the world with, he dismisses it. So Fiesco discharges his negro after he
has done his work: “_Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit gethan, der Mohr
kann gehen_.”
In my criticism of Mr. Peirce’s theory I said (_The Monist_, II, p. 574):
“How little, after all, we can escape the determinism of law as
being a feature of the world, will be seen from the fact that
the explanation for the evolution of law is presented by Mr.
Peirce as being itself a law, i. e., a formula describing a
regularity supposed to obtain in facts.”
Mr. Peirce replies:
“Is there no difference between a law, the essence of which
is to be inviolable ... and _that mental law, the violation
of which is so included in the essence that unless it were
violated, it would cease to exist_?... Thus I clearly escape
the contradiction attributed to me.” (P. 561.)
Mr. Peirce’s escape is like the disappearance of a medium from a room
without doors. He must have got out through the fourth dimension. The
argument is so subtle that I cannot see it, and I feel tempted to retort
in a sentence quoted from my profound adversary:
“I confess, I can find only words without ideas in the
objection.” (P. 561.)
Mr. Peirce speaks of law as having developed out of chance, but he
himself, in fact, after a fashion, explains the origin of those laws of
nature which represent its present uniformities by a law of habit-taking.
That the conservation of energy should leave no room for feeling is
to me an obscure proposition. The law of the conservation of energy
declares only that the sum of all energy in the world, potential as well
as kinetic, remains constant. If a living and feeling being renews its
waste and stores up new energy in its tissues, it must take it out of the
general storehouse of nature; it must transform it, and cannot produce it
out of nothing. Why should feeling become impossible, if the conservation
of energy is true?
The identification of chance with feeling is, to my mind, a vagary. It is
true that feeling develops mind; mind makes deliberation possible, and
deliberation implies choice. But choice is not chance. The choice which
a man makes is determined by his character. There is more resemblance
between logical identity and a pun, than between feeling and chance.
4. THE NEGATIVE ARGUMENT A LOGICAL FALLACY.
The four positive arguments for believing in absolute chance are
untenable. But Mr. Peirce, knowing that he had to weather a storm of
criticisms, has taken along a sheet-anchor, consisting of a negative
argument, which, if it were true, would make the four positive arguments
redundant.
What shall we say to the statement, that chance need not be explained?
Mr. Peirce says:
“Chance, according to me, or irregularity—that is, the absence
of any coincidence,—calls for no explanation. If _law_ calls
for explanation, as Dr. Carus admits it does, surely the
mere absence of law calls for no further explanation than is
afforded by the mere absence of any particular circumstance
necessitating the result.” (P. 559.)
Mr. Peirce is a great logician, but the logical arguments of his
philosophy are not sound. If the absence of law, of coincidences, of
regularities, did not require explanation, the scientist would (as is
but right) still have to explain the uniformities of nature, but the
miracle monger would have a good time; for he could tell us boldly that,
according to the rules of modern logic he is not bound to give any
explanation.
It is true that while everything must be explained, the absence of
everything (i. e. nothing) need not be explained; but we cannot use
this pattern as a schedule which can be filled out at our pleasure. The
ideas “absence of,” “no,” “no one,” and “nothing” play a part in logic
analogous to that of zero in mathematics. I need hardly remind the
reader of the puzzling demonstration, that since one cat has one tail
more than _no_ cat, and since no cat has eight tails, one cat must have
nine tails. Operations with zero act like death in the realm of human
conventionalities. Death makes the beggar equal to the king. Multiply any
equation that is wrong with zero, and it will be correct. Operations with
zero render the impossible possible.
But let us look closer at Mr. Peirce’s proposition. He avers that “the
mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating the result
calls for no explanation.”
Should it ever happen that the absence of any particular circumstance
necessitates the result, I do not see why this absence should remain
unexplained. Say for instance, a certain stronghold is taken because the
enemy discovers the absence of guards in a certain part of the walls. If
this absence of guards be counted as an important circumstance helpful
in the conquest of the citadel (and there is no reason why we should not
count it as such) can we say that while the presence of guards on all
other spots of the wall has to be and can be explained as an endeavor to
secure the place against a _coup de main_, the mere absence of guards
calls for no explanation? The absence of guards in a particular spot
of the Capitol during the siege by the Gauls, was accounted for by the
steepness of the place. This particular spot was regarded as safe on
account of its inaccessibility. Similarly, the absence of guards in the
citadel of the Messenians is explained by the idea that the Spartans
would make no attack because in that particularly stormy night a
cloudburst seemed to prevent all approach.
Obviously the necessity of explaining a rule, does not confer the
privilege of neglecting to explain its exceptions.
It goes without saying that Mr. Peirce’s argument (even if it were
formally faultless) can have no force with a necessitarian. Such
a one, after having explained and proved to his satisfaction that
_Gesetzmässigkeit_ (or regularity such as can be formulated in laws) is a
characteristic feature of the universe, is not only asked to believe that
there are after all exceptions to law, but is even told that according to
some paragraph in Mr. Peirce’s unwritten logic of relatives no further
argument is needed to prove the non-existence of law. Only Mr. Peirce’s
extreme love of his pet theories can make him blind to such palpable
fallacies. But such are the foundations of his philosophical architecture.
III. MR. PEIRCE AS A CRITIC.
A good general, who has to mask the weak points of his position, uses
the strategem of making demonstrative sallies upon his enemy. Mr.
Peirce, although apparently quite unconscious of the fact that his basic
doctrines are untenable, instinctively imitates this maxim of warfare.
His defence is mostly aggressive. Instead of replying to my arguments he
endeavors to represent my views as incohesive and contradictory.
The present issue is not whether my views are tenable, but whether Mr.
Peirce’s are. However, I am glad to have the benefit of the searching
criticism of so subtle a thinker as Mr. Peirce. Therefore, I willingly
appear before his tribunal to expurgate myself of his charges.
1. THE A PRIORI AND POSITIVISM.
Mr. Peirce is greatly puzzled with my position. He quotes several
statements of mine which appear to him contradictory. I said: (1) that
millions of _single_ experiences cannot establish a belief in necessity,
(2) that necessitarianism must be founded upon the _a priori_, and (3)
that the _a priori_ must be founded upon experience.[136] To him who
overlooks the here italicised word “single” this may, indeed, seem to be
a vicious circle.
All knowledge begins with experience. We define experience as the effects
of events upon sentient beings, and these effects are sense-impressions
of certain forms and interrelations. At an advanced stage of evolution,
the formal and relational are first unconsciously, as, for instance, in
counting, and then consciously, with scientific deliberation, abstracted
from the sensory. Systems of pure forms are constructed out of the purely
formal elements, thus gained from experience by abstraction, such as
our system of numbers and the logical categories. Now the laws of these
forms of thought are applicable to all formal and relational conditions
of reality. The formal and relational of reality are known to us even
in those regions of the universe and in those provinces of scientific
investigation which have not as yet been explored. The scientist knows
them _a priori_, even before he investigates objects which he never saw
before. He is acquainted with certain of their qualities, viz., with the
laws of their formal and relational conditions.
Thus the _a priori_, or, as I prefer to call it, formal thought, is a
product of experience, and is again applicable to experience.
Single experiences, isolated observations, innumerable particular cases
cannot directly yield or reveal the laws of formal thought. So long as
they remain single and isolated they will never develop into mental
factors; but such is the nature of reality that the single experiences
will be built up and arranged in feeling substance as systematically
as, for instance, the formation of crystals or the harmonious growth of
cells in organisms? When sentient creatures become conscious not only
of the sensory element of their experience, but also of this system of
their soul, of the formal of their psychical existence, they become
rational beings; and the formal which grows with their sentiency is not
an exclusive and peculiar quality of theirs; it is not purely subjective,
but it has been imparted to them, piecemeal, together with the single
data of their experience. It constitutes a part of their _Anschauung_; it
is found in the objective world and is a general feature of reality.
Out of the formal elements of our _Anschauungen_, of the facts of
experience, that organ of cognition is developed which Kant calls “pure
reason.”
Experience is often used to denote sense-experience only; thus Kant
contrasts experience or sense-perception, which he calls _a posteriori_,
with pure reason and formal thought, which he calls _a priori_. We use
experience in the sense defined above, _so as to include the formal
element_.
I am unable to form a clear conception of Mr. Peirce’s view of the _a
priori_. Those systems of formal thought which I regard as constructions
he regards as products of analysis. He says, “They are results dependent
upon the action of reason in the depths of our own consciousness.” He
only grants that “their abstract and distinct formulation comes very
late.” He still holds that the _a priori_ is innate.
In my conception, mathematical ideas, like that of the contrivance of
logarithms, are inventions; and they are constructions as much as the
invention of the steam-engine by James Watt.
There is one peculiarity about the purely formal which is not found in
the sensory elements of experience. Our knowledge of the various spheres
of the purely formal is of a general nature; it applies to any form of
the same kind. This gives system to our formal conceptions, and enables
us to make statements which are rigidly and unequivocally determined. It
is this quality which makes them available as an organ of cognition when
dealing with facts of experience. They furnish us with methods, schedules
of reference, and plans which like blanks have to be filled out.
Science begins with the application of formal thought, viz., with
counting, measuring, and classifying. Only with the assistance of the
formal sciences can we master the material of the sensory data of
experience; and thus it happens that the formal is the condition, not of
any kind of experience, but of every systematic experience.
The formal sciences are the tools of cognition. That to which they cannot
be applied remains unexplained, and this is the ultimate reason why
processes of nature can be regarded as explained only when recognised as
processes of transformation. Cognition is the tracing of form. We can
understand a change only if it is a change of form. We cannot understand
how anything real can disappear into, or originate out of, nothing. We
have no explanation for any actual increase or decrease either of matter
or energy. Whenever we see something entirely new we regard it as a new
combination, the elements of which existed before.
If there were processes in the universe which could positively be proved
not to be transformations we should be confronted with an unfathomable
mystery; and it is a matter of course that we must not be duped so easily
by the appearance of problems which cannot be solved at first sight. The
advance of science which has resolved so many mysterious phenomena into
plain instances of transformation gives us confidence that this method
is the only reliable maxim of inquiry. It has helped us so far, and it
will help us in the future.
* * * * *
I call my views positivism, because like the French positivists and also
like Locke and his school I maintain that all knowledge is to be derived
from the positive facts of experience. But my positivism is not of the
old kind; it is neither sensationalism nor materialism nor Comtism. It is
a new positivism broadened by a study of Kantian philosophy and Kant’s
problem of the _a priori_; and this new positivism, I hope, deserves the
attention of the thinkers of mankind.
Mr. Peirce calls it a “straddling of the question,” by which he means
that a man is “on both sides of the fence,” and has learned so to
formulate the issues, “that both parties can readily subscribe to his
propositions.”
2. DETERMINISM AND FATALISM.
Fatalism and determinism must not be confounded. We define determinism
as that view, according to which every event is determined by its
conditions. The decision of a man whose liberty is not curtailed by any
compulsion, so that he can act as he pleases exactly in agreement with
his character, is determined objectively by the motive and subjectively
by his character. A man of a certain character in a given situation will
act in a way that is perfectly determinable.
Determinism, as I take it, does not exclude free-will. Nor does it
exclude such chance as is, for instance, the incidental turning up of the
various faces of a die.
Determinism is the basis of science, and also of ethics as a science. If
the decision of a free will were merely the result of chance, why should
our teachers and preachers take so much trouble to form character?
While determinism is a sound doctrine, fatalism is a superstition.
Fatalism excludes the idea of free will. We define fatalism as that view
which regards the fate of a man, whatsoever he may do, as fixed. For
instance, we call the orthodox Mohammedan a fatalist; he looks at the
flame without quenching it, because he argues, “if it is Allah’s will
that my house burn down, it will burn down, whatever I may do.”
In my reply to Mr. Peirce (_The Monist_, Vol. II, p. 572) I approvingly
quoted from him a passage containing the word “fate,” adding that here
“the word ‘fate’ must be understood as Mr. Peirce understands it.” In
spite of this warning, Mr. Peirce employs this quotation made from _his_
writings as if it were mine, and calls attention to the inconsistency
involved in the different application of the word. This charge of
inconsistency is neither judicious nor fair!
We define “necessary” as “that which is determined.”
Determined means describable. Necessity is that feature of things which
makes it possible that we can, in proportion to our knowledge, describe
beforehand or predict the course of events.
Kant’s definition of “necessary,” as given in his “Critique of Pure
Reason,” is narrower. He says:
“That the coherence of which with the real is determined
according to universal conditions of experience is necessary,
or exists necessarily.”
This means in our phraseology, “that feature of the real which is
determined by the laws of form.”
The word “determinism” has been inappropriately used in the sense of
fatalism, in which sense it has to be condemned as a superstition.
The term is needed, however, to denote a basic principle of great
value. “Determinism,” if used in the sense which the word literally
indicates, means “that view which regards all events as determined by its
conditions.” Determinism does not mean that everything is decreed by some
fate, that some Deity or other power has determined the course of events.
It means that definite conditions produce definite results, and that the
results can be ascertained and described, if _all_ the conditions are
known.
Fatalism is a peculiar kind of determinism, and, indeed, an obviously
erroneous one. Fatalism rests upon a dualistic conception, regarding
necessity as a foreign force residing outside and above things and
compelling them to act in a special way. It is the Moira of the ancients
and the Kismet of the Mohammedans. The monistic view knows nothing of
a foreign force or supermundane _fatum_ enacting a special course
of affairs. Necessity, in the monistic conception, simply denotes
the determinedness of results by its conditions; it signifies that
_Gesetzmässigkeit_, or regularity according to law, is a feature of
reality. We need not repeat again that the monistic view of determinism
excludes neither chance nor free-will. It only excludes “absolute” chance
and that indeterminable arbitrariness which is sometimes said to be
free-will.
If events were not determined, if under the very same conditions the
same causes could bring about different results, so that no regularities
formulable in laws existed, the world would be a chaos and no cosmos,
absolute chance would prevail, and science would be impossible.
Mr. Peirce not only confounds fate and necessity, but he also identifies
them with resistance, and with reality. My idea of necessity has as
little to do with the experience of, reaction as, for instance, with
the idea of density, or with pleasure and pain. To confound such
heterogeneous concepts must be productive of confusion. No wonder that
Mr. Peirce makes the confession that these ideas seem to him “of a mixed
nature.”
That my presentation of the case of Determinism _versus_ Free-will
results in “a doctrine to which the advocates of free-will will generally
subscribe as readily as their opponents,” is used as a reproach; but I do
not take it as such, for my intention is not to side with one party, but
to bring out the truth of both views.
3. NATURAL LAWS, DESCRIPTIONS.
Mr. Peirce makes the following allegation of inconsistency. He says of me:
“The declaration (§ 198) that ‘natural laws are simply a
description of nature as nature is,’ and that ‘the facts of
nature express the character of nature,’ are nominalistic. But
in another place (107-116) he says distinctly that uniformities
are real.” (P. 531.)
I am unable to detect any inconsistency in these expressions. The gist of
these three statements is this: the formulas usually called natural laws
describe certain uniformities of reality.
The expression “description of nature” is by no means nominalistic. If
law is said to be a description, it is not a mere name, but presupposes
the existence of some objective reality for the description of which it
has been formulated.
4. CAUSATION.
Mr. Peirce’s usage of the word “cause” is very unsettled. He says (p.
538):
“The original idea of an efficient cause is that of an agent,
more or less like man.”
The original idea of “cause” is the struggle of reaching an end or
bringing about a certain state of things. The Latin _causa_ means “a
lawsuit.”
In a similar way, the German _Ursache_ does not mean the original thing,
but a “seeking.” _Sache_ is the English _sake_ and Gothic _sakjô_,
meaning “struggle,” or “quarrel.” It is derived from the same root as the
verb “to seek.”
Like _causa_, the word _Ursache_ was used as a legal term.
Mr. Peirce further states:
“The modern mechanical conception, on the other hand, is
that the relative positions of particles determine their
accelerations at the instants when they occupy those
positions.” (P. 538.)
“In dynamics, it is the fixed force, gravitation, or whatever
else, together with those relative positions of the bodies that
determine the intensity and direction of the forces, that is
regarded as the cause.” (P. 540.)
“The practice which I endeavor to follow in regard to the
word _cause_ is, to use it in the Aristotelian sense of an
_efficient cause_ in all its crudeness.” (P. 541.)
“When my idea is a more general and logical one, I prefer to
speak of the explanation.” (P. 541.)
No wonder that some causes are prior to their effects, others
simultaneous, and that effects may even be prior to their causes! Using
the word in various senses, Mr. Peirce becomes so entangled about
causation, that in mustering the ideas force, position, reason, law,
cause, and explanation, he no longer knows which is which.
* * * * *
Mr. Peirce being unable to bring any consistency into the usage of the
term “cause,” drops it entirely as a philosophical word. This is Dr.
Ironbeard’s method, who kills his patient to save him pain.
There was a time when I felt inclined to follow that plan of dealing
with words in this predicament. But I found out very soon that there is
not one difficult word in philosophical language which is not or was not
at some time or other almost universally maltreated by the professional
thinkers of mankind. What, then, is to be done? Shall we eradicate all
old terms that are erroneously used and create a philosophical Volapük,
which will have the advantage of being unincumbered with the errors of a
long historical inheritance, but the disadvantage of being nowhere spoken
and nowhere understood, except by its inventors?
Dr. Ironbeard’s method of dealing with terms is radical. It imitates the
method of the social reformers who, on finding something wrong in society
generally, propose to tear down the entire social structure, and begin
the world over again from its beginning.
Most of the terms which have been in use for centuries and even
millenniums, I have found to correspond to a special want of expressing
some definite reality or constant group of realities or important
relation among realities. The misuse of different words almost invariably
has its origin in a consideration of the name alone, to the neglect
of the reality denoted by the name. And misuses can be mended only by
carefully investigating the realities themselves for the denotation of
which the words have been invented. If we were to make a clean sweep
of the “superstitions,” soul, God, cause, natural law, etc., because
in many minds there are superstitious notions connected with these
ideas, we should soon have to invent new terms for the realities which
necessitated the formation of the old ones. The great bulk of religious
and philosophical words originated because in each case there was an
actual want of a phrase to denote some specific reality. The errors of
the various terms arise because our ideas concerning the nature of these
realities have not as yet been matured, and it is the office of the
philosopher to contribute his mite toward their clarification.
Causation, in my conception, is transformation. Take any system of
conditions and let it somehow be changed. The event which starts the
change is called the cause, the new configuration produced, the effect.
The various factors of the system are the conditions or circumstances.
Taking this view, I _do not say_ that the effect is the cause
transformed. The total effect is the cause plus all the circumstances
transformed. The effect is something radically different from the cause.
The cause is always an event, that is a motion of some kind; the effect,
a new arrangement, a new formation, a new state of things, or perhaps the
dissolution of an old state of things.
While cause and effect are different, the whole process of causation,
including cause, circumstances, and effect, is to be viewed as one
fact, or, rather, as one system of facts; and a process of causation is
explained, (as we have seen above) as soon as it is so described that we
recognise it as a transformation.[137]
There is a popular usage which calls the cause of the falling stone
gravitation. This kind of cause is not an event, not a motion, but a law
of nature, and I prefer to call it “the reason” for the stone’s fall.
Mr. Peirce defines a reason as follows:
“A reason, in one sense, is the replacement of a
multiple-subject of an observational proposition by a general
subject, which by the very conditions of the special experience
is predicable of the multiple subject.” (P. 558.)
This somewhat stilted definition seems upon the whole to agree with what
I also call “a reason.” All the reasons by which we comprehend nature are
formulated in statements which describe those general features of reality
which we call “laws of nature.”
Who does not see that causes (i. e., events which produce effects) and
reasons (i. e., the formulas by which we comprehend the uniformities of
nature) are two radically different ideas, and who can deny that the
denotation of these two radically different ideas, by one and the same
term, must and actually does bring about lamentable confusion in the
minds of philosophers! Accordingly, let us call them by different names;
never mind what we call them, but let us distinguish them. I regard the
usage stated here as the most appropriate. We call “the cause” of the
stone’s fall that event which removed its support; but when we inquire
after the reason why the stone falls, we want to know the law of nature
which describes in a general formula that quality of stones which makes
them fall.
5. THE FUTURE IN MENTAL CAUSATION.
It seems as if some evil genius had caused Mr. Peirce to cross my
position everywhere, even where I should expect to find him in perfect
agreement.
Concerning mental and mechanical causation he first startles me with an
italicised proposition which declares:
“_There is no mechanical truth in saying that the past
determines the future rather than the future the past._” (P.
539.)
Mr. Peirce apparently intends to discredit the belief that the past
determines the future. He adds:
“We continue, for convenience, to talk of mechanical phenomena
as if they were regulated, in the same manner in which our
intentions regulate our actions, (which is essentially a
determination of the future by the past,) although we are quite
aware that it is not really so.” (P. 539.)
In other words, Mr. Peirce contends that our view of mechanical causation
is based upon an analogy with mental causation; the latter being a
determination of the future by the past, we conclude that the former is
regulated in the same manner.
This is an old error which rests on the supposition that cognition begins
with introspection or self-knowledge. The truth is that all cognition
begins with objective observation.
We have to say, (1) that man’s view of mechanical causation has not been
fashioned after the model of mental causation, and (2) that the future
actually enters as a factor in mental causation. We do not believe that
the future determines the past, but it does determine the present.
Should we judge of the causation of mechanical motions from our own
mental experience, we should certainly reach other conclusions than we
do, for the most characteristic feature of mental causation, that which
essentially distinguishes it from mechanical causation, is the fact that
the future actually enters into it as the main factor.
We as rational beings, and the lower animals also on a smaller scale,
do know to some extent the future. We know by experience the effects of
certain actions. This fact of the future’s being partly known, makes
it possible for the future to enter as a factor in mental causation.
I go so far as to maintain that there is no mental causation except
some consideration of the future be contained in the motive cause. The
presence of a plan, of an end kept in view, of an aim to be reached
in the future, is exactly what distinguishes the purposive action of
thinking beings from mechanical events.
6. MENTAL CAUSATION.
Mr. Peirce has discovered in my expositions of mechanical and mental
action what he believes to be a flagrant contradiction, and, as if
it were the exhibition of my scalp, displays it triumphantly (§ 27)
in capitals and italics. “No objection can be made,” I said, “to the
possibility of explaining the motions ... of the brain by the laws of
molar and molecular mechanics.” And “yet the simplest psychical reflexes
cannot be explained from mechanical or physical laws alone.”
Is this really a contradiction, or is it Mr. Peirce’s inability to
discover the agreement between the two statements? Let us see.
Take a little toy fish of tin with a small iron rod in its snout,
floating in the water, and push the fish so that it shoots forward with
a certain velocity in a straight line. Now take a magnet and hold it at
a short distance from the prolonged path of the fish. The fish at once
changes its course; it now describes a curve which according to the
laws of mechanics is determined (omitting any other possible modifying
circumstances) by the momentum of the push, the velocity of which is
gradually diminished by the friction of the water, and the attraction of
the magnet. These are the data, and from these data the motion of the
fish is unequivocally determined by the laws of mechanics.
Now, when we speak of the motion of the fish, we mean the motion, and
not the iron rod, or the qualities of the iron rod, in its snout. While
speaking of motion or the laws of motion, and while calculating the curve
of a motion, our ideas move in a perfectly defined sphere of abstraction
from which all other things and considerations are excluded. This method
of abstraction which is the essence of human thought and also of that
special kind of human thought called science, is the way by which alone
we are enabled to arrive at clear distinctions and lucid explanations. We
have to keep our various abstractions stored in an orderly manner in our
mind, each one in a special box. If we do not distinguish the different
spheres of abstraction and their limits, we shall soon confound all
issues in a hopeless chaos.
But we find, on further examination, that in this limitation of the
description to the abstract sphere of pure motion only a part of
the process before us is described. The description explains fully,
exhaustively, and satisfactorily the mechanical aspect of the case, but
it does not explain why the magnet attracts iron. The attraction of
the magnet consists in the definite qualities of (1) the magnet, (2)
the iron, and (3) the medium between them. When we inquire after an
explanation of the physical qualities of things, we enter into another
sphere of abstraction, viz., that of physics. That physics will have
to be explained as a domain of molecular mechanics may be mentioned
incidentally.
Take another and simpler instance: the fall of a stone. The motion of
the stone, its increasing velocity during the fall can be explained
according to the laws of mechanics; but that quality of the stone called
gravity, which is the reason of its fall, cannot be deduced from the laws
of mechanics. The gravity of a mass is treated in mechanics as the given
fact or datum, an investigation into the nature of which is excluded from
the sphere of mechanics. He who demands of mechanics an explanation of
gravity searches in the wrong box.
When we come to the investigation of psychical phenomena, we strike a
feature which is entirely absent in mechanics, physics, and chemistry.
It is the appearance of feeling. Feelings vary according to the various
impressions made by surrounding objects. The same objects making the
same impressions, special kinds of feelings come to stand for or to
represent their respective kinds of objects, and thus feelings acquire
meaning, feelings become ideas. This peculiarity of sentiency, that it
has acquired meaning, is the characteristic feature of “mind.”
When speaking of mind I refer to all those phenomena of meaning-freighted
feelings which ensoul thinking beings; and the domain of psychology is
thus again quite a distinct domain of abstraction.
Now let us return to the contradiction of which Mr. Peirce accuses me.
An idea which physiologically considered is a special brain-structure or
combination of brain-structures, reacts upon a given stimulus, which, let
us say, is the sound of a certain word. The word is a sound-symbol and
the word possesses a certain meaning. The word spoken having the same
meaning as a special idea that is thought, while its brain-structure is
agitated, possesses a quality comparable to chemical affinities. This
peculiar word will serve as a stimulus for this peculiar idea. It will
not (at least not directly) stimulate other ideas—as little as a chemical
that has no affinity for the ingredients of another chemical will cause a
reaction. Why the motion takes place calls for a psychical explanation,
but the motion itself takes place in strict accord with the laws of
mechanics.
But are not the laws of mechanics annulled by the laws of physics, and
those of physiology by the laws of psychology?
No, they are not annulled, but modified.
A piece of iron that falls to the ground with the same velocity as a
stone of equal weight will be held up by a magnet strong enough to hold
it. This is not an annulment of the gravity of the iron; it is not a
reversion of the law of gravitation; gravitation holds in this case as
good as in any other. It is only a modification and a complication. We
must remember that the law of gravity does not say, the non-supported
piece of iron or stone will drop, it says that all bodies are attracted
by the earth with a definite force depending upon their mass and
position. And this attraction takes place in our example; the iron
supported by the magnet retains all its inherent gravity, which is
constantly asserting itself, although counteracted by the force of the
attraction of the magnet.
Since the mechanical, chemical, psychical, etc. qualities represent
reality in various abstract aspects, we should know that there are no
purely mechanical, no purely chemical, no purely psychical phenomena.
Every real phenomenon, i. e. the original whole from which the
abstractions have been made, presents a complex state of things of which
many various aspects can and must be taken.
I repeat now without fear of contradiction or miscomprehension,
that brain-motions are perfectly explainable by the laws of molar
and molecular mechanics, while psychical reflexes, not being purely
mechanical processes, cannot be explained by mechanical laws. The
properly psychical and the properly mental are other elements of an
entirely different nature from the mechanical and the physical. They
belong to a radically different sphere of abstraction. He who tries to
explain the psychical by the mechanical, looks for his explanation in the
wrong box. And he who regards the proposition that the mechanical laws
hold good for all motions without any exception, but that they cannot be
called upon to explain that which is not motion, as a contradiction, has
not as yet learned practically to apply the method of abstraction.
It is strange that we have to give this little lesson in the elements
of abstraction lore to so prominent a logician as Mr. Peirce. We feel
inclined to exclaim: “Art thou a master of Israel and knowest not these
things?”
STRAY SHOTS.
There are a number of incidental comments aimed at scattered points of
my position. I call them “stray shots”; they have exploded without harm.
While going over the battle-field I shall pick them up and will throw
some of them back into Mr. Peirce’s camp, whence they came.
Mr. Peirce is in the habit of calling every approach to his views “deep,”
while divergencies are branded as “shallow.”—
Hume’s scepticism is called Leibnitz’s principle, by which latter Mr.
Peirce apparently means that innumerable single cases of experience
alone do not constitute certainty. Why Mr. Peirce demands that Hume’s
conclusion which Leibnitz never would have countenanced, should be
identified with Leibnitz’s principle from which it is derived is not
apparent.—
How easily Mr. Peirce changes his opinion! Venn’s “Logic of Chance,”
which Mr. Peirce so much admired formerly, has become “a blundering
little book.”—
Synechism and agapasticism, viz., the principle of continuity and the
idea of love as main factors of evolution are nothing new. I have
always defended them, although not in the peculiar way that Mr. Peirce
does.[138] In his article “Evolutionary Love” he appears to me unjust
toward Darwin. I do not think that I should improve my propositions,
which are in their way synechistic as well as agapastic, by adopting
either Mr. Peirce’s terms or his presentation of these principles.—
Mr. Peirce says, he does not doubt that my idea of mental causation was
intended to be an improvement on his molecular theory of protoplasm. I
can assure Mr. Peirce that I had no such intentions. I held my view long
before I ever had a chance of knowing Mr. Peirce’s molecular theory of
protoplasm. Moreover, I am unable to discover any similarity between his
views and mine.—
I took pains to explain that, if we disregard the notion of form, every
transformation, that is, every case of causation, will appear as a most
miraculous and inexplicable event. To illustrate my view I said that
“_supposing we had no idea of the laws of form or only an incoherent and
fragmentary knowledge of them_,” it would be “a very wonderful thing”
that two congruent regular tetrahedrons when put together will form a
hexahedron—a body which is something new. And I added to this statement,
“_but the laws of form do perfectly and satisfactorily explain it_.”
How great was my astonishment to see Mr. Peirce with great complacency
take up the problem and explain it! Indeed, it is true. That the
combination of two congruent regular tetrahedrons will make a hexahedron,
is wonderful _only_ to him who does not understand the laws of form.
Otherwise, it is not wonderful. I was amused at Mr. Peirce’s ingenuity to
prove to me that it is a case of 8-2=6.—
There is a difference between the combination of two tetrahedrons and
of the atoms _H₂O_. Mr. Peirce tells me, that the one is ideal, the
other real—“a difference which to his Scotistic mind is very important.”
Did Mr. Peirce think, indeed, that I was not aware of this difference,
or does he mean to establish a rule never to compare the relations as
developed in the sciences of pure forms to the relations that obtain in
reality?—
Says Mr. Peirce in one passage, there is a difference between the ideal
and the real, which to his Scotistic mind is very important. In another
passage he declares that “the nominalist alone makes a sharp distinction
between the abstract and the concrete.”—
Mr. Peirce smiles at the endeavor of reconciling religion with science.
For he thinks:
“It is a thing which will come to pass of itself when time is
ripe, and that our efforts to hasten it have just that slight
effect that our efforts to hasten the ripening of apples on a
tree may have.” (P. 545.)
Mr. Peirce forgets that the religious fruits of the conciliation between
religion and science are our own sentiments. He who says that man should
be indifferent about working out the truth, on the plea that truth will
take care of itself, is comparable to the apple-tree, that refuses to
work out the ripening of the apples. The proposition to let religion and
science work out their destinies, one of which is their mutual agreement,
of themselves, is irreligious and also unscientific. Truth will not take
care of itself if we do not strain all our efforts to find truth; and the
kingdom of heaven will never come unless (as Christ taught, Matt. 11, 12)
“it suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”—
The same Mr. Peirce who says that our efforts to hasten the conciliation
of religion with science are useless, believes in miracles and proposes a
theory that prayer can work miracles.—
Several philosophers, such as Locke and Hegel, have complained of the
uselessness of the logical law of identity _A_ = _A_, and also of its
barrenness for any practical purpose. The law of identity has been
invented nevertheless, because there is a want for it; and this want, in
my opinion, was felt because the statement of sameness (as set forth in
_The Monist_, Vol. III, p. 70, et seqq.) is one of the most elementary
and important forms of reasoning, being indispensable, for instance, in
mathematics where it appears as equations. We may simply laugh at the old
logicians
“Who whirl in narrow circling trails,
Like kittens playing with their tails.”
We may impatiently discard the whole proceeding as empty talk, yet
I submit that we had better try to understand the meaning of their
unprofitable exertions and the drift of their apparently meaningless
argumentations. If we regard the principle of absolute identity as the
formula of sameness (in the sense explained in the quoted passage, _The
Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 70, et seqq.) emptied of its contents we
shall understand why logicians wasted so much energy on an entirely
barren subject. We shall readily condone their mistakes in consideration
of the importance of the subject. It is difficult to say how much we have
profited by their blunders.—
Mr. Peirce uses the terms analytical and synthetical in a new sense for
reasons which he explains at greater length in his “Theory of Probable
Inferences.” He says, “analytical reasoning depends upon associations
of similarity; synthetical reasoning upon associations of contiguity.”
I willingly grant to the scientist and the philosopher the liberty to
change the historical meaning of terms if the traditional usage is
not helpful in our dealings with the facts which they were invented to
describe. However, we must not change a term without good and sufficient
reasons. In the present case, I still prefer the traditional usage of the
terms “analytical” and “synthetic.”—
Mr. Peirce takes the liberty of changing terms for himself, but he
resents it in others.—
Mr. Peirce disapproves of the usage of the word “construction” in the
sense of systems of formal thought, such as the decimal system, etc.,
etc. “Because,” he says, “the word is imperatively required in the
theory of cognition to denote a mathematical diagram framed according to
a general precept.” On the strength of this argument we might as well
disapprove of calling churches, mosques, houses, cottages, or any kind of
edifice, “building,” because the word “building” is imperatively required
to denote business-buildings.—
Mr. Peirce says that according to my statement (in ¶ 163) “every element
of compulsion is to be excluded from the conception of necessity.” Having
never made such a statement, I looked up the passage, which is the last
but one paragraph in _The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, page 86, and find
that Mr. Peirce must have misread the sentence, “compulsion excludes
free will, and necessity does not,” which, of course, has an entirely
different meaning.—
Mr. Peirce identifies evolution with real growth, regarding it as opposed
to the law of the conservation of energy. He regards everything as a
product of such growth, or _Erzeugung_, and adds, “I fancy it is this
cautious reflectiveness of my procedure which especially displeases Dr.
Carus.” Mr. Peirce does not use the word “bold.” He says, “cautious
reflectiveness.”—
I did not say that causation is to be explained from the law of the
conservation of matter and energy. I said (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No.
4, p. 566) that the law of the conservation of matter and energy throws
light upon the problem of causation. The law of the conservation of
matter and energy and the law of causation describe the same thing under
two different aspects. If we understand the one, it will help us to
understand the other.—
Kant’s chapter on the Architectonic of Pure Reason is well known to me,
but I think that Kant was possessed of a peculiar love of architectonic
which has contributed not a little to rendering the system of his
philosophy unnecessarily labyrinthine.—
It is surprising to find a man whom I always regarded as a Kant scholar
of first degree saying that “Kant makes space a necessary form of
thought.” Now, as a matter of fact, Kant does not make space a form of
_thought_, but of _Anschauung_ or intuition. We cannot understand Kant
unless we understand this distinction.[139]—
Kant conceives of causation as a necessary sequence. Mill, who objects to
the idea of necessity, replaces Kant’s words “universal” and “necessary”
by “invariable” and “unconditioned,” a substitution which was made with
the outspoken intention of radically changing the meaning of the phrase.
Mill’s terms are _not_ “more exact,” as Mr. Peirce says, but different.
They are worse than less exact to a Kantian, and can appear more exact
only to those who take Mill’s view, which is nominalistic. And this
substitution of Mill’s is regarded by realistic Mr. Peirce as a mere
“rewording of Kant’s definition”!—
Mr. Peirce makes too much of the idea of “_Erzeugung_, which,” as he
correctly says, “is Kant’s word for the sequence of effect from cause.”
Yet Kant’s idea of _Erzeugung_ does not conflict with “the modern
mechanical doctrine.” Kant says in that very same chapter, “_Aller
Wechsel (Succession) der Erscheinungen ist nur Veränderung_,” i. e., “All
change (succession) of phenomena is only transformation.” (!) Does not
Mr. Peirce know that Kant calls every world-conception that stands in
contradiction to the mechanical principle “a philosophy of indolence,” or
“_faule Weltweisheit_”?—
The same Kant who proposed a mechanical explanation of the evolution of
the starry heavens, objected very strongly to that kind of explanations
“which derive all order from chance”; and speaking of Epicurus’s
“absolute chance”(!) he adds: “Epicurus was even so reckless (_so
unverschämt_) as to demand that the atoms should deviate from their
straight course without any cause.” Mr. Peirce has either overlooked in
Kant these passages, or, if he has read them, he has never taken them to
heart.—
Mr. Peirce objects to my statement that according to his philosophy the
domain of mind is characterised by absence of law. He argues: “Is not one
of my papers entitled ‘The Law of Mind?’” Yet this law of mind, he states
two lines further on, “requires its own violation.” (P. 552.)—
The “sporting” of the primeval chance, Mr. Peirce says on page 552
of this number, is “not undetermined and indeterminable,” because
“its ultimate result must be an entire elimination of chance from the
universe.” Shall we understand that the “arbitrary sporting” of the
primeval chaos, with which Mr. Peirce (according to _The Monist_, Vol. I,
No. 2, p. 175) begins his cosmogony, was determined? If absolute chance
is determined, why not call such a philosophy “determined Indeterminism”?
We try hard to understand Mr. Peirce, but sometimes we really have to
give it up.—
Physiology teaches that memory alone changes feeling into consciousness,
but the consciousness of Mr. Peirce’s original Chance is without memory
and habit.—
Chance, a being living and conscious, has, according to Mr. Peirce,
created the world, but the ultimate result of evolution must be an
entire elimination of Chance from the universe. Thus it appears that the
creation of the world is an act of divine suicide. The world-process is a
slow degeneration of God, finally ending in his complete annihilation.
RETROSPECT.
In summing up the result of the whole battle, we find that there is not
a single question on which we have to yield or even modify our position.
Our position remains the same, while Mr. Peirce’s position has become
glaringly untenable. There is one point, however, in which justice
demands that we should recognise that he is right. I should not have
called Hamilton “Mr.,” but “Sir William.” I can, however, assure Mr.
Peirce that this mistake of mine (which in all my allusions to Hamilton
occurs only once) was a mere slip of the pen; it was not ignorance on my
part and still less was it any disregard of the rules of politeness.
We are obliged to reject the favorite ideas of Mr. Peirce, and have only
to add that our esteem for him has not been lessened, in spite of all
disagreements, and notwithstanding the flaws we have detected in his
reasoning. On the contrary, our admiration for him as a dialectitian
has been greatly increased, for, in truth, we have never before seen
propositions so untenable in their nature, so odd and almost bizarre, as
those of “absolute chance,” of “matter as effete mind,” of “feeling as
being the inner aspect of chance,” and of “real growth as opposed to the
conservation of energy,” defended with greater adroitness.
Mr. Peirce is unusually familiar with certain branches of learning, of
which he has made a specialty, and also with general philosophy; but he
has original ideas, and he prizes them too highly. Where he makes no use
of his originality, he does extraordinarily good Work. Thus, most of his
papers on logic, published in sundry magazines, are, in their critical
as well as constructive parts, strictly scientific and almost free from
apocryphal speculations. Only slight hints in them have been a puzzle to
me and other readers of his essays. Of late, however, Mr. Peirce has come
out more explicitly with his peculiar philosophy, and we regret to say
that the more he allows his original ideas to enter into his thoughts,
the more warped are his theories.
While we regard Mr. Peirce’s original ideas as erroneous, we must
say that they are nevertheless highly interesting and stimulating.
His propositions are presented so vigorously, so attractively, so
brilliantly, that while perusing his articles, we find them remarkably
suggestive; we enjoy them as we do poetry. They read like a romance of
the origin of the world or a fairy-tale of metaphysics.
Mr. Peirce’s views should receive the consideration of all earnest
students of philosophy; for he goes to the root of its main problems, and
his very errors are instructive.
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] Kepler’s scheme is, that all the regular solids, icosahedron,
dodecahedron, octohedron, tetrahedron, and cube should be placed one
within the other at such distances that spheres could be described
between them so as to touch the corners of each respective interior and
the planes of each respective exterior solid. He found, by placing the
sun in the centre and allowing the planets to move in great circles on
the spheres, (making the circle between the icosahedron and dodecahedron
equal to the orbit of the earth,) that then the distances between the
planets would, upon the whole, agree with astronomical observations.
This theory is as ingenious, as fascinating, and as original as Mr.
Peirce’s propositions. It has only one little fault; it does not agree
with facts. And Kepler afterwards abandoned his original theory.
[126] Like Mr. Peirce, Kepler had, in his days, too, thought of the
possibility of making the world evolve from chance. When, in 1604, a new
and brilliant fixed star suddenly appeared in Ophiuchos, he took up the
problem of star-evolution. We will let Kepler tell the story in his own
words as it appears in his treatise on the new star:
“Yesterday, while pondering over the problem, I was called to dinner, and
my young wife served the salad. ‘Do you think,’ I asked her, ‘if since
the origin of creation, pewter platters, salad leaves, oil and vinegar,
and also hard-boiled eggs had been flying in a chaotic mixture through
space that _Chance_ would have been able to collect them to-day in a
salad?’ ‘Certainly not in such a good mixture as this is,’ was the reply
of my beautiful wife.”
Kepler rejected the idea that the world could have evolved by chance.
[127] The philosophical articles of the _Century Dictionary_ do not
seem to be free of party spirit. An extraordinary amount of praise is
given to the mediæval realists which, considering the vagaries of their
propositions, they do not deserve. On the other hand, the blame for
the discredit into which scholasticism has fallen is heaped upon the
nominalists.
[128] I said in _Fundamental Problems_, page 142, “The introduction of
the word positivism into philosophy is the merit of M. Auguste Comte.
Although we cannot accept much of M. Comte’s conception of positivism
we gratefully adopt the name.” There are plenty of other passages in
which my usage of the term positivism, as distinguished from the French
positivism, is set forth, so that there could be little danger of being
misunderstood.
[129] My main objection to the term Absolute is to forestall any
hypostatising of a vague abstract notion which can only serve the purpose
of mystification. I suffer the term Absolute in a loose sense when it is
understood that it is used loosely. I do not say, as Mr. Peirce seems
to believe, “absolutely universal” or “absolutely necessary.” The words
universal and necessary are sufficiently significant to me without any
additional emphasis.
Reality is relative throughout. Absolute existences are, if the term is
taken seriously, nonentities; and the expression “The Absolute” for the
whole of existence or for those features of existence which are universal
and necessary is, to say the least, misleading. These are my reasons for
rejecting the Absolute as a philosophical term. There is, of course,
no objection to the term in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and other
sciences, where it has acquired technical meanings.
[130] Mr. Peirce correctly says that the axioms of geometry are now
exploded. This, however, does not overthrow the reliability of formal
mathematics; on the contrary, it places it on a safer basis than that of
unprovable assumptions, which must be taken for granted.
We look upon the whole system of geometry as a _product of mental
operations_. We perform some operations and note what their products are.
We do something and mind the consequences of what we do. The problem
of modern geometry is to invent a method by which we can construct in
the simplest manner possible a straight line and a plane. Euclid still
presupposes the existence of the plane and assumes it to be such that
parallel lines do not meet. When we are able to construct the plane of
Euclidean geometry, we can dispense with the axiom of parallels, for, in
that case, the plane will possess the qualities it has by construction.
We can very well execute other constructions in which parallel lines
possess other qualities, and we shall on the basis of such an altered
plan of operation be able to produce entirely different systems of
geometry.
We must distinguish between the space of our mathematicians and real
space. Experience teaches us that real space has three dimensions
which means that from a given point every other point is determinable
by three magnitudes. We might doubt (although I think there is little
occasion to do so) whether the real space of our experience is truly
three-dimensional, but we cannot doubt that the truths developed in the
one-dimensional system of numbers, in the two-dimensional system of plane
geometry, in the three-dimensional system of solid geometry, and also in
_n_-dimensional systems each in their respective domain are perfectly
reliable, for they are unequivocally determined, they are _eindeutig
bestimmt_. There is no application of the theory of probabilities in a
field where the products are not due to chance but result with certainty.
[131] I wonder why the _Century Dictionary_ does not mention the
scholastic usage of the word _univocus_ as the root of univocal.
Similarly we are not told that the word _incompossibilitas_ is an
invention of the schoolmen. Duns Scotus, Mr. Peirce’s favorite
philosopher, uses the terms _univoce_ and _incompossibilitas_ freely.
[132] We accept in this argument Mr. Peirce’s solutions, which, however,
are his own. A simpler example would have been more appropriate.
[133] The belief in a duality of truth appears quite rational from the
dualistic standpoint of the middle ages, and the arguments of Scotus are
cleverly devised, being based upon the supposition that the fall of man
had changed the entire order of the world, so that the laws of nature
prior to the Fall were different to those which obtain now.
[134] Duns Scotus was a very zealous advocate of ecclesiastical
supremacy, even advising, for instance, the prosecution of the Jews in
order to convert them. It is a strange irony of fate that the author of
the _Fons vitæ_, upon whose authority Scotus so largely depends and from
whom he derived some of his most important ideas was an Israelite. Scotus
did not know that Avicebron was a pseudonym of the Spanish Jew Salomon
ben Gebirol.
[135] I omit here a discussion as to whether or not the conservation
of energy is true or not. I need not mention that the views of our
physicists, such men as Helmholtz, Mach, Maxwell, Tait, and others differ
widely from Mr. Peirce’s presentation of the subject. Mr. Peirce rejects
the law of the conservation of energy, but retains the conservation,
or (as he prefers to say) perduration of matter. I waive the question,
whether this is consistent, and call attention only to another, most
flagrant contradiction. Mr. Peirce states that, “not only the total
amount [of matter] remains constant, but all the different parts preserve
their identity”; and yet he says that “matter is effete mind.” Thus when
mind becomes effete, the amount of matter increases; however, when the
habits of matter are broken up, mind originates, and the amount of matter
decreases. This, it seems, would make any perduration of matter and of
the identity of its different parts impossible.
[136] That my view of the _a priori_, as Mr. Peirce claims, is
“Schleiermacherian” is new to me.
[137] It is a matter of course that frequently several events coöperate
to bring about an effect. In that case we have our choice, either to
speak of several causes, or to treat the coöperation of all of them as
_the_ cause, or to select one of them to be called the cause, while the
others may be counted among the conditions.
The limitation of a system of causation depends entirely upon the purpose
of our inquiry, and we must here, as in many other things, use discretion.
Mr. Peirce concludes, that according to my view of causation we can,
in a relatively uniform motion, such as the flight of a cannon ball,
regard the motion of every moment as the cause for the motion of the
next moment. I say “relatively,” for absolutely uniform motion does not
exist. I grant this, but I do not grant what Mr. Peirce regards as a
contradiction of mine, that in that case the cause would be equal to the
effect. A man who knows the artifices of the hair-splitting Eleates and
the other conundrums of logic, should know that every second of time is
different from every other second; 12 o’clock is different from 1 second
past 12. He who denies this, has only to miss a train in order to be
converted. And how much more different than the moments of time are the
various moments of real motion, for in every moment the moving body is in
another place, with changed relations; and if that does not constitute a
difference, we should have to deny the existence of motion.
[138] See my article on “The Continuity of Evolution” in _The Monist_,
Vol. II, No 1; and also “Monism and Meliorism,” p. 73, where “the
struggle for the ideal” is contrasted with “the struggle for life.”
[139] For details see, in _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 4, page 518, et
seqq., and 527, et seqq., my articles, “Mr. Spencer on the Ethics of
Kant,” heading iv, and “What Does Anschauung Mean?”
I now forgive Mr. Spencer; for if a Kant scholar like Mr. Peirce can
fall into this unpardonable mistake, why should not Mr. Spencer, whose
knowledge of Kant’s writings is, as he confesses himself, extremely
limited, have the same privilege?
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THEISM.
I. THE REALISM OF THEISM.
It is commonly alleged that there is deeply seated in the human mind
a belief in the existence of a supreme being, and that the prevalence
of such belief is evidence that it has a basis in supernatural
revelation. It is urged in reply to this assertion, that this belief
is not universal, and that in any case its presence cannot be regarded
as satisfactory evidence that is well founded. It is known that the
disposition to worship is aroused by grand and beautiful objects; and as
Darwin well remarks in one of his letters, the natural sentiments of the
sublime and the beautiful easily assume a personal direction. Scientific
explanations, moreover, push a personal source of things ever further
from us, and it is becoming apparently more easy to doubt or deny any
such source whatever.
Prevalent human instincts and intuitions are, however, the result of
experience imperfectly or perfectly digested, as the case may be.
In most instances they yield to analysis something of value. A more
plausible explanation of the theistic instinct is the anthropomorphic
one. Man knows that he originates many movements, both of his own body
and of other material things, and he knows of no other real source of
such movements. He therefore, in his primitive state, before scientific
explanations are attained, naturally refers motions in nature to an
original personal source. This, it may be supposed, is the natural habit
of the unsophisticated mind, and is at the bottom of theistic belief,
whether as unexplained in consciousness, and therefore an instinct, or
as a distinctly formulated belief. The phenomena of nature must have
originated somehow, and there is no other conceivable source of motion
than a personal one.
Facts developed by scientific research tend to weaken this
anthropomorphism. The indestructibility of matter means that it has never
been created. The conservation of energy states that matter has always
been in motion. The law of organic evolution is supposed to do away with
the necessity for creative intervention in the origination of plants
and animals. Finally, the observed facts of the evolution of mind show
that this, the light of the world, grew like the organic beings which
it inhabits. Nothing higher than man has been found, and there seems to
be no ground for suspecting the existence of any higher mind. And man
himself dies and undergoes dissolution, like other organic bodies. The
result of this use of the facts of science is agnosticism, at least. We
know of nothing beyond what they teach, and some agnostics go so far as
to say, “ignorabimus,” we shall never know. Agnostics, however, have
their faces set in different directions. Some rest in it as a relief
from mental toil, as persons more theologically inclined join a church.
Others, believers in the progressive evolution of knowledge as of other
phenomena, set themselves to explore the unknown country, believing that
our opportunities in this direction are practically unlimited.
Let us look again at this anthropomorphism which is so deeply seated and
so widely spread. Its essence is the fact that we control our own bodies
in a great degree and that our material organs obey the behests of our
mind. We do things for, to us, satisfactory reasons, and for satisfactory
reasons we leave many things undone, which we could readily do. What has
science done towards explaining this most ordinary phenomenon? We may
truthfully say, absolutely nothing. It remains a fact that a majority, if
not all animals, move their bodies in their entirety or in part, because
they have sensations. In the lower animals these sensations are merely
either sense-impressions from without, or they are from within, being
produced by their physical condition. We rise but little in the scale,
when effects of memory are evident, for we find that many actions are
due to experience of the result of former actions. With still higher
development, mental organisation becomes more apparent, and the reasoning
and emotional states have more and more distinct outcome in intelligent
acts. But the mechanism by which the act is called forth by the mental
state, has never been explained.
The difficulty lies here. A sensation, or a state of mind, weighs
nothing. A material body, let it be a cell or a mass of cells, as a
muscle, weighs something. How then can the former move the latter? From a
mechanical point of view, it cannot be done. For that which has no weight
to set in motion anything which has weight, is to violate the law of the
conservation and correlation of energy. And this law is not only an _a
priori_ necessity, but it has been demonstrated _a posteriori_ in so many
cases that exceptions cannot be thought of. So a school of physiologists
say that _it is not done_. No animal eats because it is hungry, or drinks
because it is thirsty. The man does not direct the muscle of his arm when
he writes, nor those of his tongue when he speaks. But it is easy to see
why such a school of physiologists includes but an infinitesimal part of
mankind.
There is a school of evolutionists who account for the whole matter
in harmony with the views of the physiologists above mentioned. I
refer to the Post-Darwinians, who account for evolution by natural
selection exclusively. That is, animals originally moved aimlessly
in all directions. Those whose movements were beneficial to them,
survived, while those whose movements were not beneficial, or which were
injurious, perished. As frequent motions in a given direction lead to
habits, so were inaugurated movements which were habitually beneficial
to the actors, which have therefore persisted and multiplied. Thus were
established the multifarious habits of animals and men. Consciousness had
nothing to do with the process. It merely acted the part of the onlooker,
being simply aware of what went on. “Like the locomotive whistle,” says
Huxley, “it made considerable noise, but did none of the work.”
To a person familiar with the facts of the evolution of the structures of
animals, this seems like a most inadequate theory. It is a commonplace
that no kind of selection, either artificial or natural, ever originated
anything. Selection simply selects between existing alternatives. The
fundamental question of evolution is, What is the origin of things?
What is the fate of things originated? is a secondary question. To
this first question the Post-Darwinian reply must be, that everything
possible has originated no one knows yet how, so that what has survived
was necessarily to be found in this _embarras de richesse_. This is an
enormous assumption, and one to which the history of the life of past
and present ages lends no support. No such multifarious and promiscuous
variation is known to have occurred in living or in extinct organic
beings. But if the variations have not been infinite, then the chance of
the existing one having been hit upon becomes greatly reduced, and the
chance of its having occurred at the same time in individuals of opposite
sex is still smaller. Finally, the chance of its not being immediately
bred out by the overwhelming numbers of individuals not possessing it, is
indeed infinitesimal. In fact, it is evident that variations of structure
must have appeared in numbers of individuals of a species at the same
time, in order to secure survival. This indicates a common cause of
general application. That such causes have existed and been effective
at all periods of past and present time is amply proved by the facts
of geology and paleontology. The most influential in effecting change
of form and structure has been the motion of the body and of its parts
necessary to secure its food, to defend or protect itself from dangers,
and to reproduce its kind. The direct mechanical effects of these motions
on all the materials of the body may be traced in the successive stages
of the forms of past ages to those of the present time.
The objections above made to the theory of multifarious variation of
organic forms, apply with equal force to the theory of multifarious
movements of organic beings as furnishing the source of intelligent
habits. An additional and especial objection to the latter hypothesis
is the fact that it does not recognise the well-known adaptability of
animals to new situations and circumstances. If the events of life were
a routine moving with mathematical precision, the theory of origin from
multifarious variations would have a better foundation; but this is not
the case. Food, friends, and enemies do not appear in stated periods,
quantities, or qualities. Emergencies are common, and variation of
circumstance is the rule. Without sensation, uniform habits would but
lead to destruction. Everything which should not be presented in the
habitual form and at the habitual time would be neglected. Food and
drink would be refused, or not obtained; defense and reproduction would
not be attempted under the proper conditions. In fact, the conduct of
living beings would be no more intelligent than that of inorganic matter
in motion, were sensation to have no share in the process. But as soon
as we believe that the habits of animals are due to hunger, thirst,
and the perception of temperature, resistance, etc., their acts become
intelligible, and the formation of habits becomes a necessary consequence
of memory or the faculty of subsequent recognition of sensations
experienced at a previous time.
It is, in this connection, of great interest to recall the diverse
effects on our mental history of sense-impressions, as compared with
the effect of thought. Sense-impressions are not remembered in the
proper sense of the term. The repetition in memory is always vastly more
indistinct than the original state of consciousness; so much so as to be
a very different thing. Thought, on the contrary, when remembered at all,
is an exact repetition in quality of its first presence. The presentative
consciousness has one quality; the representative and re-representative
have another quality. This shows us that the structural arrangement
of brain substance concerned in the latter forms of consciousness
have a far more permanent quality than that due to the former. They
thus constitute more permanent acquisitions, and this being the case,
must have a most important bearing on evolution.[140] This is because
it is a representative state which determines action. The process of
determination may become so rapid as to be almost instantaneous; but
it had to be learned and the representation was what gave the act its
character and which organised the machinery of the automatic or reflex
act.
I here refer to the low degrees of consciousness sometimes called
subconsciousness, and the expression, “the subliminal consciousness,”
introduced by F. Meyer. All shades of consciousness intervene between
the most distinct forms and the unconsciousness of the reflex state.
Intelligent subconsciousness is a low stage in this evanescent
series. Stages on the passage to and from sleep, and other forms of
unconsciousness due to physical causes, are properly termed subconscious.
There are reflexes which are due to mechanisms which we inherit from
our animal and human ancestors, which are sometimes accompanied by
consciousness. The amount of intelligence displayed will depend on
the function involved. Experiments on vertebrate animals show that
intelligent adaptation of the movements of the body have been transferred
forwards in the brain during the course of evolution. Thus, a fish which
retains the medulla only, will guide itself through the water so as
to avoid danger. If the cerebellum and thalami are left to a reptile,
it will avoid destructive acts. But if a mammal is deprived of its
hemispheres, its actions are without design, and it is incapable of
self-preservation.
It may be that in the temporary absence of the higher consciousness,
the lower forms which once existed in our ancestors may be revived, as
in some of the elements of our dreams, and in some forms of cerebral
disease, when much of the blood is withdrawn from the cortex or parts
of it. The amount of consciousness necessary to the performance of
intelligent acts depends on the novelty of the situation. Many of the
theories on this subject, however, take it for granted that intelligent
acts arise in primarily unconscious states. This is only credible on the
supposition that such acts have arisen by natural selection only, a view
which I have combated on a previous page. Some authors use expressions
which can only imply unconscious consciousness. This is of course
absurd and self-contradictory. No source but sensation can be found for
intelligent acts.
It is true that there are some movements of organic bodies which have an
intelligent appearance, to which we cannot ascribe consciousness. Such
are those of the spermatozoöids and of the leucocytes. Some of the lowest
animals and plants cannot be yet proved to be conscious. We cannot now
explain the nature of the movements which these forms exhibit, but they
will probably yield to research. Enough it is for our present purpose
to know that the majority of animals are conscious for a large part
of their lives. And we have abundant evidence to show that movements
inaugurated in conscious states may be performed, so soon as learned, in
unconsciousness, and become part of the mental furniture of the animal.
It seems, then, that the control of ponderable matter by mental states
is not the exclusive prerogative of man, but is a phenomenon of common
observation in the animal kingdom. The facts indicate that it is
characteristic of mind to move resistant and tri-dimensional matter
under suitable conditions. These conditions are rigid, but within the
limits which they define, the sequence is definite. It is difficult
to believe in anything which is in direct violation of mechanical
necessity, and a mere hypothesis to that effect would not deserve a
moment’s consideration. But the belief that the body, or parts of it, are
moved in direct obedience to mental states is founded on more numerous
observations than are most of those beliefs which we hold to be true. In
fact there is no scientific doctrine better supported by observation and
experience than this one. On this ground alone, then, we are compelled
to believe in something in the universe which is supermechanical, or
extramechanical. We may call this supernaturalism, or occultism, or
what we like, but the fact remains. We have in it the germ of theism,
anthropomorphic, if you will, but one which grows in importance as we
come to examine further into the characteristics of mental action.
Before going into this part of the subject, I will refer to the part
played by mind in evolution. From what has gone before, it is evident
that this part has been an important one. If structures are produced by
motions, it is clear that habits produce structures, and _vice versa_;
and that under the law of natural selection only the useful and harmless
ones have survived. It follows, then, that progressive evolution of
form is secured by the presence of consciousness, and must, sooner or
later, fail without it. With development of intelligence the progress
must become more continuous and rapid. The facts of paleontology confirm
such a hypothesis; since the more intelligent animals (Mammalia) have
generally supplanted the less intelligent, (Reptilia and Batrachia),
whenever brought into conflict with them. The supremacy of the
intelligent over the unintelligent Mammalia is also clearly shown by
research into their past history. The modification of type, or evolution,
has also become more and more rapid as time has advanced and intelligence
developed.
There is another reason why the intervention of supermechanics into
the process has been necessary to secure such results as we observe in
the evolution of life. The law of inorganic evolution is, as Spencer
epitomises it, “the integration of matter and the dissipation of
energy.” Natural chemical reactions when not interfered with by human
intelligence, produce solids and give out heat. In other words, they
result in death and not in life. To produce life something different from
chemical energy has been necessary. And as the case is a parallel one
to the evolution of the types of life, we may suspect that the agency
at work has been a related one. It is some form of energy of the vital
class which is able to overcome the bonds which hold dead matter in
their adamantine grasp; and it is evident that such an energy could have
been organised only in some region where mechanics of a superchemical
order prevail. If we take a large view of the universe the alternatives
of life and death present themselves clearly before us. The law of the
latter is the integration of matter and dissipation of energy. The law of
the former is the converse; the loosing of the bonds of matter, and the
production of mechanism for the raising of the type of energy. The first
is catagenesis, the latter is anagenesis. The end of catagenesis is the
extinction of all mind and all life. Anagenesis sustains both. The best
foundation for our belief in anagenesis is that it exists. Catagenesis
has not destroyed it, and this fact must lead us to suspect that it is
the product of an agency which is superchemical; and the only such that
we know is consciousness.
In the presence of such a far-reaching hypothesis we are called upon to
consider more particularly the relations of mind to its physical basis.
The essential condition of the existence of mind as we know it, is
metabolism. The substance[141] of the nervous cells must be in a state
of decomposition and recomposition; old material loosing its chemical
bonds and giving forth energy, and new material arriving to undergo
the same process. The energy thus produced displays the phenomena of
mind, and as such differs widely from the inorganic energies of heat,
light, etc. The extent to which it displays habits depends on the part
of the nervous structure where it is produced. In the spinal cord it is
strictly automatic, and as we approach the hemispheres the so-called
voluntary element becomes more apparent, until a region is reached where
conception, deliberation, and judgment have their seat. In this region
energy is purely mental in its attributes, and it unlocks the executive
mechanism of the body, and puts it in action in accordance with the needs
of consciousness. So far, mechanical laws explain the order of events.
The supermechanical resides in the mental content and its effects on the
outgoing energy. No quantitative relation can be shown to exist between
the results of the mental processes of classification, conception,
judgment, etc, and the amount of incoming or outgoing energy. Indeed it
is plain that none can exist, if the statement already made be true,
viz., that thoughts are without weight. This part of the subject requires
critical treatment, but the general result is included in the above
statement, which is sufficient for our present purpose.
Since consciousness possesses such extraordinary relations to matter we
may well suspect that it has a wider distribution than comes within the
purview of our present limited ken. Why should it not protect and nourish
itself under conditions different from those which prevail in our planet?
The one condition necessary to it is metabolism—which means free energy.
The kind of physical basis cannot be important, provided it be capable
of exhibiting this kind of non-automatic energy. Automatism and all its
reflex consequences are the death of consciousness, as every one knows.
From such a type of energy all the fixed types of energy must have been
derived, and with them the types of both mental and physical structures.
In its freest form it should have as a physical basis a form of matter
which should be without habits, but always ready to undergo a catagenetic
change into routine energy and ultimate unconsciousness. Such a medium
should be unspecialised matter, and the consciousness inhabiting it would
be a creator. Such consciousness would be readily transmitted wherever
the physical basis should be suitable, and one such substance is our
protoplasm. The probable inferiority of protoplasm as a physical basis
is indicated by the long and tedious education which has been necessary
to enable beings made of it to attain a high order of intelligence. In
such a basis anagenesis is slow, and catagenesis is easy. Other bases
might be imagined where the reverse would be the case. No assumption
can be made as to a constant and limited amount of consciousness in the
universe. That such is the case is supposable; but it is also supposable
that the amount of suitable physical basis may be increased by a process
of assimilation of non-conscious matter, as is done by animals in
digestion and reproduction. This process might continue until all matter
should be brought into that generalised condition which is necessary
to the continuance of consciousness. The entire universe would then
be conscious, and a maximum limit would be reached. In the primitive
consciousness, whatever its extent in space in the Universe, we have the
Supreme Being or Person.
II. THE IDEALISM OF THEISM.
What I mean by the above expression is the theism which is supposed
to be demonstrated by idealistic metaphysics. There are two forms of
this alleged demonstration, both of which have for their starting-point
the basis of the idealistic philosophy. This basis is the fact that we
know nothing of matter excepting as sense-impressions. From this it is
inferred that were conscious beings to become extinct, matter would
no longer exist. It is also a consequence of this belief that what we
observe of the conduct of matter, which we call by the name of natural
law, is of purely mental origin.
If now the universe consist wholly of mind, the totality of it, either
as reduced to a body of general laws, or to a single comprehensive
generalisation, or concept, is one form of idealistic God. The other
demonstration is as follows. Since matter exists as mental states, and
since these mental states are common to mankind, who are mortal; since
these mental states reproduce themselves from generation to generation,
it is inferred that a permanent mental state exists, which possesses the
permanent sensations we call matter. And this common mind of humanity is
God.
The difference between these deities is this. In the first case he is an
abstraction of the human mind and therefore not a person apart from such
men as are capable of the generalisations of which he consists. In the
second case he is a person apart from humanity. The validity of either
demonstration to the thinker depends on his point of view. To every one
but the idealist, the first proposition is atheism. The evidence for the
second is metaphysical anthropomorphism, and would be a demonstration,
were the theory of idealism well founded.
The fact that we only know matter as sense-impressions does not, in
the opinion of realists, prove that it does not exist as the resistant
and extended. Resistance of each part to the movements of other parts
(energy), and extension in space, are conditions about which we have a
great deal of information. Our lives are spent in overcoming the one, and
in getting round the other. Our methods of dealing with it represent the
antithesis of those employed in thought-processes. The latter are best
performed in the absence of the muscular exertion which is so necessary
in dealing with the former. I have referred to the well-known difference
in consciousness between sense-impressions and the representation and
re-representation of them. The difference certainly implies a difference
in the immediate sources of the respective kinds of consciousness. The
one is produced by something different from that which produces the
other. In short, the one is produced by the contact of matter external
to our physical basis, and the other is produced by a modification of
brain-structure; and in the first place by that simplest form of it
which is the cause of memory. The effect of such observation is the
conviction that matter exists as something outside of consciousness or
mind, in spite of the fact that we only know it in consciousness. In a
word, consciousness and knowledge imply the existence rather than the
non-existence of something which is known.
The fundamental actualities are, then, subject and object; or, in popular
language, mind and matter. Philosophy includes the sciences which embrace
the knowledge of both subject and object; but the practical philosophy
is the science of the mutual relations of the two. It may be said that
subject and object are opposite sides of the same reality, but this form
of expression appears to me to be no more accurate than the statement
that energy and matter are opposite sides of the same thing. As energy
is the motion of matter, mind is the intelligence of matter; and both
may be called properties of matter with equal propriety, since both are
impossible without a physical basis. Mind, however, differs from energy
in possessing some intrinsic qualities which are in essence independent
of the qualities of the physical basis; and these intrinsic qualities
are the forms of logic. These are, however, but a part of the totality
of mind, although they underlie or penetrate all its representative
activities.
While mind then cannot exist without a physical basis, it remains to
be considered whether any other objective world is necessary to its
existence. It is sometimes alleged that consciousness could not exist
without an objective, exterior to its physical basis. If, however,
consciousness is a necessary attribute of free energy, the latter purely
metaphysical speculation has no foundation. The “intuition of Being”
(Rosmini) would exist, albeit not much specialised, in the absence of
multifarious objects; but the forms of logic would characterise it
nevertheless.
It is alleged that we can never know matter as it is, because our
observation is restricted to the mutual relations of its component
parts. In this assertion our intelligence necessarily concurs, but this
need not cause us to relax our exertions in the pursuit of knowledge.
The practical philosophy is, as already remarked, the knowledge of the
relations subsisting between mind and matter, so that our most valuable
acquisition will be in the end the laws of a relation. We may well
postpone our endeavors after the absolute, even if we can ever attain a
knowledge of it. The realist is content to believe that if we do not know
“things as they are in themselves,” it is because, of the imperfection of
our senses. But we are constantly discovering new aids to research, and
we can put no limit to our power in this direction.
The research into the relations of subject and object, means to theology,
an investigation as to the existence and nature of Deity, and as to an
existence for conscious beings in other than terrestrial life. The pure
idealist reaches an affirmative answer to these problems by a short and
easy route, based on a study of the intrinsic nature of mind alone. The
pure realist reaches a negative conclusion by an equally short cut, by
considering the properties of matter alone. Not a few thinkers entertain
both doctrines at one and the same time, although they are mutually
exclusive and contradictory. No wonder that they reach what Montgomery
well terms “the puzzle of puzzles.” But the rational conclusion from this
deadlock must be, that there is something wrong with the methods of both
sides. To the practical mind it seems that the vice in both methods is
the failure to harmonise properly with their own, the facts adduced by
the opposite side in the discussion. And it is indeed evident that that
cannot be the final philosophy which restricts itself to a consideration
of mind alone; or that which restricts itself to a consideration of
matter alone. That men should pursue different lines of research is
natural. Those whose minds are capable in the fields of conception
naturally prefer idealistic studies; while those whose especial genius
lies in the direction of mechanics, easily pursue-materialistic research.
What is needed is a combination of the two fields of ability in the same
mind.
A considerable class of serious people, observing the diversities between
the schools of philosophy, regard such studies as useless. Since they
have not the disposition or ability to solve the question for themselves,
they find it best to rest in uncertainty, which has optimistic or
pessimistic tendencies according to temperament and education. The
optimist has faith that all is, and all will be, well; while the
pessimist takes the opposite view. Both are sustained in their position
by those teachers who teach the impotence of our faculties and the
uselessness of knowledge. Such appeal in support of their position to the
facts already cited; the imperfection of our senses; the relativity of
knowledge; the inscrutable nature of mind and matter, etc. This position
is, however, a plea of avoidance, and it will be time enough to listen to
it when the avenues of the increase of human knowledge are permanently
closed. This they are not at present.
The key to the position is the doctrine of evolution. Here we behold
the interaction of subject and object, both in our own persons and in
the inferior beings which are with us, and which have preceded us on
earth. That mind has not sprung full-fledged upon this planet, is clear;
and that it has made wonderful progress in power, is equally clear. Why
did it not appear with all its powers “in the beginning”? The answer
obviously is, “the intractability of matter.” Why has it progressed in
face of this obstacle? The answer is, the tractability of matter. Mind,
through its intrinsic quality, has coërced matter, in ever increasing
degree, and the limit of its capacity in this direction plainly has not
yet been reached. Its most important conquest has been that of its own
physical basis, and next to it is the conquest of the world of objects by
which it is surrounded. Its last conquest will be the knowledge of its
destiny, as a projection of its known past. To this end the knowledge
of its own constitution is essential, but this is not all, as the pure
idealist would have us believe. The knowledge of external relations is
also essential, for we can in no state of being escape them. Psychic life
is an “internal adjustment to external relations,” quite as much as is
the physical life, as it is defined by Spencer in the phrase just quoted.
The Deity of evolution indicated in the first section of this paper,
will not satisfy the pure idealist. He is not an absolute, since He
is compelled to respect relations. But we find Him to be just, which
he evidently is not if absolute. He is anthropomorphic, and not an
abstraction of the human mind. And yet as the seat of rationality, and
as the director of free energy, He possesses the function of creator
of whatever is possible. The evolution of independent human minds has
been only possible through education, and here as elsewhere, teachable
students have met with greater success than the stolid.
It has been already pointed out that the process of evolution may be
either progressive (Anagenesis) or retrogressive (Catagenesis). This is
well known to be the case with organic types, where degenerate phyla are
common. It seems, indeed, that in the order of things degeneracy has
occurred wherever it has been possible; that is, under circumstances
which permitted vegetative life through lack of stimuli to energetic
motion. There has always been “room at the top”; but only when all
the lower fields of existence have been for the time being filled,
has there been room at the top only. The history of mental evolution
has accompanied that of general structural evolution, and for similar
reasons. It is well illustrated in human society to-day. These facts
suggest that this has been the history of all evolution, since they
harmonise with the order of evolution observed in our solar system, in
which the inorganic has preceded the organic, or Catagenesis has preceded
Anagenesis. If the forms of non-vital energy represent a result of
Catagenesis, we are not bound to look on minerals as in any sense living,
as has been suggested by Haeckel and others. Most, if not all, forms
of chemical energy have sunk below the vital level, and certainly far
below the possibility of displaying consciousness. We are here looking
over unexplored territory, and one whose elucidation is entirely in the
future, but we may put our ideas in order, if we do nothing more.
Besides his relations to the impersonal materials that surround him, man
has essential relations to his fellow-man. The laws of these relations
are ethics. Much is written and spoken against the utilitarian or
evolutionary theory of ethics. I cannot, however, escape the conviction
that this theory offers the true explanation of the rise of the ethical
sentiment in mankind. But to understand it aright, we must include
the growth of the social sentiment, as well as that of the rational
element, in the evolution of justice or right. The opponents of this view
sometimes commit the error common to all those who do not understand the
nature of mental evolution. Some of them imagine that it is necessary to
suppose that, in harmony with this theory, every man decides his every
act solely in accordance with what appears to him at the time to subserve
the lowest form of selfishness of which he is capable. The doctrine,
on the contrary, maintains that habits of honesty and justice are the
result of the education of the ages, and that men obey such motives
according to their developmental status; that is, in accordance with the
evolution of the habit of preferring the higher to the lower forms of
utility. The further question of what it is that has raised the standard
of utility, is answered by what we see going on around us. The fear of
the law; the love of the approbation of our fellows; the sympathy with
our fellow-men; the fear of their indignation; all these are educators of
great potency, which have always been active. These motives, organised as
character, are compulsory, and it would be strange if they have not been
effective in producing results.
Practical ethics has to do with material beings and their material
possessions, i. e. with person and property. Without the objective,
the content of ethics is purely ideal, consisting of love and hate,
and the justice and injustice of opinion which might be the outcome of
those sentiments. These sentiments are realities of the subjective,
representing the affections, as the form of thought constitutes the
rational faculties. But if we endeavor in thought to deprive love
and hate, justice and injustice, of all material consequences and
implications, we deprive those sentiments of much of their value if we
do not abolish their occasions altogether. It appears to me at least
doubtful whether hate and injustice could exist in a society consisting
of disembodied minds, if such beings could be imagined; a supposition
which I cannot entertain.
If ethics cannot exist without material expression, it is clear that,
on the other hand, they cannot exist without a subjective foundation.
Thus ethics is the highest expression of the relation between mind and
matter. Ethics is the practical application of the mental powers to
human relations, and the more complete the evolution of mind, the more
perfect is the ethical practice. Thus the evolution of the mind is the
guarantee of ethical progress, and the more intelligent the mind, the
more easy will the evolution be. As in all education, the laggards
experience the severities of compulsion, while pains and penalties are
avoided by those who perceive their approach and do not await their
arrival. Here we have the utilitarian ground of our numerous ethical
and religious organisations. They invite men to _a priori_ subjective
theory, and objective practice, so as to preserve society from the evils
of inferior and painful methods of compulsion, which lie at the basis of
ethical evolution. It is the dread of this method which rouses a natural
repugnance in the minds of many men to the doctrine which teaches of it.
But it must be remembered that the instruments of evolution change with
the thing that is evolving, and the conditions of progressive ethics are
the stages of progress of the mind. What is necessary for the education
of the lower mind is no longer necessary for the higher. This is not only
a truth of philosophy, but the fact may be discerned in the religions
which men have made for themselves. They describe the ethical state of
their authors, and prescribe the treatment appropriate to it.
Our knowledge of some parts of evolutionary history is meagre, and on
some of its chapters we are absolutely in the dark. This is especially
true of the causes of the appearance of life and consciousness on the
earth. Spontaneous generation has not been proven, and the immediate
source of sensation is unknown. The conclusions enumerated in the
preceding pages are derived from evidence presented in more or less
complete fragments. But the thesis remains true that mind possesses a
limited control over its physical basis, but one which is sufficient to
account for the main direction of the evolution of those organic forms
which possess it. And it is also true that the essential forms of the
rational mind are not due to corresponding qualities of the physical
basis. These forms are: the principles of identity, of abstraction, and
of generalisation or conception. These characteristics constitute the
idealistic essence of Theism. But we look to the realistic element of
Theism for the demonstration of the distinct personality of God.
E. D. COPE.
FOOTNOTES:
[140] _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society_, 1889, p. 495
[141] Recent experiments conducted in the laboratory of the Johns Hopkins
University show that the cytoplasm of cells, which are exhausted by
labor, is vacuolated.
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
GERMANY.
The name of Cesare Lombroso is now more and more mentioned in Germany,
not only in psychiatrical, juridical, and sociological works, written
for the learned public, but also in the newspapers and magazines. By the
side of occasional recognition of his doctrine of the born criminal and
genius, we meet—and these are the majority of the cases—with violent
attacks on it, which not seldom exhibit real ignorance of the views of
the celebrated Italian investigator. Lombroso himself is partly to blame
for this unfortunate circumstance, for his writings, with their mountains
of undigested material, are so lacking in unity and perspicuity that
misconceptions are very apt to arise.
The German translator of Lombroso, DR. H. KURELLA, psychiatrist in
Kreuzburg, in Silesia, has recently given to the world a synoptical
exposition of Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, under the title
_Cesare Lombroso und die Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers_, Hamburg, 1892,
Richter. The author not only expounds the doctrines of Lombroso, but also
deals critically with them, and, although upon the whole his sympathies
are with the views of the Italian scientist, he nevertheless believes
that the existence of a fixed type of the _delinquente nato_, embracing
all special forms of criminality, is yet a question of doubt. On the
other hand, MAX NORDAU, a widely-read author of ours, gives unqualified
recognition to the theories of Lombroso, fully accepting the idea of
“degeneration,” first introduced by Morel into science and further
developed by Lombroso, and, in completion of the work of his master,
extending this idea to art and literature. In his work, _Entartung_, the
first volume of which was recently published by Carl Duncker, of Berlin,
and is dedicated to Lombroso, “his dear, admired master,” he says:
“Degenerate types are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and
idiots. They are often writers and artists, and these exhibit the same
mental, and frequently also the same physical, traits as those members of
the same anthropological family that satisfy their diseased instincts by
means of the murderer’s knife or the cartridge of the dynamitard, instead
of with pen and pencil.”
People who are acquainted with Nordau’s previous works will perhaps
imagine that this latest book of his is simply a mass of journalistic
ebullitions which can lay no claim to _scientific_ value. This, however,
is wrong. Nordau is not only well acquainted with the patho-psychological
literature of this province—especially with the French—but he also
turns his knowledge to scientific account, which psychiatrists like
Pelman and others have publicly admitted. Taking it as a whole, Nordau
has presented in this first volume of his work a good psychology of
mysticism—good, that is, for all who accept the association psychology.
Nordau’s expositions embrace all the psychological theories which belong
in this province, with their applications to individuals and to the
tendencies of modern literature and art. With respect to the first point,
the author is right in saying that he does not offer here anything new
to the professional psychologist, but he is wrong in his theory that
psychologists will read this chapter with impatience, for his exposition
is unquestioniably elegantly written. Of much greater interest is the
second part, in which a diagnosis of imbecility is rendered upon the
English pre-Raphaelites, the French symbolists, the Tolstois, and
Richard Wagners. The chapter on Richard Wagner will especially attract
attention for its severity. Nordau closes it with the words, “of all the
aberrations of the present time, Wagnerism is the most widely diffused
and the most important. The playhouse at Bayreuth, the _Bayreuther
Blätter_, the Parisian _Revue Wagnerienne_, are lasting monuments by
which the future will measure in wonderment the dimensions of this
degeneration and hysteria of our day.”
Nordau throws light upon numerous mooted phenomena of modern art and
literature, pointing out their diseased features. One is really surprised
at the extent of his work. All in all, it may be foreseen that Koch’s
doctrine of the “psychopathical minor factors”—or those psychical factors
which constitute the border-line between mental health and disease—will
clear up much more extensive fields than they have, when applied in the
direction indicated by Nordau. KOCH has now published the third part of
his work, (which I have repeatedly mentioned in _The Monist_) and thus
completed it. He concludes his last volume with these words: “The domain
of the ‘psychopathical minor factors’ is a wide and very interesting one.
Whosoever enters profoundly into it will learn to look at much in life
with different eyes from those with which he began, will understand many
men and many human acts, which before he did not understand. There are
yet many scientific treasures to be unearthed in this field, and I hope
that I shall win many a coadjutor. I hope, also, that qualified men will
make this theory of the psychopathical minor factors fruitful in wider
fields and for greater problems.”
It is a common belief that it is pre-eminently in our time that psychical
disorders and psychical minor factors play so great a rôle. But that in
the sense of Nordau they are not of so recent origin a careful reader
will learn from a new work of LUDWIG GEIGER, the well-known historian
of literature and civilisation (Paetel, Berlin). Its title is: _Berlin,
1688-1840: Geschichte des geistigen Lebens der preussischen Hauptstadt_.
As yet, only the first volume has appeared, which extends to the death of
Frederick the Great. The reader, however, would obtain an entirely wrong
impression of the work if he were to believe that psychiatrical points
of view are expressly dwelt upon in this book. To find them he must read
between the lines. The book is an extraordinarily painstaking history of
the civilisation of Berlin, taken from the sources, and giving especial
prominence to intellectual factors. We shall reserve the detailed
discussion of this important work for another occasion, perhaps until it
is fully completed.
CHRISTIAN UFER.
BOOK REVIEWS.
HAND-COMMENTAR ZUM NEUEN TESTAMENT. IV. EVANGELIUM, BRIEFL UND
OFFENBARUNG DES JOHANNES. Bearbeitet von _H. J. Holtzmann_. Zweite
verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage. (Freiburg I. B. and Leipsic: 1893. J.
C. B. Mohr.)
The fourth gospel, of all the sacred writings of the New Testament, has
always been the reviewer’s favorite book. Its profundity, its wealth of
philosophical ideas, the fervor of its author’s religious sentiment,
and the spiritual grace that pervades the whole book, exercised an
unspeakable charm on my mind. This gospel was the first to rouse my
doubts in the belief of literal inspiration, and it was again the one,
which, after the severest storms of infidelity had blown over, reconciled
me to the spirit of Christianity. Thus the perusal of Professor
Holtzmann’s commentary again arouses the recollections of former
struggles, and I find that even to-day the first chapter of the fourth
gospel has lost none of its fascination. It is a wonderful book, and its
author is a man whom I always longed to meet and shake hands with, over
a span of almost two millenniums and a world-wide abyss of difference of
opinion.
Only those who are familiar with the difficulties of the St. John
literature of the New Testament can really appreciate this latest work
of Prof. H. J. Holtzmann. He presents in a most clear and concise manner
the problems involved, together with their various solutions, critically
arranged. He carefully avoids obtruding on the reader his own views.
He stands before us as a faithful compiler only. I say “only,” but
this “only” means a great deal. It does not mean that he suppresses or
conceals his own views, it means that he states the facts with scrupulous
impartiality. If there is any partiality apparent in his treatment of
the sacred writings, it is the reverent attitude he preserves whenever
love of truth obliges him to accept the negative result of critical
investigations. And where is there a theological scholar to-day, who
is orthodox enough to dare to accept the theory that the gospel of St.
John was written by the apostle? Holtzmann carries his impartiality
to the extent of not rejecting this old traditional idea, concerning
the authorship of the fourth gospel, but the evidence against it is
overwhelmingly sufficient to satisfy the most narrowminded believer.
Holtzmann teaches us at the same time to understand the spirit of
the first and second century of our era, and thus excludes from the
beginning the old prejudice, that if the author were not the man whom
he impersonated his work must be regarded as a fraud. The historical
value of the book lies in the revelations it gives us concerning the
religious demands of the times in which it was written. The fourth
gospel originated when the Jewish religiosity of growing Christianity
began to expand into cosmic universality. The author was undoubtedly a
Jew-Christian, whose home most likely was Ephesus. Ephesus was the place
where we find the first beginnings of Christian Alexandrianism. Here the
Logos-idea was introduced into Christian thought. Philo, the Alexandrian
Jew, had already represented Moses as the incarnation of the divine
Logos. Should not now a Christian familiar with Philo’s philosophy apply
the same method to Jesus of Nazareth? Some work adapted to satisfy the
wants of the time and especially the religious yearnings for knowledge as
a means of edification was needed. The Christ-idea had taken a definite
shape in the imagination of the Christian congregations of Asia Minor,
consisting of diaspora Jews and Gentiles, and their Christ-idea found a
worthy expression in the picture of Jesus of Nazareth as we have it in
the fourth gospel.
The fact that the author of the fourth gospel was a Jew-Christian,
appears from his readiness to explain Jewish customs. He knows Judaism,
and is familiar with Jerusalem as it appeared after the destruction of
the temple. The probability is that he wrote his gospel between 120 and
140. He is comparable to Matthew in so far as both are greatly interested
in the controversy between Gentiles _versus_ Jews, yet Matthew’s
Israel has grown into the world-wide cosmos. The frequent occurrence
of the very word “cosmos” in the fourth gospel is remarkable. In the
same way the Greek term γιγνώσκειν (to know) appears besides the older
term πιστεύειν (to believe), which latter is a translation of a Jewish
conception, still employed so vigorously by St. Paul. The author of the
fourth gospel is not familiar with Galilee and does not seem to care for
consistency in the details of his accounts, for he frequently contradicts
his own statements. The most important differences between his and the
three synoptic gospels are the accounts as to the main field of Jesus’s
activity, which according to St. John was Judea, according to the
synoptic gospels Galilee, and the day of Jesus’s death, which according
to St. John is the 14th of Nisan, according to the synoptic gospels the
15th of Nisan, so that if we follow the latter, Jesus would have been
tried and condemned, against all Jewish customs, on one of the greatest
festival days. Holtzmann rightly warns the reader, that whatever may
speak in favor of the synoptic gospels as being, in general, historically
more correct, the author of the fourth gospel might have had some special
source for this particular fact.—
The Revelation of St. John has given more trouble to the Christian
exegesis than any other book, and light was not shed upon its plan and
construction, until it was found to be one instance only of a whole class
of literary productions. When we consider the Revelation of St. John in
the same line with other apocalyptic works, and when we understand the
mental disposition of the pious Jews shortly before and after Christ, we
have a clew to the enigmatic visions which are unrolled before our eyes.
The expectations of the Jews in the times of the Maccabees were
disappointed again and again. The great events of the world did not
justify the national hopes, and God did not seem to care about fulfilling
his promises. The last prophet, who called himself Malachi, or “the
messenger of God,” proclaimed the message of the Lord, “Yet I loved
Jacob,” and he comforts the faithful who still endure in all their
tribulations, that “a book of remembrance is written before him for them
that feared the Lord and that thought upon His name.” After Malachi,
a number of revelations appeared, which, to the satisfaction of the
Messianic expectations, explained the events of the world, and prophesied
that those only who should persevere until the end would be called upon
to rule, together with the “Son of Man,” who is to come to smite the
heathens and to rule them with an iron rod. The first apocalyptic author,
who wrote in 164 B. C., impersonated Daniel, the prophet, who had lived
about 400 B. C. The powerful nations of the world are represented as
beasts, the fourth and last beast being the Macedonian empire. It has
ten horns, that is, rulers, the last one being Antiochus Epiphanes. As
soon as his power is broken, the power over the earth will be given to
Israel, which is called the Son of Man. The power of the tenth horn was
broken, indeed, yet the Messianic hopes remained unfulfilled, and thus
new prophecies were wanted, which should again explain the plans of
the Almighty, so that the faithful would still endure and hope. Thus,
Henoch was written, and after Henoch the Assumption of Moses, the book of
Baruch, and other revelations.
The apocalyptic literature is characterised by Messianic expectations and
eschatological reflections. The end of the present course of affairs is
said to be near at hand and a new order will be established in which the
faithful shall rule for a whole millennium and the wicked be tormented.
The Revelation of St. John represents this spirit of apocalyptic hopes
among the early Christians of Asia Minor. It throws much light upon the
conditions and the conceptions of a period concerning which we have
very little information. We here see Christianity in its beginnings.
The coloring of the Revelation is still Jewish. Its author stands in
a conscious contrast to the Greek spirit which is about to change the
properly Jewish character of the new doctrine. The author of the St. John
revelation is a Jew to the backbone still; he denounces the antinomistic
Christianity of the Gentiles as represented by Nocolaitanes whom, we are
told, God hateth. He does not directly mention the apostle St. Paul, but
there is little doubt that he is alluded to in Chap. II, 2, as one of
them “which say they are apostles and are not.”
The more powerful the Greek spirit grew in the church, the weaker became
these original features inherited from the diaspora Jews until they
were dropped forever through the efforts of Origenes who made a decided
and successful opposition to the belief in the millennium. Yet it took
some time for the traditional view of the Messiah to change into the
purer and more spiritual Christ-ideal There were two parties in the
early church who spoke two radically different idioms; the one still
cherished the old chiliasm, dreaming of the establishment of a millennium
on earth. Their terminology moved always in the same allegories: they
spoke of green and fat fields and of sulphurous abysses, of white horses
and terrible beasts, of trees of life, of golden cities and of war and
bloodshed, while the other party spoke of Logos, of the eternal Son
through whom the world had been made, of “the dispensation of the fulness
of the times in which God might gather together in one all things in
Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth,” of the pleroma
and of aeons.
The Revelation of St. John is an expression of the former party and it
was natural that after a complete victory of the latter party, Christian
teachers knew not what to make of this book which shows Christian views
by the side of an irreconcilable Judaism, and a worldly empire in
Jerusalem, the beloved city with twenty-four Jewish elders representing
the twelve tribes of Israel. The rest of Jerusalem is to be finally
converted while there is no hope for paganism. The difference between
Israelites and Gentiles remains a radical one even in the Holy City when
the new heaven and the new earth has been created. The Gentile-Christians
appear as citizens of a lower order. The Israelites alone live in the
city while the Gentiles only walk in the light thereof, and they shall
bring the glory and honor of the nations into it.
We have given a few glimpses of the problems of the St. John literature
only. It is impossible to go over the whole field. Nor is it necessary to
do so. Professor Holtzmann has given us so complete a presentation that
we need but refer to his work which is indispensable to all interested
in the literature of the New Testament. It will be the more valuable
and welcome as it is furnished with an index, a feature rarely found in
German books.
P. C.
DIE WILLENSFREIHEIT UND IHRE GEGNER. By _Dr. Constantin Gutberlet_.
Fulda: Fuldaer Actiendruckerei. 1893.
Dr. Constantin Gutberlet regards the doctrine of free-will as a cardinal
doctrine of Christianity. In the present booklet he endeavors to show
that all attacks made upon it by unchristian savants have failed. He
criticises Höffding, Lombroso, Wundt, Münsterberg, Lotze, P. Ree, and
Schopenhauer, and establishes as his own view a theory of free-will which
he calls “freedom of choice.” He says: “There is no decision without
_sufficient_ reason, but there may be without _rational_ reason. The
sufficient reason is that a greater good may be recognised as possessing
‘blind’ sides, that we can do without it and even reject it for the sake
of these ‘blind’ sides. On the other hand, a lesser good may be given as
an object of willing, and our willing by its own energy conditions the
free decision of the will” (p. 25). Freedom of will is not a reversal
of causation, which latter, according to Gutberlet, is “an absolutely
necessary law” (p. 8 and _passim_).
It is difficult to understand how Gutberlet, taking this view, can class
himself among the indeterminists. From his premises, we should expect
him to take the view which we have defended, that freedom of will is not
contradictory to determinism. If freedom of will means freedom of choice,
in which “we ourselves, as the contents of our ideas, feelings, and
dispositions, are the cause not only of our activities, but also of our
free decision” (p. 19), then our decisions are most certainly determined
by our character. Gutberlet’s criticism of Wundt (pp. 167-171), who
defends freedom of will and determinism, is wide of the mark, and it
seems that Gutberlet is either not clear on this point himself or he does
not draw the consequences of his own standpoint. Says Gutberlet: “Only
on the supposition that there is no other than ‘mechanical’ causation of
natural forces, can the determinist maintain that freedom abolishes the
principle of causation. In the application of the principle of Causation
‘what happens has a cause’ to natural forces, the principle can be
inverted thus: ‘when all sufficient causes are given, the effect follows
with necessity.’ Yet if there are spiritual agents which stand above the
mechanical causation of nature and natural forces, we cannot _a priori_
declare that their effects follow with the same necessity from their
character as is the case with nature. Accordingly, unless we assume the
questionable theory that free causation is impossible, we cannot invert
here the principle of causation and use it against free decision” (p.
168).
How does this sentence agree with Mr. Gutberlet’s statements that
causation is an absolutely necessary law and that “we ourselves ...
are the cause of our free decision.” Our decisions are determined by
“our ideas, feelings, and dispositions,” and yet a sufficient cause
determines its effect only if the causation is mechanical, not if it is
spiritual. Gutberlet explains the difficulty as follows: “Certainly, if
we did not reduce the free decision _once made_ (die _eingetretene_ freie
Entscheidung), to an adequate cause, we should sin against logic and
psychology. But we understand by ‘adequate cause of a decision’ not only
the influence of motives, but also the energy of a free will.” Very well
then, Mr. Gutberlet would be a determinist as much as Wundt. Decisions
are determined by two factors: (1) by the motives (i. e. the objects
which act as stimuli upon the will) and (2) by the character of the
agent. Not everybody is affected by the same stimulus in the same way.
One chooses this and another that motive, and his character determines
the choice; and a man of a certain character, under definitely given
conditions, will freely and yet necessarily choose a certain motive. Dr.
Gutberlet, it appears to us, says yes and no in one breath.
Dr. Gutberlet is the editor of the _Philosophisches Jahrbuch_, a Roman
Catholic periodical. He belongs to that class of men who by partisans of
free thought are regarded as especially dangerous. He is not as narrow
as the common type of _defensores fidei_. He studies the works of modern
savants “whose intellectual superiority,” as he confesses, he “admires
in many respects.” He is broader than most of his _confreres_, and thus
he makes the creed of his church appear broader than it practically is.
We can see no danger in the appearance of such men. It is true, he will
make converts among the educated, or at least, he will keep some wavering
elements within the pale of the church; for the Roman church is, upon the
whole, still very hostile to progress. But, on the other hand, such a man
is in his circles a missionary of science; he will help to broaden the
views of his brethren. He is learning, and they will learn from him.
P. C.
GRUNDZÜGE DER PHYSIOLOGISCHEN PSYCHOLOGIE. By _Wilhelm Wundt_. Leipsic:
Wilhelm Engelmann. 1893.
Wundt’s “Physiological Psychology” is perhaps justly regarded as his
best and most valuable work. We have just received the first part of the
fourth edition and may expect that the second part will soon appear. We
intend to review the whole work as soon as completed, and will state
here only that this new edition contains, among many emendations and
additions, an explicit account of the modern methods of psychological
investigations, with descriptions and illustrations of the most important
instruments invented for that purpose.
κρς.
VERGLEICHEND-ENTWICKELUNGSGESCHICHTLICHE UND ANATOMISCHE STUDIEN IM
BEREICHE DER HIRNANATOMIE. 3. RIECHAPPARAT UND AMMONSHORN. Abdruck
aus _Anatomischer Anzeiger_. By _Dr. L. Edinger_. (Jena: 1893. Gustav
Fischer.)
Dr. Edinger proves in this essay that in the cerebral evolution of
animals the cortex makes its first appearance in the formation of the
cornu ammonis. This convolution being the centre of smell, it is more
than merely probable that smell sensations, or something analogous to
smell sensations, were phylogenetically the first psychical functions.
κρς.
ÉTAT MENTAL DES HYSTÉRIQUES LES STIGMATES MENTAUX. By _Pierre Janet_.
Paris: Rueff & Co. 1892.
M. Pierre Janet, one of the most prominent disciples of Professor
Charcot, presents in this little volume of two hundred and thirty-three
pages a summary of the results of modern psychical research as it is
understood at the Salpétrière. Charcot himself recommends the book to the
medical profession. Janet investigates anæsthesia (Chap. I), amnesia,
abulia, the diseases of motion, and the modifications of character. The
author proposes to “describe the phenomena and endeavors to establish a
rigorous determinism of their relations. The moral view of a diseased
person,” he says, “ought to constitute a part of the clinical diagnosis
while the psychical state must be closely investigated in its connection
with physiological facts. This is the only way in which the physician
can gain a knowledge of the entire man and understand the diseases which
affect his organism.”
Professor Charcot states that Professor Janet’s researches on the mental
state of hysterical persons were begun long ago and completed under his
supervision; that they were expounded by M. Janet in the Spring of 1892
in a few lectures at the Salpétrière; that they tend to confirm the
idea, often expressed in his own teachings, that hysteria is upon the
whole a mental disease.
Hypnotism has long enough been regarded not only as harmless but even as
a panacea for almost all the ailments of mankind. It would be well to
heed Charcot’s warning, as hysterical diseases may be treated with better
success, if the mystery that still surrounds them disappears before calm
and scientific investigation.
ς.
L’ÉCOLE D’ANTHROPOLOGIE CRIMINELLE. By _l’Abbé Maurice de Baets_. Gand:
P. van Fleteren. 1893.
Dr. de Baets, Professor of Philosophy of the Gregorian University
of Rome, Italy, and Secretary to the Bishop of Ghent, criticises in
this elegantly printed little volume the modern school of criminal
anthropology. He believes with Herbert Spencer that, if a great number
of people accept certain errors, these errors must contain a kernel of
truth. Professor de Baets says that he does not deny crime to be an
outgrowth of the organism, to be inherited, to be closely connected with
insanity, etc., but he cannot approve of criminal unaccountableness. The
denial of responsibility, he says, is the denial of the wrong, and the
denial of the wrong is the denial of morality. He sums up his view in
italics on page 48: “Man is responsible for his acts in the measure that
his acts depend on a free will.”
κρς.
AGAINST DOGMA AND FREE-WILL. By _H. Croft Hiller_. London: Williams and
NORGATE. 1892.
The author has much to say against ecclesiasticism and sacerdotalism, and
while he repudiates such men as Wundt and Ribot, he “begs to thank Drs.
Weismann, Luys, and Ferrier from whose labors the views expressed in this
treatise derive that scientific authentication without which they would
be worthless.” The book is apparently a first venture into the stormy
ocean of literary pursuits.
ς.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, OR THE ONE AND THE MANY. By _Antoinette
Brown Blackwell_. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1893.
The author trusts that she has “_demonstrated_ a conscious immortality.”
In a former book of hers entitled “The Physical Basis of Immortality,”
1876, she propounded “the theory of persistent mind-matter individuals”
which are to be conceived as ultimate atoms. The present volume of five
hundred and nineteen pages is written to show that “this conception of
the ultimate atoms could consistently explain and harmonise mental and
material phenomena and by coördinated interpretations of the most diverse
processes simplify and unify nature and her manifestations.” The theory
of the correlation of matter and mind is accepted; “Nature,” the author
says, “is nothing if not mathematical,” and there are many passages to
which no monistic thinker would take exception. Along with them we find
statements, e. g. on the rhythmic motion of atoms, etc., which it will be
difficult to prove. Her peculiar view is characterised in the following
sentence: “All ultimate individualities _may_ be identical in kind, but
no obvious necessity decides that they _must_ be, and in an order of
things where other varieties are prevalent, the weight of evidence for
the present is on the side of varieties, even in the ultimate units.”
The author’s theory (if we rightly understand her) has been tried
before. Some suggestions of Goethe’s seem to indicate that he believed
in soul-monads, and the German psychologist Herbart erected on the
assumption of material soul-atoms his system of a mathematical psychology
in which sound science was curiously mingled with improbable vagaries.
The author of “The Philosophy of Individuality,” although apparently
quite well informed otherwise, has, strange enough, not taken notice
either of Goethe or of Herbart. Perhaps she would have abandoned her
theory if she had been fully familiar with Herbartism and the critique
which it has received; for Herbart’s soul-atoms are to-day regarded as a
thing of the past.
κρς.
DIE GRUNDBEGRIFFE DER GEGENWART. By _Prof. Rudolf Eucken_. Leipsic: Veit
& Co. 1893.
Prof. Rudolf Eucken discusses in this volume such topics as
“Subjective—Objective”; “A priori—A posteriori”; “Monism—Dualism”;
“Idealism, Realism, and Naturalism”; “Theoretical—Practical,” and
so forth. It seems to us that Eucken has not yet fully succeeded in
reconciling his philosophy with natural science. We are glad to notice
that he has a critical eye for the shortcomings of naturalists under
whose methods of classification and mechanical conceptions the properly
spiritual of man would be eliminated. He is judicious in his exposition
of the various problems, but we miss a final solution, such as would
clearly state and recognise the truth in both. Nevertheless the book is
sound, full of valuable information, and its perusal is to be recommended
to every student of philosophy.
κρς.
THE ÆSTHETIC ELEMENT IN MORALITY. By _Frank Chapman Sharp, Ph.D._ New
York: Macmillan & Co. 1893.
The book contains chapters on: (1) the theory of altruism; (2) the
intrinsic worth of character; (3) an analysis of moral beauty; (4)
an examination of the æsthetic method of ethics; and (5) the idea of
obligation in æsthetics and ethics. The author’s knowledge of ethical
theories appears to be limited. Duns Scotus, the Realist, is called a
thoroughgoing Nominalist. In spite of such defects, we find much that
is good in the book. In the end of his discussion the author says with
truth: “When the element of the _good_, or that which is capable of
clothing itself in the form of an ideal, is taken out of the conception
of obligation, this latter degenerates into what is nothing more than
mere submission to an arbitrary imperative....Prometheus, chained to the
rocks for bringing the gift of fire to the wretched barbarous inhabitants
of the earth, in defiance of the will of the ‘Father of gods and men,’ is
one of the grandest productions of the human imagination, and were the
Supreme Being such a one as Augustine and Calvin imagined him, we should
despise the wretched slaves that licked the dust at his feet.”
κρς.
PERIODICALS.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
CONTENTS: Vol. V. Nos. 1 and 2.
DIE STABILITÄT DER RAUMWERTE AUF DER NETZHAUT. By _Franz
Hillebrand_.
UEBER EIN OPTISCHES PARADOXON. (Second Article.) By _Franz
Brentano_.
LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
This second article, “On an Optical Paradox,” is a rejoinder of Franz
Brentano of Vienna to Th. Lipps. We gave an account of this interesting
discussion in _The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 153 et seqq. Professor
Brentano insists on explaining the optical illusion concerning distances
between two points, as seen in Fig. 1-3, by an overestimation of
small and an underestimation of large angles. He complains of being
misunderstood by Professor Lipps who substitutes “acute” for “small” and
“obtuse” for “large”; for, says he, in comparisons both angles may be
obtuse or both may be acute. Professor Brentano adds some more puzzling
figures to prove his case; and, as in his first article, his propositions
are ingenious and thought-stimulating; but his arguments do not suffice
to convince us of the validity of his theory. We do not exactly
intend to deny the general rule as to the overestimation of large and
underestimation of small angles, but are inclined to believe that it will
not serve as a sufficient explanation. We reproduce the most important
figures devised by Brentano, and take the liberty of adding a few remarks
and additional figures of our own.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
[Illustration: Fig. 3.]
Fig. 4 represents two right angles, one of which is divided into nine
angles of 10° each. Brentano claims that we so overestimate the nine
small angles as to take the undivided right angle as an acute one. I can
only say that however much I have tried, I am not subject to the illusion.
[Illustration: Fig. 4.]
In Fig. 5 we have on the straight line _AB_ a series of stations which
are connected with a common centre. The line _AB_ is not a curve, but
this figure reminds us of a perspective view of the sector of a circle.
The drawing appears as the diagrammatic picture of a shield, the buckle
of which is in _C_. Thus _AB_ is conceived as representing a curve. It
does not seem that a comparison of the angles has anything to do with the
illusion.
How much perspective interferes with the optical illusions under
discussion, impresses itself upon my mind, when I think of figure 5 as
the diagram of a mountain, rising above the plane _AB_. If I imagine I
stand below the plane, which may be a high table-land, the line _AB_
appears to my eye straight. But when I imagine I am looking down upon the
plane, the curvature of _AB_ becomes very strongly marked.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.]
In Fig. 6 we can detect no optical illusion. The line _AB_ appears
straight to us. The drawing reminds us of a sunrise on the ocean.
[Illustration: Fig. 6.]
The same must be said about Figure 7. Brentano, in agreement with Lipps,
claims that we are inclined to regard the distance between the ends of
the two lines as larger than between the points. If there is any illusion
at all, it seems to me, that on the contrary, the distance between the
ends of the lines appears shorter. And why? We measure the distance by
allowing our eyes to run from one point to the other and then comparing
the measurements. This comparison is geometrically effected by combining
the respective starting points, and thus judging as to the parallelism
of these two lines mentally constructed. Whether or not the dots appear
equidistant, depends upon the execution of all these operations. While
directly measuring the distances between the points, we have an easier
measurement where the lines are attached. The lines give to the points
a certain vim; they almost appear to move with a velocity indicated by
the length of the little lines, while the isolated dots present a very
phlegmatic appearance.
[Illustration: Fig. 7.]
In order to see what effects other positions of the lines produce, let
us compare in Fig. 9 the several relations by covering the rest. If
there is any illusion as to _a_ and _b_, we should say that the points
of _a_ appear at a greater distance; as to _b_ and _c_, we see the
greater distance in _c_, as to _c_ and _d_, we feel doubtful, while
any comparison with _e_, tends strongly to convince us of their equal
distance. The reason is obvious. The lines in _e_ assist us in drawing
the parallels, which we consciously or unconsciously construct in order
to compare the distances.
[Illustration: Fig. 8.]
[Illustration: Fig. 9.]
A comparison like that of α and β in Fig. 8, where the equal length of
the combining lines is very apparent, induced Brentano to regard the
illusion which is observed in Figures 1-3 as due to the angles. In our
opinion he is mistaken. For the illusion actually takes place in α and
β; only it is quickly corrected with the help of the parallels, which,
as in ε, assist the imagination in making an exact comparison. When we
place α and β either at a sufficient distance, or are somehow prevented
from making use of the parallel lines, we shall have the same illusion
as appears in Figures 1, 2, 3. To prove this, we have but to bring the
figure α in a slanting position, as is shown in λ, and the illusion
is so strong that many will find it difficult to believe that λ is an
electrotyped duplicate of α.
The mooted illusions are not sense-illusions, but illusions of judgment;
and we believe that the explanation of these curious phenomena must be
sought in the elements which unconsciously enter into the make-up of our
judgments.
Lipps says that lines are felt to be movements. If a line is continued,
albeit with a slight declination, the motion appears “free and
victorious,” aspiring beyond itself; while, if confined in the corner
of an acute angle, it seems cut off and impeded. The victoriously
progressive motion is overestimated; the checked motion is underestimated.
Brentano, in order to meet Lipps’s objections, proposes a few additional
figures, of which we reproduce the most important ones in Fig. 10-14.
[Illustration: Fig. 10.]
[Illustration: Fig. 11.]
[Illustration: Fig. 12.]
[Illustration: Fig. 13.]
[Illustration: Fig. 14.]
It seems to us that the main part which the angles play in these or any
other similar figures, consists in leading our imagination astray. The
parallel lines which we attempt to construct for our comparison, switch
slightly off with an inclination toward the angles.
But that is not all; there are other elements that affect our judgment
at the very outset. In measuring a distance we do something, and in
looking at a diagram we think something. The diagram is suggestive of
some reality to which we compare it. All these ideas, be they conscious,
subconscious, or even unconscious, affect our judgment and are sometimes
apt to lead it astray.
In addition we have to mention two things, the influence of which upon
our verdict cannot be doubted; the one is the size of the entire figure,
the other the vacuity of the distance to be measured: both tend to make
the distance appear longer than it really is. To illustrate this, we add
the three Figures 15, 16, 17 which contain no angles and yet show the
same illusions.
[Illustration: Fig. 15.]
[Illustration: Fig. 16.]
[Illustration: Fig. 17.]
The distance between the points in Figure 17 appears longer than in
Figure 16, and in Figure 16 again longer than in Figure 15. The fact is,
that before starting on our measurement-journey, we have in Figure 17
already traversed a good distance after having noted the extraordinarily
lengthened boundary marks. The town _A_ may be exactly as far as the town
_B_, yet the journey to _A_ will appear longer, if I have to ride an hour
before I reach the station, while I may live opposite the terminus of the
railroad to _B_.
When our eyes glide down from one point to the other, we pass in one
case through an empty desert the dreariness of which is not interrupted.
We almost lose our way and become lonesome in its monotony. If our way,
however, is full of variations, we are pleasantly entertained and regard
our journey as so much shorter. The contrast is most obvious in figure
10. The time-illusions as to the swiftness of hours of work or amusement
and the slowness of moments of _ennui_ have become proverbial among all
nations. The more dreariness, the more marked is the lengthening of the
distance, while even a partial accompaniment shortens the traversed road.
κρς.
CONTENTS: Vol. V. Nos. 3 and 4.
THEORIE DES FARBENSEHENS. By _H. Ebbinghaus_.
UEBER DEN MUSKELSINN BEI BLINDEN. By _Paul Hocheisen_.
LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 2.
EINIGES ZUR GRUNDLEGUNG DER SITTENLEHRE. (First Article.) By
_J. Petzoldt_.
KRITIK DER GRUNDANSCHAUUNGEN DER SOCIOLOGIE H. SPENCER’S. By
_P. Barth_.
WERTHTHEORIE UND ETHIK. (Second Article.) By _Chr. Ehrenfels_.
(Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY.
CONTENTS: Vol. V. No. 3.
ON ERRORS OF OBSERVATION. By _Prof. James McKeen Cattell_.
MINOR STUDIES FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY OF CLARK
UNIVERSITY.
ON THE DISCRIMINATION OF GROUPS OF RAPID CLICKS. By _Thaddeus
L. Bolton_.
STATISTICS OF DREAMS. By _Mary Whiton Calkins_.
ON THE PRESSURE SENSE OF THE DRUM OF THE EAR AND “FACIAL
VISION.” By _F. B. Dresslar_.
ON REACTION-TIMES WHEN THE STIMULUS IS APPLIED TO THE REACTING
HAND. By _J. F. Reigart and Edmund C. Sanford_.
EXPERIMENTS UPON PHYSIOLOGICAL MEMORY BY MEANS OF THE
INTERFERENCE OF ASSOCIATIONS. By _John A. Bergström_.
A NEW INSTRUMENT FOR WEBER’S LAW; WITH INDICATIONS OF A LAW OF
SENSE MEMORY. By _James H. Leuba_.
A NEW PENDULUM CHRONOGRAPH. By _Edmund C. Sanford, Ph. D._
LABORATORY COURSE IN PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. (Fourth Paper.)
By _Edmund C. Sanford, Ph. D._ (Worcester, Mass.: J. H. Orpha.)
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 3.
GERMAN KANTIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY. By _Dr. Erich Adickes_.
THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF NEO-KANTISM. By _Prof. Andrew Seth_.
MENTAL MEASUREMENT. By _Prof. J. McK. Cattell_.
BOOK REVIEWS. (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn & CO.)
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 5.
PSYCHOLOGIE DU MUSICIEN. 1. L’EVOLUTION DES APTITUDES
MUSICALES. By _L. Dauriac_.
LA SOCIABILITÉ ET LA MORALE CHEZ LES ANIMAUX. By _Houssay_.
SUR LES IDÉES GÉNÉRALES. By _Marchesini_.
QUESTIONNAIRE SUR L’AUDITION COLORÉE, FIGURÉE ET ILLUMINÉE. By
_Gruber_.
L’ATTENTION ET LES IMAGES. By _F. Paulhan_.
UNE ILLUSION D’OPTIQUE. By _B. Bourdon_.
SCIENCE ET SOCIALISME. _G. Sorel_.
ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 6.
LA NOUVELLE THÉORIE DE L’HÉRÉDITÉ DE WEISMANN. By _Y. Delage_.
UN CALCULATEUR DU TYPE VISUEL. By _J.-M. Charcot and A. Binet_.
PSYCHOLOGIE DU MUSICIEN.—II. L’OREILLE MUSICALE. By _L.
Dauriac_.
REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE.
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.
LE MOUVEMENT ET LES ARGUMENTS DE ZÉNON D’ÉLÉE. By _G. Noël_.
LE PROBLÈME MORAL DANS LA PHILOSOPHIE DE SPINOZA. By _V.
Delbos_.
LE CONCEPT DU NOMBRE CHEZ LES PYTHAGORICIENS. By _G. Milhaud_.
LE DIALOGUE DANS L’ENSEIGNEMENT DE LA PHILOSOPHIE. By _C.
Mélinand_. (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.)
CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.
LES PRÉTENDUS SOPHISMES DE ZÉNON D’ÉLÉE. By _V. Brochard_.
SPIR ET SA DOCTRINE. By _A. Penjon_.
ESSAI SUR LE CARACTÈRE GÉNÉRAL DE LA CONNAISSANCE. By _G.
Remacle_.
PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH.
CONTENTS: Vol. VI. No. 2.
BEGRIFF DER PHILOSOPHIE. By _Uebinger_.
DIE OBJECTIVITÄT UND DIE SICHERHEIT DES ERKENNENS. By
_Isenkrahe_.
DER BEGRIFF DES “WARREN.” (Concluded.) By _Franz Schmid_.
DER GRUNDPLAN DER MENSCHLICHEN WISSENSCHAFT. By _Bahlmann, S.
J._
HANDSCHRIFTLICHES ZU DEN WERKEN DES ALANUS. By _Bäumker_.
(Fulda, 1893.)
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