A Pluralistic Universe
by
William James
Part 2 out of 4
there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd
or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it. The charges of
self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning,
rest on a vicious intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change the _venue_, and to
discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis. As
such, is it more probable or more improbable?
But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the
notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with
which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other object
is the 'God' of common people in their religion, and the creator-God
of orthodox christian theology. Only thoroughgoing monists or
pantheists believe in the absolute. The God of our popular
Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we
stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and the
angels stand outside of both of us. I can hardly conceive of anything
more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or of
Isaiah. _That_ God is an essentially finite being _in_ the cosmos,
not with the cosmos in him, and indeed he has a very local habitation
there, and very one-sided local and personal attachments. If it should
prove probable that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow in
the slightest degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus
may not exist, or may not be the most important existence in the
universe for us to acknowledge. I pray you, then, not to confound the
two ideas as you listen to the criticisms I shall have to proffer.
I hold to the finite God, for reasons which I shall touch on in the
seventh of these lectures; but I hold that his rival and competitor--I
feel almost tempted to say his enemy--the absolute, is not only not
forced on us by logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis.
The great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we make
the world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that will
always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes
the world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that they
prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationality
has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and
practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree _in all
these respects simultaneously_ is no easy matter. Intellectually, the
world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subject
its events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical world
is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally,
the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual
frustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so
supremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of
conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the
type of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that
whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic
hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality
unsatisfied by the same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in one
coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at
first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which
will yield the largest _balance_ of rationality rather than one which
will yield perfect rationality of every description. In general, it
may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any
action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of
exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty
that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic
tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting
and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like. Albeit the
absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively
perfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say that
those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously
have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain
elements in it.
Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationality
of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is the
assurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all is
well with the cosmos--central peace abiding at the heart of endless
agitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful
aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into
detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be
accounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in
our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as
static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our
sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does
give _peace_, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded
by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who
choose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite
world of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers,
is itself eternal. For such minds Professor Royce's words will always
be the truest: 'The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the
condition of the perfection of the eternal order.... We long for the
absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeks
through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time,
but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity. Were there no longing in
time there would be no peace in eternity.... God [_i.e._ the absolute]
who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only possesses
in the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes to
possess it even through and because of my sorrow. Through this my
tribulation the absolute triumph then is won.... In the absolute I am
fulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend
this sorrow.'[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to
cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this
absolute experience analogous. But it is hard to portray the absolute
at all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' style
of language--I use the word not ironically, but prosaically and
descriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with the
kind of emotion that the absolute arouses. One can follow the pathway
of reasoning soberly enough,[8] but the picture itself has to be
effulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly
preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's characteristic form
of rationality. We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the
whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should
be, in spite of all appearances. In making up the balance for or
against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit
side of the account.
The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive
detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven
by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic
possibility.
On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, and
not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous
mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous
irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism
escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of
monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem
of evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the
absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as
darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on it
by something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to
keep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though
we, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could
acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never
just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the
absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which
nothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from
within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a
spectacle with less evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as
the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is
the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever
sense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that
the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing
things is altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationality
acutely, and the 'fall,' the predestination, and the election which
the situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else
in their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remains
a puzzle, both intellectually and morally.
Grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the
absolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world be
more perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms, and
by not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what was
perfect already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the same
spectacle? Suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copy
of a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is that universe improved or
deteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separate
leaves and chapters also created, giving false impressions of the book
to whoever looks at them? To say the least, the balance of rationality
is not obviously in favor of such added mutilations. So this question
becomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of things
being so rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all these
coexisting inferior fragmentary visions?
Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent
reason in things which makes certain combinations logically
incompatible, certain goods impossible. He surveys in advance all the
universes he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his
antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the
evil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best of
all the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the most
abstractly desirable world. Having made this mental choice, God next
proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory
will: he says '_Fiat_' and the world selected springs into objective
being, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its
imperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision.
Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of
Leibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the
_fiat_, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of
being where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine
value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at,
then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not
richer for God's utterance of the _fiat_. He might much better have
remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme,
without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme _as such_ was
admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10]
Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the
perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted
itself into all our finite experiences?
It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them
have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this
point of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes: 'Does not our very
failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? ... In
so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are not
perfect ourselves. And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot be
perfect.'[11]
And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the hypothesis
of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth,' he
calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all
things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in
its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a
self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,--he calls this
problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal _fons
et origo_, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he
concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form
of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate
certainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which
he says he has 'never doubted.' This candid confession of a fixed
attitude of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms and
perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not only
empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid
as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy
is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their
reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.
I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that
_he_ at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but that
the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneous
copies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute's book
alone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as the total
consciousness of everything that is? Must not its field of view
consist of parts? And what can the parts of a total consciousness be
unless they be fractional consciousnesses? Our finite minds _must_
therefore coexist with the absolute mind. We are its constituents, and
it cannot live without us.--But if any one of you feels tempted to
retort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employing
pluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause. The
notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being
depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has _objects_,
not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own
several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional
to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its
definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism
goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be
self-sufficing.[14]
My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of the
absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs
a most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from
the intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The
_ideally_ perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the _parts
also are perfect_--if we can depend on logic for anything, we can
depend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as the
ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are
admittedly imperfect. Evidently the conception lacks internal
consistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution. It
creates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and of
error, from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free.
In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are
practical, not speculative. Not why evil should exist at all, but how
we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need
there consider. 'God,' in the religious life of ordinary men, is the
name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal
tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to
co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.
He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When
John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up,
if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately
right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region
of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally
treated as a paradox: God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. I
believe that the only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite, and I
shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist
in addition--and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational
features, still be left open--then the absolute is only the wider
cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which
in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious
hypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for the
reaction it may awaken.
Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a
relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.
I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.
First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but
it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be,
will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.
Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the
all-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame
an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the
enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many _reductiones ad absurdum_ of
pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as
follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles
facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean
many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact,
which in turn requires _its_ knower, so the one absolute knower has
eventually to be brought in. _All_ facts lead to him. If it be a fact
that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not
a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not
a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulately
aware of all these negations. Along with what everything is it must
also be conscious of everything which it is not. This infinite
atmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to be
explicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as
to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore,
if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The
rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the
more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such
an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]
I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker
to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr.
Joachim's words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an
emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its
defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal
grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile
the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: _reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
caches, just as it seems to_--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis.
_Prima facie_ there is this in favor of the caches, that they are at
any rate real enough to have made themselves at least _appear_ to
every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to
only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates
of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is
infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to
assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course
we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute,
and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the
details of the finite and the immediately given.
If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even
sacrilegious, I am sorry. Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by
what I have to say in later lectures.
LECTURE IV
CONCERNING FECHNER
The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands.
The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best
court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme;
and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with _it_ all is
well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise
to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It
introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain
poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should
have heard.
But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude
that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness
than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher
presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship,
to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with
incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?
Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty,
a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath. Logically it is
possible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them with
the absolute at all. The treaty of offensive and defensive alliance
which certain groups of the Christian clergy have recently made with
our transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on a
well-meaning but baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the old
testament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in common
with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man;
and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of
Abraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into each
other, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective
and modern minds, I reply that although in certain specifically
philosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds more
properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite
another path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is there
to prove it. I propose in these lectures to plead for that other line
of development. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper
framework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all
alternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do for
many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance
with philosophy--I will contrast it with a system which, abstractly
considered, seems at first to have much in common with absolutism, but
which, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at the
opposite pole. I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a
writer but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am
persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on.
It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail,
which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this
audience share. Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the
past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except
one. Had she been born in the Ionian Archipelago some three thousand
years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure
of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The
world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely,
and the Thin. No one can deny the truth of this analysis, as far as it
goes (though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it
has itself a rather 'thin' sound), and it is nowhere truer than in
that part of the world called philosophy. I am sure, for example, that
many of you, listening to what poor account I have been able to
give of transcendental idealism, have received an impression of its
arguments being strangely thin, and of the terms it leaves us with
being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as
this. Some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition;
but thin as that has been, I believe the doctrines reported on to have
been thinner. From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed to us to
straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which
our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one
tries to make a whit concreter. If we open Green, we get nothing but
the transcendental ego of apperception (Kant's name for the fact that
to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed), blown up
into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole
universe. Nature, Green keeps insisting, consists only in
relations, and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal;
a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the
relations by which it determines other things. Present to whatever is
in succession, it is not in succession itself. If we take the Cairds,
they tell us little more of the principle of the universe--it is
always a return into the identity of the self from the difference of
its objects. It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of
them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it
binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness.
This seems the very quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly
grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that
the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and
that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune
'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The
whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.
Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making the
relations between things 'dialectic,' but if we turn to those who use
his name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particulars
of his attempt, and simply praising his intention--much as in our
manner we have praised it ourselves. Mr. Haldane, for example, in his
wonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but
what he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that 'the
categories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and gives
meaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are grasped
in the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposes
the last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth.' He hardly
tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme. He says indeed
that absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or
otherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself from
itself, have as their real _prius_ absolute mind in synthesis; and,
this being absolute mind's true nature, its dialectic character must
show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's and Wordsworth's
poetry, as well as in religious forms. 'The nature of God, the nature
of absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, and
so the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity,
a trinity.' But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth and
establishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane's Hegelianism carries us hardly
an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit.
Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in their
results. Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that reality
cannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything really
outside of one's self is to be self-contradictory, so the ultimate
reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all he
can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is
that the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and can
of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor.'
Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin a fare. 'The main practical
interest of Hegel's philosophy,' he says, 'is to be found in the
abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is
rational and righteous, even when we cannot see in the least how it is
so.... Not that it shows us how the facts around us are good, not that
it shows us how we can make them better, but that it proves that they,
like other reality, are _sub specie eternitatis_, perfectly good, and
_sub specie temporis_, destined to become perfectly good.'
Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that
whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Common
non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the
generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born.
The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt
for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn
our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically
mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole
basis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty so solidly rests, settles
down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel's
gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however
finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is
'implicitly present.'
This indeed is Hegel's _vision_, and Hegel thought that the details of
his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely,
in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no
better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted
faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic
proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel's
logic, and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be
mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,'
which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us
in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end
vision and faith must eke them out. But how abstract and thin is
here the vision, to say nothing of the faith! The whole of reality,
explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless
be present in them all implicitly, altho no one of us can ever see
how--the bare word 'implicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the
monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joachim's monistic system of
truth rests on an even slenderer point.--_I have never doubted_,'
he says, 'that universal and timeless truth is a single content or
significance, one and whole and complete,' and he candidly confesses
the failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this immediate
certainty' to the level of reflective knowledge. There is, in short,
no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all
the little 'lower-case' truths--and errors--which life presents. The
psychological fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough.
The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems
to me to be a _machtspruch_, a product of will far more than one of
reason. Unity is good, therefore things _shall_ cohere; they _shall_
be one; there _shall_ be categories to make them one, no matter what
empirical disjunctions may appear. In Hegel's own writings, the
_shall-be_ temper is ubiquitous and towering; it overrides verbal and
logical resistances alike. Hegel's error, as Professor Royce so well
says, 'lay not in introducing logic into passion,' as some people
charge, 'but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic....
He is [thus] suggestive,' Royce says, 'but never final. His system as
a system has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains
forever.'[1]
That vital comprehension we have already seen. It is that there is a
sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, but
may vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinary
logic, since it denies this, must be overcome. Ordinary logic denies
this because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts
_are_ their own bare selves and nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel's
'system' was Hegel's attempt to make us believe that he was working
by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality
sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all
his results.
What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see
in a later lecture. It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose
thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent,
and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the
speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.
There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between
the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods
concretely can do. If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the
'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of
reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it
may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked
(for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that
in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in
'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been
tried? Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs
to my mind. Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by
sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to
be thanked for all of science's results.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his
metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a
few of the facts about his life.
Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived
from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig,
a typical _gelehrter_ of the old-fashioned german stripe. His means
were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way
of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He passed his medical
examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but
decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical
science. It was ten years before he was made professor of physics,
although he soon was authorized to lecture. Meanwhile, he had to make
both ends meet, and this he did by voluminous literary labors. He
translated, for example, the four volumes of Biot's treatise on
physics, and the six of Thenard's work on chemistry, and took care of
their enlarged editions later. He edited repertories of chemistry
and physics, a pharmaceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight
volumes, of which he wrote about one third. He published physical
treatises and experimental investigations of his own, especially in
electricity. Electrical measurements, as you know, are the basis of
electrical science, and Fechner's measurements in galvanism, performed
with the simplest self-made apparatus, are classic to this day.
During this time he also published a number of half-philosophical,
half-humorous writings, which have gone through several editions,
under the name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary and artistic
essays, and other occasional articles.
But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations
on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation)
produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific
attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the
functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely from
active life. Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner's
malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but its
severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation
incomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to get
well, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine
miracle. This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with inner
desperation, made a great crisis in his life. 'Had I not then clung to
the faith,' he writes, 'that clinging to faith would somehow or other
work its reward, _so haette ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten_.' His
religious and cosmological faiths saved him--thenceforward one great
aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the
world. He did so on the largest scale; but he did many other things
too ere he died.
A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical
and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics--many persons
consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in
the first of these books; a volume on organic evolution, and two works
on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is considered by
some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science, must be
included among these other performances. Of the more religious and
philosophical works, I shall immediately give a further account.
All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the
vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and
sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one
with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen,
and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.
His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads
of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men,
and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due
perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest
discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest
scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a
philosopher in the 'great' sense, altho he cared so much less than
most philosophers care for abstractions of the 'thin' order. For him
the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he
did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into
ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole
universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and
envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious. It has taken fifty
years for his chief book, 'Zend-avesta,' to pass into a second edition
(1901). 'One swallow,' he cheerfully writes, 'does not make a summer.
But the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming;
and for me that summer means my daylight view some time prevailing.'
The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and
our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the
spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.
Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater
life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality,
which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence
than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies
outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we
believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless,
and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner
asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath,
the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit
and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature
turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is
treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns
between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a
thin nest of abstractions.
Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is
analogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his
many pages--only reasonings like those which men continually use in
practical life. For example: My house is built by some one, the world
too is built by some one. The world is greater than my house, it
must be a greater some one who built the world. My body moves by the
influence of my feeling and will; the sun, moon, sea, and wind, being
themselves more powerful, move by the influence of some more powerful
feeling and will. I live now, and change from one day to another; I
shall live hereafter, and change still more, etc.
Bain defines genius as the power of seeing analogies. The number
that Fechner could perceive was prodigious; but he insisted on the
differences as well. Neglect to make allowance for these, he said, is
the common fallacy in analogical reasoning. Most of us, for example,
reasoning justly that, since all the minds we know are connected with
bodies, therefore God's mind should be connected with a body, proceed
to suppose that that body must be just an animal body over again, and
paint an altogether human picture of God. But all that the analogy
comports is _a_ body--the particular features of _our_ body are
adaptations to a habitat so different from God's that if God have
a physical body at all, it must be utterly different from ours in
structure. Throughout his writings Fechner makes difference and
analogy walk abreast, and by his extraordinary power of noticing
both, he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his
conclusions into factors of their support.
The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The
entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own
collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon, and planet; so must
the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the
consciousness of our earth plays one part. So has the entire starry
system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the
sum of all that _is_, materially considered, then that whole system,
along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely
totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of
God.
Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology; but there is
room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man
and the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positive
content of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets his
imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order. The
earth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the earth as our
special human guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to
their saints; but I think that in his system, as in so many of the
actual historic theologies, the supreme God marks only a sort of limit
of enclosure of the worlds above man. He is left thin and abstract in
his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions
with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom
the divine order provides.
I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's
speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have
been required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the
detail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning he
employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions
can be written on a single page, the _power_ of the man is due
altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the
multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the
cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the
ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the
sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he
gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who _sees_, who in
fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the
common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.
Abstractly set down, his most important conclusion for my purpose in
these lectures is that the constitution of the world is identical
throughout. In ourselves, visual consciousness goes with our eyes,
tactile consciousness with our skin. But altho neither skin nor eye
knows aught of the sensations of the other, they come together and
figure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusive
consciousness which each of us names his _self_. Quite similarly,
then, says Fechner, we must suppose that my consciousness of myself
and yours of yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep separate
and know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in a
higher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which they
enter as constituent parts. Similarly, the whole human and animal
kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider
scope. This combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousness
of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share of
experience to that of the whole solar system, and so on from synthesis
to synthesis and height to height, till an absolutely universal
consciousness is reached.
A vast analogical series, in which the basis of the analogy consists
of facts directly observable in ourselves.
The supposition of an earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctive
prejudice which Fechner ingeniously tries to overcome. Man's mind is
the highest consciousness upon the earth, we think--the earth itself
being in all ways man's inferior. How should its consciousness, if it
have one, be superior to his?
What are the marks of superiority which we are tempted to use here? If
we look more carefully into them, Fechner points out that the earth
possesses each and all of them more perfectly than we. He considers in
detail the points of difference between us, and shows them all to
make for the earth's higher rank. I will touch on only a few of these
points.
One of them of course is independence of other external beings.
External to the earth are only the other heavenly bodies. All the
things on which we externally depend for life--air, water, plant and
animal food, fellow men, etc.--are included in her as her constituent
parts. She is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are not
so. We depend on her for almost everything, she on us for but a small
portion of her history. She swings us in her orbit from winter to
summer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day.
Complexity in unity is another sign of superiority. The total earth's
complexity far exceeds that of any organism, for she includes all our
organisms in herself, along with an infinite number of things that our
organisms fail to include. Yet how simple and massive are the phases
of her own proper life! As the total bearing of any animal is sedate
and tranquil compared with the agitation of its blood corpuscles, so
is the earth a sedate and tranquil being compared with the animals
whom she supports.
To develop from within, instead of being fashioned from without, is
also counted as something superior in men's eyes. An egg is a higher
style of being than a piece of clay which an external modeler makes
into the image of a bird. Well, the earth's history develops from
within. It is like that of a wonderful egg which the sun's heat, like
that of a mother-hen, has stimulated to its cycles of evolutionary
change.
Individuality of type, and difference from other beings of its type,
is another mark of rank. The earth differs from every other planet,
and as a class planetary beings are extraordinarily distinct from
other beings.
Long ago the earth was called an animal; but a planet is a higher
class of being than either man or animal; not only quantitatively
greater, like a vaster and more awkward whale or elephant, but a being
whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life. Our
animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to
and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only
our defect. What are our legs but crutches, by means of which, with
restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
of ourselves. But the earth is no such cripple; why should she who
already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue,
have limbs analogous to ours? Shall she mimic a small part of herself?
What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? of a neck, with
no head to carry? of eyes or nose when she finds her way through space
without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to
guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the
flowers that grow? For, as we are ourselves a part of the earth, so
our organs are her organs. She is, as it were, eye and ear over her
whole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and
hears at once. She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon
her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each
other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.
Most of us, considering the theory that the whole terrestrial mass is
animated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogy
too literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be a
sentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? What
corresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expect
functions which she already performs through us, to be performed
outside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectly
well how the earth performs some of these functions in a way unlike
our way. If you speak of circulation, what need has she of a heart
when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all
the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going? What need
has she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in
living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?
The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All the
consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains.--Can there be
consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain, which
primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external
objects on which we depend, performs a function which the earth
performs in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles or
limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other
stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in
its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in
its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty
mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the
clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers
disperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption,
awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to
take any note.
For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special
brain than she needs eyes or ears. _Our_ brains do indeed unify and
correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our
ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light
together, and compare them. We account for this by the fibres which in
the brain connect the optical with the acoustic centre, but just how
these fibres bring together not only the sensations, but the centres,
we fail to see. But if fibres are indeed all that is needed to do that
trick, has not the earth pathways, by which you and I are physically
continuous, more than enough to do for our two minds what the
brain-fibres do for the sounds and sights in a single mind? Must every
higher means of unification between things be a literal _brain_-fibre,
and go by that name? Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents
of our minds together?
Fechner's imagination, insisting on the differences as well as on the
resemblances, thus tries to make our picture of the whole earth's life
more concrete. He revels in the thought of its perfections. To carry
her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be
more excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all
in one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sun-lit over
one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens
from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her
mountains and windings of her valleys, she would be a spectacle of
rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her
from her own mountain-tops. Every quality of landscape that has a
name would then be visible in her at once--all that is delicate or
graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or
cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face--a
peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like
diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but
the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is
shrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory transparent folds of which
the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and
folding about herself anew.
Every element has its own living denizens. Can the celestial ocean of
ether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, not
have hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming
without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as
by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they
inhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one
another, following the slightest pull of one another's attraction, and
harboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?
Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light,
needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and
God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and
moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries
between God and us, obeying his commands. So, if the heavens really
are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels,
for other creatures _there_ are none. Yes! the earth is our great
common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.
In a striking page Fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision
of this truth.
'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were
green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here
and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all
things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one moment
of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it
seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear
a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and
flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so
at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and
carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how
the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life
so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels
above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them
nowhere.... But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The
earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in
mineralogical cabinets.'[2]
Where there is no vision the people perish. Few professorial
philosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why one
can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh
sense of reality.
His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be
like. He called it 'Nanna.' In the development of animals the nervous
system is the central fact. Plants develop centrifugally, spread their
organs abroad. For that reason people suppose that they can have no
consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous
system provides. But the plant's consciousness may be of another type,
being connected with other structures. Violins and pianos give out
sounds because they have strings. Does it follow that nothing but
strings can give out sound? How then about flutes and organ-pipes?
Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the
consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with
the kind of organization that | they possess. Nutrition, respiration,
propagation take place in them without nerves. In us these functions
are conscious only in unusual states, normally their consciousness is
eclipsed by that which goes with the brain. No such eclipse occurs in
plants, and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more
lively. With nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their
leaves, to let their cells proliferate, to feel their rootlets draw
the sap, is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer
if water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn? or that when the
flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life
take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely
and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves? Does
the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light,
relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to
the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering
or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has
the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive
part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the
mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They can neither
run away nor cry out. But this only proves how different their modes
of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and
ears and locomotive organs, it does not prove that they have no mode
of feeling life at all.
How scanty and scattered would sensation be on our globe, if the
feeling-life of plants were blotted from existence. Solitary would
consciousness move through the woods in the shape of some deer or
other quadruped, or fly about the flowers in that of some insect, but
can we really suppose that the Nature through which God's breath blows
is such a barren wilderness as this?
I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who
have never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their more
general characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel like
reading them yourselves.[3] The special thought of Fechner's with
which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his
belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part
_constituted_ by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere
sum of the more limited forms. As our mind is not the bare sum of
our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms
together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes
and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate
knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the
contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of
our separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objects
proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too
narrow to cognize. By ourselves we are simply out of relation with
each other, for it we are both of us there, and _different_ from each
other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it
knows that we are. We are closed against its world, but that world is
not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life
had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure,
permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might
always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the
wider.
Fechner's great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our
individual minds. When our eyes are open their sensations enter into
our general mental life, which grows incessantly by the addition of
what they see. Close the eyes, however, and the visual additions stop,
nothing but thoughts and memories of the past visual experiences
remain--in combination of course with the enormous stock of other
thoughts and memories, and with the data coming in from the senses
not yet closed. Our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this
enormous life into which they fall. Fechner thinks, as any common man
would think, that they are taken into it directly when they occur,
and form part of it just as they are. They don't stay outside and
get represented inside by their copies. It is only the memories and
concepts of them that are copies; the sensible perceptions themselves
are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as
the eyes are open or shut.
Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many
sense-organs of the earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life so
long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as they
occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the
other data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world
were closed, for all _perceptive_ contributions from that particular
quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have
spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the
larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow
and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our
own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new
relations and develop throughout our whole finite life. This is
Fechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little
'Buechlein des lebens nach dem tode,' in 1836, and re-edited in greatly
improved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta.'
We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of
her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams
separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They
realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when
anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet
the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon
the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the
branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has
happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action
having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:--so
our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as
memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of
the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we
ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer
isolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems,
entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive
experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their
turn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so.
If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a
common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct
personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own
exists in any sense _less for itself_ or _less distinctly_, when
it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there
distinguished and defined.
--But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes. Thus
is the universe alive, according to this philosopher! I think you
will admit that he makes it more _thickly_ alive than do the other
philosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain the
same results, but only in the thinnest outlines. Both Fechner and
Professor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive
mind. Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituent
parts of that mind. No other _content_ has it than us, with all the
other creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it finds
between us. Our eaches, collected into one, are substantively
identical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is
perfect, so that we have to admit that new qualities as well as
unperceived relations accrue from the collective form. It is thus
superior to the distributive form. But having reached this result,
Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to
me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary
idealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices.
Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to the
more collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the various
intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,--as we are to
our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system
to the earth, etc.,--and if, in order to escape an infinitely long
summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their
absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to
him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of
things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping
superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious
commerce at any rate has to be carried on.
Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It
recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the
phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in
all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in
this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable
absolute itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination?
Isn't this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room in
it for a long hierarchy of beings? Materialistic science makes it
infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and
electrons, and what not. Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only
under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with _bodies_ of
any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or
correspondence. The resultant thinness is startling when compared with
the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.
May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha
and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate
religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?
Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want
them, for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind content with little,
the much in the universe may always remain hid.
To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has
been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear
more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel
himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run
thin. If philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of
logic,--and I believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the vision
afterwards,--must not such thinness come either from the vision being
defective in the disciples, or from their passion, matched with
Fechner's or with Hegel's own passion, being as moonlight unto
sunlight or as water unto wine?[4]
But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my
text. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and
separate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explains
the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by
which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of
subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass
without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.
LECTURE V
THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way
of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled
richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an
apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more
about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the
assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while
forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.
Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.
There is thus in reality but this one self, consciously inclusive of
all the lesser selves, _logos_, problem-solver, and all-knower; and
Royce ingeniously compares the ignorance that in our persons breaks
out in the midst of its complete knowledge and isolates me from you
and both of us from it, to the inattention into which our finite minds
are liable to fall with respect to such implicitly present details as
those corporeal sensations to which I made allusion just now. Those
sensations stand to our total private minds in the same relation in
which our private minds stand to the absolute mind. Privacy means
ignorance--I still quote Royce--and ignorance means inattention. We
are finite because our wills, as such, are only fragments of the
absolute will; because will means interest, and an incomplete will
means an incomplete interest; and because incompleteness of interest
means inattention to much that a fuller interest would bring us to
perceive.[2]
In this account Royce makes by far the manliest of the post-hegelian
attempts to read some empirically apprehensible content into the
notion of our relation to the absolute mind.
I have to admit, now that I propose to you to scrutinize this
assumption rather closely, that trepidation seizes me. The subject is
a subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to delve into subtleties by
one's self with pen in hand, or to study out abstruse points in
books, but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them.
Nevertheless I must not flinch from my task here, for I think that
this particular point forms perhaps the vital knot of the present
philosophic situation, and I imagine that the times are ripe, or
almost ripe, for a serious attempt to be made at its untying.
It may perhaps help to lessen the arduousness of the subject if I put
the first part of what I have to say in the form of a direct personal
confession.
In the year 1890 I published a work on psychology in which it became
my duty to discuss the value of a certain explanation of our higher
mental states that had come into favor among the more biologically
inclined psychologists. Suggested partly by the association of ideas,
and partly by the analogy of chemical compounds, this opinion was
that complex mental states are resultants of the self-compounding of
simpler ones. The Mills had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of a
'psychic synthesis,' which might develop properties not contained in
the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and
Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the
absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial
units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing
themselves together in successive stages of compounding and
re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex
states of mind. The elementary feeling of A, let us say, and the
elementary feeling of B, when they occur in certain conditions,
combine, according to this doctrine, into a feeling of A-plus-B, and
this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of C-plus-D,
until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of
awareness, without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond
the feelings of the several letters themselves, being supposed to
exist. What each of them witnesses separately, 'all' of them are
supposed to witness in conjunction. But their distributive knowledge
doesn't _give rise_ to their collective knowledge by any act, it _is_
their collective knowledge. The lower forms of consciousness 'taken
together' _are_ the higher. It, 'taken apart,' consists of nothing
and _is_ nothing but them. This, at least, is the most obvious way
of understanding the doctrine, and is the way I understood it in the
chapter in my psychology.
Superficially looked at, this seems just like the combination of H_2
and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.
When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance
'water,' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)
that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, get
into closer quarters, say into the position H-O-H, they _affect
surrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolve
sugar, put out fire, etc., which they didn't in their former
positions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speak
of water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H.
In the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the
sugar, fire, or skin. The lower feelings produced _effects on it_,
and their apparent compounds were only its reactions. As you tickle
a man's face with a feather, and he laughs, so when you tickle his
intellectual principle with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscular
feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its category of 'space,'
but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those
simpler feelings. It is rather a new and unique psychic creation which
their combined action on the mind is able to evoke.
I found myself obliged, in discussing the mind-dust theory, to urge
this last alternative view. The so-called mental compounds are simple
psychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them, I said,
is something new. We can't say that awareness of the alphabet as
such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate
letter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of single
letters _without_ others, while their so-called sum is one awareness,
of every letter _with_ its comrades. There is thus something new in
the collective consciousness. It knows the same letters, indeed, but
it knows them in this novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shy
of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treat
the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the
substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses,
and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they
alone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions result
in its production instead. Do not talk, therefore, I said, of the
higher states _consisting_ of the simpler, or _being_ the same with
them; talk rather of their _knowing the same things_. They are
different mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar
way, the same objective A, B, C, and D.
The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus
untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically
unnecessary. Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a single
word, are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the whole
sentence. The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, not
compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective
multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known
separately by as many simple thoughts.
For many years I held rigorously to this view,[3] and the reasons for
doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the
opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of
a whole to its parts. If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion
ought to be untenable in metaphysics also. The great transcendentalist
metaphor has always been, as I lately reminded you, a grammatical
sentence. Physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses,
these of words, the words of syllables, and the syllables of letters.
We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if
suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each
word is taken up into that whole meaning. Just so, according to
our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole
sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause,
a word, a syllable, or a letter. Most of us are, as I said, mere
syllables in the mouth of Allah. And as Allah comes first in the order
of being, so comes first the entire sentence, the _logos_ that forms
the eternal absolute thought. Students of language tell us that speech
began with men's efforts to make _statements_. The rude synthetic
vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped,
and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts. It is not
as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then
made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;--they actually
followed the reverse order. So, the transcendentalists affirm, the
complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and
we finite creatures _are_ only in so far as it owns us as its verbal
fragments.
The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to
such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely
hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally.
We see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a whole
shower, no single feather without a whole bird, neck and crop, beak
and tail, coming into being simultaneously: so we unhesitatingly lay
down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the
whole also is. And then, since everything whatever is part of the
whole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether part
or whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusion
that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole
ground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existence
included. We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers,
so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird. Extending
the analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience,
to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists.
But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be
it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion
suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's
eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising.
First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the
absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than _as_
it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else.
Yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced, as idealism
affirms, we surely exist otherwise, for we experience _ourselves_
ignorantly and in division. We indeed differ from the absolute not
only by defect, but by excess. Our ignorances, for example, bring
curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it owns
eternally the solution of every problem. Our impotence entails pains,
our imperfection sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance. What
I said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute
experience and our experiences. Their relation, whatever it may be,
seems not to be that of identity.
It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with
our being only the absolute's mental objects. A God, as distinguished
from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as
so many substances, each endowed with _perseity_, as the scholastics
call it. But objects of thought are not things _per se_. They are
there only _for_ their thinker, and only _as_ he thinks them. How,
then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think
themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them? It is as if the
characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and
transact business of their own outside of the author's story.
A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we
see on reflection that in the _physical_ world there is no real
compounding. 'Wholes' are not realities there, parts only are
realities. 'Bird' is only our _name_ for the physical fact of a
certain grouping of organs, just as 'Charles's Wain' is our name for a
certain grouping of stars. The 'whole,' be it bird or constellation,
is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when
a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ
or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an
onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there _is_ thus no
'all,' there are only the 'eaches'--at least that is the 'scientific'
view.
In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact
realize themselves _per se_. The meaning of the whole sentence is
just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the
absolute's experience _is_ for itself, as much as yours is for
yourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won't
work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent
with a vision produced in it _by_ our several minds analogous to the
'bird'-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce _in_ those same
minds. The 'whole,' which is _its_ experience, would then be its
unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences
self-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for the
theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic
idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally
_parts_ of God, and he only ourselves in our totality--the word
'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finite
facts.
I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture.
Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to
speak, and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views. The practical
upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that
if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should
unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at
still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute
was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but
self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are only
two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If you
stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If you
call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one
fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those
parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is
supposed to be.
So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the
notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no
more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in
the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call
the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which
pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers
which Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had done
little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised
me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and
envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same
freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful
because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the
privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute
they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when
employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have
mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had
yielded to them against my 'will to believe,' out of pure logical
scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to
follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was
easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid
enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers,
like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by
in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will
to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would
permit me no such license.
So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to
introduce the subject. Let us now consider it more objectively.
The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of
contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard. In the
first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential
character, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher and
the lower in the universe are entitatively identical, incompatible
with this character. Incompatible in consequence of the generally
accepted doctrine that, whether Berkeley were right or not in saying
of material existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_, it is undoubtedly
right to say of _mental_ existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_ or
_experiri_. If I feel pain, it is just pain that I feel, however I
may have come by the feeling. No one pretends that pain as such only
appears like pain, but in itself is different, for to be as a mental
experience _is_ only to appear to some one.
The idealists in question ought then to do one of two things, but they
do neither. They ought either to refute the notion that as mental
states appear, so they are; or, still keeping that notion, they
ought to admit a distinct agent of unification to do the work of
the all-knower, just as our respective souls or selves in popular
philosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like a
joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. If
our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing our
billion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts.
But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active
principles called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having,
as it thinks, definitively demolished them. And altho some disciples
speak of the transcendental ego of apperception (which they celebrate
as Kant's most precious legacy to posterity) as if it were a combining
agent, the drift of monistic authority is certainly in the direction
of treating it as only an all-witness, whose field of vision we finite
witnesses do not cause, but constitute rather. We are the letters, it
is the alphabet; we are the features, it is the face; not indeed as if
either alphabet or face were something additional to the letters or
the features, but rather as if it were only another name for the very
letters or features themselves. The all-form assuredly differs from
the each-form, but the _matter_ is the same in both, and the each-form
only an unaccountable appearance.
But this, as you see, contradicts the other idealist principle, of
a mental fact being just what it appears to be. If their forms
of appearance are so different, the all and the eaches cannot be
identical.
The way out (unless, indeed, we are willing to discard the logic of
identity altogether) would seem to be frankly to write down the all
and the eaches as two distinct orders of witness, each minor witness
being aware of its own 'content' solely, while the greater witness
knows the minor witnesses, knows their whole content pooled together,
knows their relations to one another, and knows of just how much each
one of them is ignorant.
The two types of witnessing are here palpably non-identical. We get a
pluralism, not a monism, out of them. In my psychology-chapter I
had resorted openly to such pluralism, treating each total field of
consciousness as a distinct entity, and maintaining that the higher
fields merely supersede the lower functionally by knowing more about
the same objects.
The monists themselves writhe like worms on the hook to escape
pluralistic or at least dualistic language, but they cannot escape it.
They speak of the eternal and the temporal 'points of view'; of the
universe in its infinite 'aspect' or in its finite 'capacity'; they
say that '_qua_ absolute' it is one thing, '_qua_ relative' another;
they contrast its 'truth' with its appearances; they distinguish the
total from the partial way of 'taking' it, etc.; but they forget that,
on idealistic principles, to make such distinctions is tantamount to
making different beings, or at any rate that varying points of view,
aspects, appearances, ways of taking, and the like, are meaningless
phrases unless we suppose outside of the unchanging content of reality
a diversity of witnesses who experience or take it variously, the
absolute mind being just the witness that takes it most completely.
For consider the matter one moment longer, if you can. Ask what this
notion implies, of appearing differently from different points of
view. If there be no outside witness, a thing can appear only to
itself, the caches or parts to their several selves temporally, the
all or whole to itself eternally. Different 'selves' thus break out
inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact.
But how can what is _actually_ one be _effectively_ so many? Put your
witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside of what is witnessed,
in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be
distinct, for what is witnessed is different.
I fear that I am expressing myself with terrible obscurity--some of
you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or
be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as
you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only
thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be
sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists
yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties
that beset monistic idealism. What boots it to call the parts and the
whole the same body of experience, when in the same breath you have to
say that the all 'as such' means one sort of experience and each part
'as such' means another?
Difficulties, then, so far, but no stable solution as yet, for I have
been talking only critically. You will probably be relieved to hear,
then, that having rounded this corner, I shall begin to consider what
may be the possibilities of getting farther.
To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point. What has so
troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself
as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme
example, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with their
constituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently from
these latter. If _any_ such collective experience can be, then of
course, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may
be. In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute from
other points of view. In this lecture I have meant merely to take it
as the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has given
me such logical perplexity. I don't logically see how a collective
experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical
with a lot of distributive experiences. They form two different
concepts. The absolute happens to be the only collective experience
concerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I took
it as my prerogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage
of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just
as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective
experiences as to the absolute.
So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my
strategical objective. The real point to defend against the logic that
I have used is the identity of the collective and distributive anyhow,
not the particular example of such identity known as the absolute.
So now for the directer question. Shall we say that every complex
mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of
other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and
superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of
them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in
theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived,
and replace it by the 'God' of theism. We should also have to deny
Fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of
experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be
compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed
in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the
incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing
and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.
But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced,
we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of
rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind. It makes the universe
discontinuous. These fields of experience that replace each other
so punctually, each knowing the same matter, but in ever-widening
contexts, from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge, _can_
they have no _being_ in common when their cognitive function is so
manifestly common? The regular succession of them is on such terms an
unintelligible miracle. If you reply that their common _object_ is
of itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous, the same
implacable logic follows you--how _can_ one and the same object appear
so variously? Its diverse appearances break it into a plurality; and
our world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as
much as did our world of subjects. The resultant irrationality is
really intolerable.
I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the other
pantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw them
unscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselves
and so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience held
me prisoner. In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation
was absurd and could be only provisional. That secret of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant
cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so
much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static
incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its
chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the
universe that engendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the
truer path. Fechner has never heard of logic's veto, Royce hears the
voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to
spurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the
veto?
Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I struggled with the problem for
years, covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memoranda
and discussions with myself over the difficulty. How can many
consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can one and
the same identical fact experience itself so diversely? The struggle
was vain; I found myself in an _impasse_. I saw that I must either
forswear that 'psychology without a soul' to which my whole
psychological and kantian education had committed me,--I must, in
short, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states,
now singly and now in combination, in a word bring back scholasticism
and common sense--or else I must squarely confess the solution of
the problem impossible, and then either give up my intellectualistic
logic, the logic of identity, and adopt some higher (or lower) form
of rationality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logically
irrational.
Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us.
Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded,
will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting
in nothing but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven's
sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry. Let but
our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties,
and let but 'God' replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels
will go round again--you will enjoy both life and logic together.
This solution is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. It
is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not
for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial
soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies,
has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of
critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable
substances and principles. They are without exception all so barren
that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names
masquerading--Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten
zeit sich ein. You see no deeper into the fact that a hundred
sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 'soul'
does the compounding than you see into a man's living eighty years by
thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers by
calling us pentadactyls. Souls have worn out both themselves and
their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get the
manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the
word 'cause,' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap--it marks a
place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.
This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask
your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion
and to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls may
get their innings again in philosophy--I am quite ready to admit that
possibility--they form a category of thought too natural to the human
mind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in the
soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which
humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will
be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance
that has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, as
he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more
seriously.
Let us leave out the soul, then, and confront what I just called
the residual dilemma. Can we, on the one hand, give up the logic
of identity?--can we, on the other, believe human experience to be
fundamentally irrational? Neither is easy, yet it would seem that we
must do one or the other.
Few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessity
of choosing between the 'horns' offered. Reality must be rational,
they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is
the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree
'somehow.' Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the
dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a
pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of
the 'dialectic process.' Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic,
and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality
incarnate. But what must be and can be, is, he says; there must and
can be relief from _that_ irrationality; and the absolute must already
have got the relief in secret ways of its own, impossible for us to
guess at. _We_ of course get no relief, so Bradley's is a rather
ascetic doctrine. Royce and Taylor accept similar solutions, only they
emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradley
does; and Royce in particular, being unusually 'thick' for an
idealist, tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief more
sympathetically home to our imagination.
Well, what must we do in this tragic predicament? For my own part, I
have finally found myself compelled to _give up the logic_, fairly,
squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life,
but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the
essential nature of reality--just what it is I can perhaps suggest
to you a little later. Reality, life, experience, concreteness,
immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and
surrounds it. If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most
men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a
higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality. But I think that
even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than
to commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not
irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution,--and by
reality here I mean reality where things _happen_, all temporal
reality without exception. I myself find no good warrant for even
suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than
that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we
finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality given us, and that
is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable. If there be any
higher sort of reality--the 'absolute,' for example--that sort, by
the confession of those who believe in it, is still less amenable
to ordinary logic; it transcends logic and is therefore still less
rational in the intellectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save
our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence.
These sayings will sound queer and dark, probably they will sound
quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment. Only the
persuasion that I soon can explain them, if not satisfactorily to all
of you, at least intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus baldly
as a sort of programme. Please take them as a thesis, therefore, to be
defended by later pleading.
I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma. I
have now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest)
that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with
so very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions of
philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of
simple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparatively
young and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson.
Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had not read
Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper
privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to
meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of
reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted
laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that
without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority
gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views
of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.
I must therefore, in order to make my own views more intelligible,
give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy. But here,
as in Fechner's case, I must confine myself only to the features
that are essential to the present purpose, and not entangle you in
collateral details, however interesting otherwise. For our present
purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy
is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed
intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don't
see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of
claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer
of the nature of reality. Others, as Kant for example, have denied
intellectualism's pretensions to define reality _an sich_ or in its
absolute capacity; but Kant still leaves it laying down laws--and laws
from which there is no appeal--to all our human experience; while what
Bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this
human experience in its very finiteness. Just how Bergson accomplishes
all this I must try to tell in my imperfect way in the next lecture;
but since I have already used the words 'logic,' 'logic of identity,
intellectualistic logic,' and 'intellectualism' so often, and
sometimes used them as if they required no particular explanation, it
will be wise at this point to say at greater length than heretofore in
what sense I take these terms when I claim that Bergson has refuted
their pretension to decide what reality can or cannot be. Just what I
mean by intellectualism is therefore what I shall try to give a fuller
idea of during the remainder of this present hour.
In recent controversies some participants have shown resentment
at being classed as intellectualists. I mean to use the word
disparagingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence. Intellectualism
has its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority to
the brutes, our power, namely, of translating the crude flux of our
merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order. An immediate
experience, as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere _that_ that we
undergo, a thing that asks, '_What_ am I?' When we name and class it,
we say for the first time what it is, and all these whats are abstract
names or concepts. Each concept means a particular _kind_ of thing,
and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds, a far
more efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon as
we have classed the various parts of it. Once classed, a thing can be
treated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless. Both
theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts
is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come back
into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an
increase both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlier
thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the
temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type
of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in
nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as
but their corruption and falsification.
Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato
taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its _definition_.
Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of
essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are
known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify
the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a
definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing _is_ whatever the
definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of
it or the full truth about it.
So far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit
of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not
merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties
with which the things sensibly present themselves. Logic can extract
all its possible consequences from any definition, and the logician
who is _unerbittlich consequent_ is often tempted, when he cannot
extract a certain property from a definition, to deny that the
concrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possess
that property. The definition that fails to yield it must exclude or
negate it. This is Hegel's regular method of establishing his system.
It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method,
then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used
for. Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung
to even when they make them unintelligible. Thus it comes that when
once you have conceived things as 'independent,' you must proceed to
deny the possibility of any connexion whatever among them, because
the notion of connexion is not contained in the definition of
independence. For a like reason you must deny any possible forms or
modes of unity among things which you have begun by defining as a
'many.' We have cast a glance at Hegel's and Bradley's use of this
sort of reasoning, and you will remember Sigwart's epigram that
according to it a horseman can never in his life go on foot, or a
photographer ever do anything but photograph.
The classic extreme in this direction is the denial of the possibility
of change, and the consequent branding of the world of change as
unreal, by certain philosophers. The definition of A is changeless,
so is the definition of B. The one definition cannot change into
the other, so the notion that a concrete thing A should change into
another concrete thing B is made Out to be contrary to reason. In Mr.
Bradley's difficulty in seeing how sugar can be sweet intellectualism
outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just
sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the
word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate
rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between'
is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be
connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens,
and so on ad infinitum.
The particular intellectualistic difficulty that had held my own
thought so long in a vise was, as we have seen at such tedious length,
the impossibility of understanding how 'your' experience and 'mine,'
which 'as such' are defined as not conscious of each other, can
nevertheless at the same time be members of a world-experience defined
expressly as having all its parts co-conscious, or known together. The
definitions are contradictory, so the things defined can in no way be
united. You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make
the world of our most accomplished philosophers. Neither as they
use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look
irrational and seem impossible.
In my next lecture, using Bergson as my principal topic, I shall enter
into more concrete details and try, by giving up intellectualism
frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my own general thesis,
less unintelligible.
LECTURE VI
BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM
I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one
can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to
begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that
that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic
method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of
what can or cannot be.
Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential
philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His career has
been the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor.
Entering the ecole normale superieure at the age of twenty-two, he
spent the next seventeen years teaching at _lycees_, provincial or
parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the
said ecole normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de
France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward
facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost.
Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great
men, _the race, the environment, or the moment_, no, nor all three
together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that
constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from
nothing previous, other things date from it, rather. I have to confess
that Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle
me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to
speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that
this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet
thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative
place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely
original, in that no man can understand us--violently peculiar ways
of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great
peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual
command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources
in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression
they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where _l'art de
bien dire_ counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has
immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashioned
professors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak
of his talent almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to
him as to a master.
If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like
Bergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an american reviewer lately
called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a
flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a
crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements
of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is what
all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in
advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real
magician.
M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came into philosophy through the
gateway of mathematics. The old antinomies of the infinite were,
I imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their
dogmatic slumber. You all remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism,
as many of our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the
tortoise. Give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift
runner Achilles can never overtake him, much less get ahead of him;
for if space and time are infinitely divisible (as our intellects
tell us they must be), by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's
starting-point, the tortoise has already got ahead of _that_
starting-point, and so on _ad infinitum_, the interval between the
pursuer and the pursued growing endlessly minuter, but never becoming
wholly obliterated. The common way of showing up the sophism here is
by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression 'never can overtake.'
What the word 'never' falsely suggests, it is said, is an infinite
duration of time; what it really means is the inexhaustible number of
the steps of which the overtaking must consist. But if these steps are
infinitely short, a finite time will suffice for them; and in point of
fact they do rapidly converge, whatever be the original interval
or the contrasted speeds, toward infinitesimal shortness. This
proportionality of the shortness of the times to that of the spaces
required frees us, it is claimed, from the sophism which the word
'never' suggests.
But this criticism misses Zeno's point entirely. Zeno would have been
perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken at
all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would still
have insisted that he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles and
the tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said--they
complicate the case unnecessarily. Take any single process of change
whatever, take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing. If time be
infinitely divisible, and it must be so on intellectualist principles,
they simply cannot elapse, their end cannot be reached; for no matter
how much of them has already elapsed, before the remainder, however
minute, can have wholly elapsed, the earlier half of it must first
have elapsed. And this ever re-arising need of making the earlier half
elapse _first_ leaves time with always something to do _before_ the
last thing is done, so that the last thing never gets done. Expressed
in bare numbers, it is like the convergent series 1/2 plus 1/4 plus
1/8..., of which the limit is one. But this limit, simply because it
is a limit, stands outside the series, the value of which approaches
it indefinitely but never touches it. If in the natural world there
were no other way of getting things save by such successive addition
of their logically involved fractions, no complete units or whole
things would ever come into being, for the fractions' sum would always
leave a remainder. But in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs by
making first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth, etc., and
adding them together. She either makes a whole egg at once or none
at all, and so of all her other units. It is only in the sphere of
change, then, where one phase of a thing must needs come into being
before another phase can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble.
And it gives trouble then only if the succession of steps of change
be infinitely divisible. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite
number of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible that
the emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact,
however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number
of decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or
nothing emerges from the spout. If all change went thus drop-wise,
so to speak, if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration of
determinate amount, just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses,
there would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to trouble
us. All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus
change by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying
'more, more, more,' or 'less, less, less,' as the definite increments
or diminutions make themselves felt. The discreteness is still more
obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or when
altogether new things come. Fechner's term of the 'threshold,' which
has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one
way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our
sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in
drops.
Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into
still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation
of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in
my last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing
intellect solely. The times directly _felt_ in the experiences of
living subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar
melt in a glass, to use one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the
time to be long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows
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