Cl Bk. Trinity College Library Durham, N. C. II SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY A BEGINNING OF AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY BY WILLIAM JAMES O LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1921 COPYRIGHT, igil, BY HENRY JAMES JR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED First Edition May, 1911 Reprinted July, S911 August, 1916 September, 1919 February, 1921 *. . . he [ Charles Renouvier ] was one of the greatest of 'philosophic characters, and hut for the decisive impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, 1 might never have got free from the monistic supersti- tion under which 1 had grown up. The present volume, in short, might never have been written. This is why, feeling endlessly thankful as 1 do, I dedicate this text-book to the great Renouvier’ s memory.’ [165] Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/someproblemsofph01jame PREFATORY NOTE F or several years before his death Professor Wil- liam James cherished the purpose of stating his views on certain problems of metaphysics in a book addressed particularly to readers of phi- losophy. He began the actual writing of this ‘introductory text-book for students in metaphys- ics,’ as he once called it, in March, 1909, and to complete it was at last his dearest ambition. But illness, and other demands on his diminished strength, continued to interfere, and what is now published is all that he had succeeded in writing when he died in August, 1910. Two typewritten copies of his unfinished manu- script were found. They had been corrected sep- arately. A comparison of the independent alter- ations in the two copies showed few and slight differences of phrase and detail, and indicated no formed intention to make substantial changes; yet the author perhaps expected to make some further alterations in a final revision if he could finish the book, for in a memorandum dated July 26, 1910, in which he directed the publication of the manu- script, he wrote: ‘ Say it is fragmentary and unre- vised’ This memorandum continues, ‘ Call it “ A begin- vii PREFATORY NOTE ning of an introduction to philosophy.” Say that I hoped by it to round out my system, which now is too much like an arch built only on one side.’ In compliance with the author’s request left in the same memorandum, his pupil and friend, Dr. H. M. Kallen, has compared the two versions of the manuscript and largely prepared the book for the press. The divisions and headings in the manu- script were incomplete, and for helpful suggestions as to these grateful acknowledgments are also due to Professor R. B. Perry. Henry James, Jr. Cambridge, March 25, 1911. CONTENTS CHAPTER I Philosophy and its Critics 3 Philosophy and those who write it, 3. What philosophy is, 4. Its value, 6. Its enemies and their objections, 8. Objec- tion that it is unpractical answered, 9. This objection in the light of history, 10. Philosophy as ‘man thinking,’ 15. Origin of man’s present ways of thinking, 16. Science as specialized philosophy, 21. Philosophy the residuum of problems unsolved by science, 23. Philosophy need not be dogmatic, 25. Not divorced from reality, 26. Philosophy as “ metaphysics, ” 27. CHAPTER II The Problems of Metaphysics 29 Examples of metaphysical problems, 29. Metaphysics de- fined, 31. Nature of metaphysical problems, 32. Rationalism and empiricism in metaphysics, 34. CHAPTER III The Problem of Being 38 Schopenhauer on the origin of the problem, 38. Various treatments of the problem, 40. Rationalist and empiricist treatments, 42. Same amount of existence must be begged by all, 45. Conservation vs. creation, 45. CHAPTER IV Percept and Concept — The Import of Concepts . 47 Their difference, 47. The conceptual order, 50. Concept- ual knowledge ; the rationalist view, 55. Conceptual know- ledge ; the empiricist view, 57. The content and function of concepts, 58. The pragmatic rule, 59. Examples, 62. Ori- gin of concepts in their utility, 63. The theoretic use of con- cepts, 65. In the a priori sciences, 67. And in physics, 70. Concepts bring new values, 71. Summary, 73. IX CONTENTS CHAPTER V Percept and Concept — The Abuse of Concepts . 75 The intellectualist creed, 75. Defects of the conceptual translation, 78. The insuperability of sensation, 79. Why con- cepts are inadequate, 81. Origin of intelleetualism, 83. Inad- equacy of intelleetualism, 84. Examples of puzzles introduced by the conceptual translation, 85. Relation of philosophers to the dialectic difficulties, 91. The sceptics and Hegel, 92. Bradley on percept and concept, 92. Criticism of Bradley, 95. Summary, 96. CHAPTER VI Percept and Concept — Some Corollaries . . . 98 I. Novelty becomes possible, 98. II. Conceptual systems are distinct realms of reality, 101. III. The self-sameness of ideal objects, 102. IV. Concepts and percepts are consubstan- tial, 107. V. An objection replied to, 109. CHAPTER VII The One and the Many 113 Pluralism vs. monism, 113. Kinds of monism, 116. Mys- tical monism, 116. Monism of substance, 119. Critique of substance, 121. Pragmatic analysis of oneness, 124. Kinds of oneness, 126. Unity by concatenation, 129. Unity of pur- pose, meaning, 131. Unity of origin, 132. Summary, 132. CHAPTER VIII The One and the Many (continued) — Values and Defects 135 The monistic theory, 135. The value of absolute oneness, 136. Its defects, 138. The pluralistic theory, 140. Its de- fects, 142. Its advantages, 142. Monism, pluralism and nov- elty, 145. X CONTENTS CHAPTER IX The Problem of Novelty 147 Perceptual novelty, 148. Science and novelty, 149. Personal experience and novelty, 151. Novelty and the infinite, 153. CHAPTER X Novelty and the Infinite — The Conceptual View 154 The discontinuity theory, 154. The continuity theory, 155. Zeno’s paradoxes, 157. Kant’s antinomies, 160. Ambiguity of Kant’s statement of the problem, 162. Renouvier’s solu- tion, 164. His solution favors novelty, 164. CHAPTER XI Novelty and the Infinite — The Perceptual View 166 The standing infinite, 167. Its pragmatic definition, 168. The growing infinite, 170. The growing infinite must be treated as discontinuous, 172. Objections, 173. (1) The number-continuum, 173. (2) The “ new infinite,” 175. The new infinite is paradoxical, 176. “ Transfinite numbers,” 177. Their uses and defects, 178. Russell’s solution of Zeno’s paradox by their means, 180. The solution criticized, 181. Conclusions, 184. (1) Conceptual transformation of percep- tual experience turns the infinite into a problem, 185. (2) It leaves the problem of novelty where it was, 187. CHAPTER XII Novelty and Causation — The Conceptual View 189 The principle of causality, 189. Aristotle on causation, 190. Scholasticism on the efficient cause, 191. Occasionalism, 194. Leibnitz, 195. Hume, 196. Criticism of Hume, 198. Kant, XI CONTENTS 201. Positivism, 203. Deductive theories of causation, 204. Summary and conclusion, 205. CHAPTER XIII Novelty and Causation — The Perceptual View 208 Defects of the perceptual view do not warrant skepticism, 209. The perpetual experience of causation, 210. In it ‘ final ’ and ‘ efficient ’ causation coincide, 212. And novelties arise, 213. Perceptual causation sets a problem, 215. This is the problem of the relation of mind to brain, 217. Conclusion, 217. APPENDIX Faith and the Right to Believe .... 221 INDEX 233 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER I PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS The progress of society is due to the fact that individuals vary from the human average in all sorts of directions, and that the originality is often so attractive or useful that they are recognized by their tribe as leaders, and be- come objects of envy or admiration, and set- ters of new ideals. Among the variations, every generation of men produces some individuals exceptionally Phiioso- preoccupied with theory. Such men feose^ho find matter for puzzle and astonish- wnte it ment where no one else does. Their imagination invents explanations and com- bines them. They store up the learning of their time, utter prophecies and warnings, and are regarded as sages. Philosophy, etymologic- ally meaning the love of wisdom, is the work of this class of minds, regarded with an indul- gent relish, if not with admiration, even by those who do not understand them or believe much in the truth which they proclaim. 3 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Philosophy, thus become a race-heritage, forms in its totality a monstrously unwieldy mass of learning. So taken, there is no reason why any special science like chemistry, or as- tronomy, should be excluded from it. By com- mon consent, however, special sciences are to-day excluded, for reasons presently to be explained; and what remains is manageable What enough to be taught under the name philoso- phy is of philosophy by one man if his in- terests be broad enough. If this were a German textbook I should first give my abstract definition of the topic, thus limited by usage, then proceed to display its ‘ Begrijf, und Eintheilung and its ‘Aufgabe und Methods.’ But as such displays are usu- ally unintelligible to beginners, and unneces- sary after reading the book, it will conduce to brevity to omit that chapter altogether, useful though it might possibly be to more advanced readers as a summary of what is to follow. I will tarry a moment, however, over the matter of definition. Limited by the omission of the special sciences, the name of philosophy 4 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS has come more and more to denote ideas of universal scope exclusively. The principles of explanation that underlie all things without exception, the elements common to gods and men and animals and stones, the first whence and the last whither of the whole cosmic pro- cession, the conditions of all knowing, and the most general rules of human action — these furnish the problems commonly deemed phi- losophic par excellence; and the philosopher is the man who finds the most to say about them. Philosophy is defined in the usual scholastic textbooks as ‘the knowledge of things in gen- eral by their ultimate causes, so far as natural reason can attain to such knowledge.’ This means that explanation of the universe at large, not description of its details, is what philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with other views, and as it uses principles not proxi- mate, or intermediate, but ultimate and all- embracing, to justify itself. Any very sweep- ing view of the world is a philosophy in this 5 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY sense, even though it may be a vague one. It is a Weltanschauung, an intellectualized attitude towards life. Professor Dewey well describes the constitution of all the philosophies that actually exist, when he says that philosophy expresses a certain attitude, purpose and tem- per of conjoined intellect and will, rather than a discipline whose boundaries can be neatly marked off . 1 To know the chief rival attitudes towards life, as the history of human thinking has de- its value veloped them, and to have heard some of the reasons they can give for them- selves, ought to be considered an essential part of liberal education. Philosophy, indeed, in one sense of the term is only a compend- ious name for the spirit in education which the word ‘college’ stands for in America. Things can be taught in dry dogmatic ways or in a philosophic way. At a technical school a man may grow into a first-rate instrument for doing a certain job, but he may miss all 1 Compare the article * Philosophy ’ in Baldwin’s Dictionary oj Philosophy and Psychology. 6 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS the graciousness of mind suggested by the term liberal culture. He may remain a cad, and not a gentleman, intellectually pinned down to his one narrow subject, literal, unable to suppose anything different from what he has seen, without imagination, atmosphere, or mental perspective. Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices. Historically it has al- ways been a sort of fecundation of four differ- ent human interests, science, poetry, religion, and logic, by one another. It has sought by hard reasoning for results emotionally valu- able. To have some contact with it, to catch its influence, is thus good for both literary and scientific students. By its poetry it appeals to literary minds; but its logic stiffens them up 7 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY and remedies their softness. By its logic it appeals to the scientific; but softens them by its other aspects, and saves them from too dry a technicality. Both types of student ought to get from philosophy a livelier spirit, more air, more mental background. ‘Hast any phi- losophy in thee, Shepherd?’ — this question of Touchstone’s is the one with which men should always meet one another. A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates. I say nothing in all this of what may be called the gymnastic use of philosophic study, the purely intellectual power gained by defin- ing the high and abstract concepts of the phi- losopher, and discriminating between them. In spite of the advantages thus enumer- ated, the study of philosophy has systematic Its ene- enemies, and they were never as their ob- numerous as at the present day. 1 ne jections definite conquests of science and the apparent indefiniteness of philosophy’s results partly account for this; to say nothing of man’s native rudeness of mind, which maliciously PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS enjoys deriding long words and abstractions. ‘Scholastic jargon/ ‘mediaeval dialectics,’ are for many people synonyms of the word phi- losophy. With his obscure and uncertain spec- ulations as to the intimate nature and causes of things, the philosopher is likened to a ‘ blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat that is not there.’ His occupation is de- scribed as the art of ‘endlessly disputing without coming to any conclusion/ or more contemptuously still as th e‘ systematische Miss- brauch einer eben zu diesem Zwecke erfundenen Terminologie.’ Only to a very limited degree is this sort of hostility reasonable. I will take up some of the current objections in successive order, since to reply to them will be a convenient way of entering into the interior of our subject. Objection 1 . Whereas the sciences make Objec steady progress and yield applica- tion that tions of matchless utility, philosophy it is un- practical makes no progress and has no practi- answered . . . cal applications. Reply. The opposition is unjustly founded, 9 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY for the sciences are themselves branches of the tree of philosophy. As fast as questions got accurately answered, the answers were called ‘scientific,’ and what men call ‘philosophy’ to-day is but the residuum of questions still unanswered. At this very moment we are see- ing two sciences, psychology and general biol- ogy, drop off from the parent trunk and take independent root as specialties. The more general philosophy cannot as a rule follow the voluminous details of any special science. A backward glance at the evolution of phi- losophy will reward us here. The earliest phi- Thisob- losophers in every land were ency- the light clopsedic sages, lovers ot wisdom, of history sometimes with, and sometimes with- out a dominantly ethical or religious interest. They were just men curious beyond immedi- ate practical needs, and no particular problems, but rather the problematic generally, was their specialty. China, Persia, Egypt, India, had such wise men, but those of Greece are the only sages who until very recently have in- fluenced the course of western thinking. The 10 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS earlier Greek philosophy lasted, roughly speak- ing, for about two hundred and fifty years, say from 600 b. c. onwards. Such men as Thales, Heracleitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, were mathematicians, theologians, politicians, as- tronomers, and physicists. All the learning of their time, such as it was, was at their disposal. Plato and Aristotle continued their tradition, and the great mediaeval philosophers only enlarged its field of application. If we turn to Saint Thomas Aquinas’s great ‘Summa,’ writ- ten in the thirteenth century, we find opinions expressed about literally everything, from God down to matter, with angels, men, and demons taken in on the way. The relations of almost everything with everything else, of the cre- ator with his creatures, of the knower with the known, of substances with forms, of mind with body, of sin with salvation, come success- ively up for treatment. A theology, a psy- chology, a system of duties and morals, are given in fullest detail, while physics and logic are established in their universal principles. 11 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY The impression made on the reader is of al- most superhuman intellectual resources. It is true that Saint Thomas’s method of handling the mass of fact, or supposed fact, which he treated, was different from that to which we are accustomed. He deduced and proved everything, either from fixed principles of reason, or from holy Scripture. The properties and changes of bodies, for example, were ex- plained by the two principles of matter and form, as Aristotle had taught. Matter was the quantitative, determinable, passive element; form, the qualitative, unifying, determining, and active principle. All activity was for an end. Things could act on each other only when in contact. The number of species of things was determinate, and their differences dis- crete, etc., etc . 1 By the beginning of the seventeenth century, men were tired of the elaborate a priori methods of scholasticism. Suarez’s treatises availed not 1 J. Rickaby’s General Metaphysics (Longmans, Green and Co.) gives a popular account of the essentials of St. Thomas’s philosophy of nature. Thomas J. Harper’s Metaphysics of the School (Macmillan) goes into minute detail. 12 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS to keep them in fashion. But the new phi- losophy of Descartes, which displaced the scholastic teaching, sweeping over Europe like wildfire, preserved the same encyclopaedic character. We think of Descartes nowadays as the metaphysician who said ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ separated mind from matter as two con- trasted substances, and gave a renovated proof of God’s existence. But his contemporaries thought of him much more as we think of Herbert Spencer in our day, as a great cosmic evolutionist, who explained, by ‘the redistri- bution of matter and motion,’ and the laws of impact, the rotations of the heavens, the circu- lation of the blood, the refraction of light, ap- paratus of vision and of nervous action, the passions of the soul, and the connection of the mind and body. Descartes died in 1650. With Locke’s ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding,’ published in 1690, philosophy for the first time turned more exclusively to the problem of knowledge, and became ‘critical.’ This sub- jective tendency developed; and although the 13 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY school of Leibnitz, who was the pattern of a universal sage, still kept up the more universal tradition — Leibnitz’s follower Wolff published systematic treatises on everything, physical as well as moral — Hume, who succeeded Locke, woke Kant ‘from his dogmatic slum- ber,’ and since Kant’s time the word ‘philoso- phy’ has come to stand for mental and moral speculations far more than for physical the- ories. Until a comparatively recent time, philosophy was taught in our colleges un- der the name of ‘ mental and moral philoso- phy,’ or ‘philosophy of the human mind,’ exclusively, to distinguish it from ‘natural philosophy.’ But the older tradition is the better as well as the completer one. To know the actual peculiarities of the world we are born into is surely as important as to know what makes worlds anyhow abstractly possible. Yet this latter knowledge has been treated by many since Kant’s time as the only knowledge worthy of being called philosophical. Common men feel the question ‘What is Nature like?’ to be 14 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS as meritorious as the Kantian question ‘How is Nature possible?’ So philosophy, in order not to lose human respect, must take some notice of the actual constitution of reality. There are signs to-day of a return to the more objective tradition . 1 Philosophy in the full sense is only man thinking, thinking about generalities rather than about particulars. But whether Philoso- phy is about generalities or particulars, only •man man thinks always by the same methods. He observes, discriminates, generalizes, classifies, looks for causes, traces analogies, and makes hypotheses. Philosophy, taken as something distinct from science or from practical affairs, follows no method peculiar to itself. All our thinking to-day has evolved gradually out of primitive human thought, and the only really important changes that have come over its manner (as distin- guished from the matters in which it believes) are a greater hesitancy in asserting its convic- 1 For an excellent defence of it I refer my readers to Paulsen’s Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Thilly (1895), pp. 19-44. 15 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY tions, and the habit of seeking verification 1 for them whenever it can. It will be instructive to trace very briefly the origins of our present habits of thought. Auguste Comte, the founder of a philosophy which he called ‘positive ,’ 2 said that human Origin of theory on any subject always took man's. three forms in succession. In the present ways of theological stage of theorizing, phe- thinking nomena are explained by spirits pro- ducing them; in the metaphysical stage, their essential feature is made into an abstract idea, and this is placed behind them as if it were an explanation; in the positive stage, phenomena are simply described as to their coexistences and successions. Their Taws’ are formulated, but no explanation of their natures or existence is sought after. Thus a ‘spiritus rector ’ would be a theological, — a ‘principle of attraction’ a metaphysical, — and a Taw of the squares’ would be a positive theory of the planetary movements. 1 Compare G. H. Lewes: Aristotle (1864), chap. 4. 2 Cours de philosophic positive , 6 volumes, Paris, 1830-1842. PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS Comte’s account is too sharp and definite. Anthropology shows that the earliest attempts at human theorizing mixed the theological and metaphysical together. Common things needed no special explanation, remarkable things alone, odd things, especially deaths, calami- ties, diseases, called for it. What made things act was the mysterious energy in them, and the more awful they were, the more of this mana they possessed. The great thing was to acquire mana oneself. ‘Sympathetic magic’ is the collective name for what seems to have been the primitive philosophy here. You could act on anything by controlling anything else that either was associated with it or resembled it. If you wished to injure an enemy, you should either make an image of him, or get some of his hair or other belongings, or get his name written. Injuring the substitute, you thus made him suffer correspondingly. If you wished the rain to come, you sprinkled the ground, if the wind, you whistled, etc. If you would have yams grow well in your garden, put a stone there that looks like a yam. Would 17 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY you cure jaundice, give tumeric, that makes things look yellow ; or give poppies for troubles of the head, because their seed vessels form a ‘head.’ This ‘doctrine of signatures’ played a great part in early medicine. The various ‘ -mancies ’ and ‘ -mantics ’ come in here, in which witchcraft and incipient science are indistinguishably mixed. ‘Sympathetic’ the- orizing persists to the present day. ‘Thoughts are things,’ for a contemporary school — and on the whole a good school — of practical philosophy. Cultivate the thought of what you desire, affirm it, and it will bring all sim- ilar thoughts from elsewhere to reinforce it, so that finally your wish will be fulfilled . 1 Little by little, more positive ways of con- sidering things began to prevail. Common ele- ments in phenomena began to be singled out and to form the basis of generalizations. But these elements at first had necessarily to be the 1 Compare Prentice Mulford and others of the ‘ new thought ’ type. For primitive sympathetic magic consult J. Jastrow in Fact and Fable in Psychology, the chapter on Analogy; F. B. Jevons: In- troduction to the History of Religion, chap, iv; J. G. Frazer: The Golden Bough, i, 2 ; R. R. Marett : The Threshold of Religion, pas- sim. ; A. O. Lovejoy : The Monist, xvi, 357. 18 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS more dramatic or humanly interesting ones. The hot, the cold, the wet, the dry in things explained their behavior. Some bodies were naturally warm, others cold. Motions were natural or violent. The heavens moved in circles because circular motion was the most perfect. The lever was explained by the greater quantity of perfection embodied in the move- ment of its longer arm . 1 The sun went south in winter to escape the cold. Precious or beautiful things had exceptional properties. Peacock’s flesh resisted putrefaction. The lodestone would drop the iron which it held if the superiorly powerful diamond was brought near, etc. Such ideas sound to us grotesque, but im- agine no tracks made for us by scientific an- cestors, and what aspects would we single out from nature to understand things by? Not till the beginning of the seventeenth century did the more insipid kinds of regularity in things abstract men’s attention away from the prop- 1 On Greek science, see W. Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i, book i; G. H. Lewes, Aristotle, passim. 19 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY erties originally picked out. Few of us realize how short the career of what we know as ‘science’ has been. Three hundred and fifty years ago hardly any one believed in the Coper- nican planetary theory. Optical combinations were not discovered. The circulation of the blood, the weight of air, the conduction of heat, the laws of motion were unknown; the common pump was inexplicable ; there were no clocks; no thermometers; no general gravita- tion; the world was five thousand years old; spirits moved the planets; alchemy, magic, astrology, imposed on every one’s belief. Mod- ern science began only after 1600, with Kep- ler, Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli, Pascal, Har- vey, Newton, Huygens, and Boyle. Five men telling one another in succession the discover- ies which their lives had witnessed, could de- liver the whole of it into our hands: Harvey might have told Newton, who might have told Voltaire; Voltaire might have told Dalton, who might have told Huxley, who might have told the readers of this book. The men who began this work of emancipa- 20 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS tion were philosophers in the original sense of the word, universal sages. Galileo said that Science is he had spent more years on philoso- fzed phi phy than months on mathematics, losophy Descartes was a universal philoso- pher in the fullest sense of the term. But the fertility of the newer conceptions made special departments of truth grow at such a rate that they became too unwieldy with details for the more universal minds to carry them, so the special sciences of mechanics, astronomy, and physics began to drop off from the parent stem. No one could have foreseen in advance the extraordinary fertility of the more insipid mathematical aspects which these geniuses fer- reted out. No one could have dreamed of the control over nature which the search for their concomitant variations would give. ‘Laws ’ de- scribe these variations; and all our present laws of nature have as their model the proportion- ality of v to t, and of s to t 2 which Galileo first laid bare. Pascal’s discovery of the proportion- ality of altitude to barometric height, New- ton’s of acceleration to distance, Boyle’s of 21 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY air-volume to pressure, Descartes’ of sine to co- sine in the refracted ray, were the first fruits of Galileo’s discovery. There was no question of agencies, nothing animistic or sympathetic in this new way of taking nature. It was descrip- tion only, of concomitant variations, after the particular quantities that varied had been successfully abstracted out. The result soon showed itself in a differentiation of human knowledge into two spheres, one called ‘Sci- ence,’ within which the more definite laws apply, the other ‘ General Philosophy,’ in which they do not. The state of mind called positi- vistic is the result. ‘Down with philosophy!’ is the cry of innumerable scientific minds. ‘Give us measurable facts only, phenomena, without the mind’s additions, without entities or principles that pretend to explain.’ It is largely from this kind of mind that the objec- tion that philosophy has made no progress, proceeds. It is obvious enough that if every step for- ward which philosophy makes, every question to which an accurate answer is found, gets ac- 22 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS Philoso- phy is the residuum of prob- lems un- solved by science credited to science the residuum of unan- swered problems will alone remain to consti- tute the domain of philosophy, and will alone bear her name. In point of fact this is just what is happening. Philo sophy has becom e a collective name for questions that have no t yet been answered to the satisfaction of all b y does not fol- whom they nave Deei TowTdSecause some of these questions have waited two thousand years for an answer, that no answer will ever be forthcoming. Two thousand years probably measure but one para- graph in that great romance of adventure called the history of the intellect of man. The ex- traordinary progress of the last three hundred years is due to a rather sudden finding of the way in which a certain order of questions ought to be attacked-, questions admitting of mathe- matical treatment. But to assume therefore, that the only possible philosophy must be mechanical and mathematical, and to dispar- age all enquiry into the other sorts of question, is to forget the extreme diversity of aspects 23 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY under which reality undoubtedly exists. To the spiritual questions the proper avenues of philosophic approach will also undoubtedly be found. They have, to some extent, been found already. In some respects, indeed, ‘science’ has made less progress than ‘ philosophy ’ — its most general conceptions would astonish neither Aristotle nor Descartes, could they revisit our earth. The composition of things from elements, their evolution, the conserva- tion of energy, the idea of a universal deter- minism, would seem to them commonplace enough — the little things, the microscopes, electric lights, telephones, and details of the sciences, would be to them the awe-inspiring things. But if they opened our books on meta- physics, or visited a philosophic lecture room, everything would sound strange. The whole idealistic or ‘critical’ attitude of our time would be novel, and it would be long before they took it in. 1 . Objection 2. Philosophy is dogmatic, and 1 The reader will find all that I have said, and much more, set forth in an excellent article by James Ward in Mind, vol. 15, no. lviii: ‘The Progress of Philosophy.’ 24 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS pretends to settle things by pure reason, whereas the only fruitful mode of getting at truth is to appeal to concrete experience. Sci- ence collects, classes, and analyzes facts, and thereby far outstrips philosophy. Reply. This objection is historically valid. Too many philosophers have aimed at closed Philo so- systems, established a priori, claim- notbe ing infallibility, and to be accepted dogmatic or re j ec t ec } on ly as totals. The sci- ences on the other hand, using hypotheses only, but always seeking to verify them by experi- ment and observation, open a w.ay for indefi- nite self-correction and increase. At the pres- ent day, it is getting more and more difficult for dogmatists claiming finality for their sys- tems, to get a hearing in educated circles. Hypothesis and verification, the watchwords of science, have set the fashion too strongly in academic minds. Since philosophers are only men thinking about things in the most comprehensive pos- sible way, they can use any method whatsoever freely.- Philosophy must, in any case, com- 25 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY plete the sciences, and must incorporate their methods. One cannot see why, if such a policy should appear advisable, philosophy might not end by forswearing all dogmatism what- ever, and become as hypothetical in her man- ners as the most empirical science of them all. Objection 3. Philosophy is out of touch with real life, for which it substitutes abstractions. The real world is various, tangled, painful. Philosophers have, almost without exception, treated it as noble, simple, and perfect, ignoring the complexity of fact, and indulging in a sort of optimism that exposes their systems to the contempt of common men, and to the satire of such writers as Voltaire and Schopenhauer. The great popular success of Schopenhauer is due to the fact that, first among philosophers, he spoke the concrete truth about the ills of life. Reply. This objection also is historically valid, but no reason appears why philosophy Nor is it should keep aloof from reality per- divorced , . T t , {rom manently. Her manners may change reaUty as she successfully develops. The thin and noble abstractions may give way to 26 PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS more solid and real constructions, when the materials and methods for making such con- structions shall be more and more securely ascertained. In the end philosophers may get into as close contact as realistic novelists with the facts of life. In conclusion. In its original acceptation, meaning the completest knowledge of the uni- Phiioso- verse, philosophy must include the meta- S results of all the sciences, and cannot physics k e contrasted with the latter. It simply aims at making of science what Herbert Spencer calls a ‘system of completely unified knowledge .’ 1 In the more modern sense, of something contrasted with the sciences, phi- losophy means ‘metaphysics.’ The older sense is the more worthy sense, and as the results of the sciences get more available for co-ordina- tion, and the conditions for finding truth in different kinds of question get more methodic- ally defined, we may hope that the term will revert to its original meaning. Science, meta- 1 See the excellent chapter in Spencer’s First Principles, entitled: ‘ Philosophy Defined.’ 27 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY physics, and religion may then again form a single body of wisdom, and lend each other mutual support. At present this hope is far from its fulfil- ment. I propose in this book to take philoso- phy in the narrow sense of metaphysics, and to let both religion and the results of the sci- ences alone. CHAPTER II THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS No exact definition of the term ‘metaphys- ics ’ is possible, and to name some of the prob- Exampies Iems it treats of is the best way of physical" getting at the meaning of the word, problems me ans the discussion of various obscure, abstract, and universal questions which the sciences and life in general suggest but do not solve; questions left over, as it were; questions, all of them very broad and deep, and relating to the whole of things, or to the ulti- mate elements thereof. Instead of a definition let me cite a few examples, in a random order, of such questions : — xj What are ‘thoughts/ and what are ‘things’? and how are they connected? What do we mean when we say ‘truth’? Is there a common stuff out of which all facts are made? How comes there to be a world at all? and, Might it as well not have been? 29 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Which is the most real kind of reality? •'What binds all things into one universe? Is unity or diversity more fundamental? /Have all things one origin? or many? Is everything predestined, or are some things (our wills for example) free? Is the world infinite or finite in amount? Are its parts continuous, or are there vacua? What is God? — or the gods? i How are mind and body joined? Do they act on each other? How does anything act on anything else? How can one thing change or grow out of another thing? Are space and time beings? — or what? In knowledge, how does the object get into the mind? — or the mind get at the object? We know by means of universal notions. Are these also real? Or are only particular things real? What is meant by a ‘thing’? ‘ Principles of reason,’ — are they inborn or derived? si Are ‘ beauty’ and ‘good’ matters of opinion 30 THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS only? Or have they objective validity? And, if so, what does the phrase mean? Such are specimens of the kind of question termed metaphysical. Kant said that the three essential metaphysical questions were: — What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? A glance at all such questions suffices to rule out such a definition of metaphysics as that of Meta- Christian Wolff, who called it ‘the physics defined science of what is possible,’ as dis- tinguished from that of what is actual, for most of the questions relate to what is actual fact. One X " may say that metaphysics inquires into the cause, the substance, the meaning, and the out- come of all things. Or one may call it the sci- ence of the most universal principles of reality (whether experienced by us or not), in their connection with one another and with our pow- ers of knowledge. ‘ Principles ’ here may mean / either entities, like ‘atoms,’ ‘souls,’ or logical laws like : ‘ A thing must either exist or not exist ’ ; or generalized facts, like ‘things can act only SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY after they exist.’ But the principles are so num- erous, and the ‘ science ’ of them is so far from completion, that such definitions have only a decorative value. The serious work of meta- physics is done over the separate single ques- tions. If these should get cleared up, talk of met- aphysics as a unified science might properly be- gin. This book proposes to handle only a few separate problems, leaving others untouched. These problems are for the most part real; that is, but few of them result from a misuse Nature of of terms in stating them. ‘Things,’ physical i° r exam pl e > are or are n °t composed problems G f one stuff ; they either have or have not a single origin; they either are or are not completely predetermined, etc. Such alterna- tives may indeed be impossible of decision; but until this is conclusively proved of them, they confront us legitimately, and some one must take charge of them and keep account of the solutions that are proposed, even if he does not himself add new ones. The opinions of the learned regarding them must, in short, be classified and responsibly discussed. For in- 32 THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS stance, how many opinions are possible as to the origin of the world? Spencer says that the world must have been either eternal, or self- created, or created by an outside power. So for him there are only three. Is this correct? If so, which of the three views seems the most reasonable? and why? In a moment we are in the thick of metaphysics. We have to be meta- physicians even to decide with Spencer that neither mode of origin is thinkable and that the whole problem is unreal. Some hypotheses may be absurd on their face, because they are self-contradictory. If, for example, infinity means ‘what can never be completed by successive syntheses,’ the notion of anything made by the successive addition of infinitely numerous parts, and yet completed, is absurd. Other hypotheses, for example that everything in nature contributes to a single supreme purpose, may be insuscep- tible either of proof or of disproof. Other hypotheses again, for instance that vacua exist, may be susceptible of probable solution. The classing of the hypotheses is thus as neces- 33 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY sary as the classing of the problems, and both must be recognized as constituting a serious branch of learning . 1 There must in short be metaphysicians. Let us for a while become metaphysicians ourselves. As we survey the history of metaphysics we soon realize that two pretty distinct types of Rational- mind have filled it with their war- physics saying of Coleridge’s is often quoted, to the effect that every one is born either a platonist or an aristotelian. By aristotelian, he means empiricist, and by platonist, he means rationalist; but although the contrast between the two Greek philosphers exists in the sense in which Coleridge meant it, both of them were rationalists as compared with the kind of empiricism which Democritus and Protagoras developed; and Coleridge had better have taken either of those names instead of Aris- totle as his empiricist example. 1 Consult here Paul Janet: Principes de Metaphysique, etc., 1897, legons 1, 2. ism and empiri- cism in meta- fare. Let us call them the rationalist and the empiricist types of mind. A 34 THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS Rationalists are the men of principles, empiri- cists the men of facts; but, since principles are universals, and facts are particulars, perhaps the best way of characterizing the two ten- dencies is to say that rationalist thinking pro- ceeds most willingly by going from wholes to parts, while empiricist thinking proceeds by going from parts to wholes. Plato, the arch- rationalist, explained the details of nature by their participation in ‘ideas,’ which all de- pended on the supreme idea of the ‘good.’ Protagoras and Democritus w T ere empiricists. The latter explained the whole cosmos, includ- ing gods as well as men, and thoughts as well as things, by their composition out of atomic elements; Protagoras explained truth, which for Plato was the absolute system of the ideas, as a collective name for men’s opinions. Rationalists prefer to deduce facts from principles. Empiricists prefer to explain prin- ciples as inductions from facts. Is thought for the sake of life? oris life for the sake of thought? Empiricism inclines to the former, rationalism to the latter branch of the alternative. God’s 35 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY life, according to Aristotle and Hegel, is pure theory. The mood of admiration is natural to rationalism. Its theories are usually optimis- tic, supplementing the experienced world by clean and pure ideal constructions. Aristotle and Plato, the Scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel are examples of This. They claimed absolute finality for their systems, in the noble architecture of which, as their authors believed, truth was eternally embalmed. This temper of finality is foreign to empiricist minds. They may be dogmatic about their method of building on ‘hard facts,’ but they are willing to be sceptical about any conclusions reached by the method at a given time. They aim at accuracy of detail rather than at completeness; are contented to be fragmentary; are less inspiring than the ra- tionalists, often treating the high as a case of ‘nothing but’ the low (‘nothing but’ self-in- terest well understood, etc.), but they usually keep more in touch with actual life, are less subjective, and their spirit is obviously more ‘scientific’ in the hackneyed sense of that 36 THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS term. Socrates, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the Mills, F. A. Lange, J. Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller, Bergson, and other contemporaries are speci- mens of this type. Of course we find mixed minds in abundance, and few philosophers are typical in either class. Kant may fairly be called mixed. Lotze and Royce are mixed. The author of this volume is weakly endowed on the rationalist side, and his book will show a strong leaning towards empiricism. The clash of the two ways of looking at things will be emphasized throughout the volume . 1 I will now enter the interior of the subject by discussing special problems as examples of metaphysical inquiry; and in order not to con- ceal any of the skeletons in the philosophic closet, I will start with the worst problem possible, the so-called ‘ontological problem,’ or question of how there comes to be anything at all. 1 Compare W. James: ‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’ in The Will to Believe (Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), p. 63 f.; Pragmatism, (ibid.), chap, i; A Pluralistic Universe (ibid.), chap. i. CHAPTER III THE PROBLEM OF BEING How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? Schopenhauer’s remarks on this question may be considered classical. ‘Apart from man,’ he says, ‘no being wonders at its own existence. When man first becomes con- scious, he takes himself for granted, as some- thing needing no explanation. But not for long; for, with the rise of the first reflection, Schopen- that won der begins which is the haueron mother of metaphysics, and which the origin of the made Aristotle say that men now and always seek to philosophize because of wonder — The lower a man stands in intellectual respects the less of a riddle does existence seem to him . . . but, the clearer his consciousness becomes the more the problem grasps him in its greatness. In fact the unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of meta- physics going is the thought that the non-ex- istence of this world is just as possible as its 38 THE PROBLEM OF BEING existence. Nay more, we soon conceive the world as something the non-existence of which not only is conceivable but would indeed be preferable to its existence; so that our wonder passes easily into a brooding over that fatality which nevertheless could call such a world into being, and mislead the immense force that could produce and preserve it into an activity so hostile to its own interests. The philosophic wonder thus becomes a sad astonishment, and like the overture to Don Giovanni, philosophy begins with a minor chord .’ 1 One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the fact of one’s being there, of one’s queer bodily shape in the darkness (a thing to make children scream at, as Steven- son says), of one’s fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Philoso- 1 The World as Will and Representation: Appendix 17, ‘On the metaphysical need of man,’ abridged. 39 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY phy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge. Attempts are sometimes made to banish the question rather than to give it an answer. Those who ask it, we are told, extend illegit- imately to the whole of being the contrast Various to a supposed alternative non-being treatments ■, . , , , . , , . of the which only particular beings possess, problem These, indeed, were not, and now are. But being in general, or in some shape, always was, and you cannot rightly bring the whole of it into relation with a primordial non- entity. Whether as God or as material atoms, it is itself primal and eternal. But if you call any being whatever eternal, some philosophers have always been ready to taunt you with the paradox inherent in the assumption. Is past eternity completed? they ask: If so, they go on, it must have had a beginning ; for whether your imagination traverses it forwards or back- wards, it offers an identical content or stuff to be measured; and if the amount comes to an end in one way, it ought to come to an end in 40 THE PROBLEM OF BEING the other. In other words, since we now witness its end, some past moment must have wit- nessed its beginning. If, however, it had a be- ginning, when was that, and why? You are up against the previous nothing, and do not see how it ever passed into being. This dilemma, of having to choose between a regress which, although called infinite, has neverthe- less come to a termination, and an absolute first, has played a great part in philosophy’s history. Other attempts still are made at exorcising the question. Non-being is not, said Parmen- ides and Zeno; only being is. Hence what is, is necessarily being — being, in short, is neces- sary. Others, calling the idea of nonentity no real idea, have said that on the absence of an idea can no genuine problem be founded. More curtly still, the whole ontological wonder has been called diseased, a case of Grubelsucht like asking, ‘Why am I myself? ’ or 4 Why is a triangle a triangle?’ Rationalistic minds here and there have sought to reduce the mystery. Some forms of 41 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY being have been deemed more natural, so to say, or more inevitable and necessary than Rational- others. Empiricists of the evolution- ist and empiricist ar y type — Herbert Spencer seems treatments a good example — have assumed that whatever had the least of reality, was weakest, faintest, most imperceptible, most nascent, might come easiest first, and be the earliest successor to nonentity. Little by little the fuller grades of being might have added themselves in the same gradual way until the whole universe grew up. To others not the minimum, but the maxi- mum of being has seemed the earliest First for the intellect to accept. ‘The perfection of a thing does not keep it from existing,’ Spinoza said, ‘on the contrary, it founds its existence.’ 1 It is mere prejudice to assume that it is harder for the great than for the little to be, and that easiest of all it is to be nothing. What makes things difficult in any line is the alien obstruc- tions that are met with, and the smaller and weaker the thing the more powerful over it Ethics, part i, prop, xi, scholium. 42 THE PROBLEM OF BEING these become. Some things are so great and inclusive that to be is implied in their very na- ture. The anselmian or ontological proof of God’s existence, sometimes called the cartesian proof, criticised by Saint Thomas, rejected by Kant, re-defended by Hegel, follows this line of thought. What is conceived as imperfect may lack being among its other lacks, but if God, who is expressly defined as Ens perfectissi- mum, lacked anything whatever, he would contradict his own definition. He cannot lack being therefore: He is Ens necessarium, Ens realissimum, as well as Ens perfectissimum. 1 Hegel in his lordly way says: ‘It would be strange if God were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as Being, the poorest and most abstract of all.’ This is somewhat in line with Kant’s saying that a real dollar does not contain one cent more than an imaginary dol- lar. At the beginning of his logic Hegel seeks in another way to mediate nonentity with being. 1 St. Anselm: Proslogium, etc. Translated by Doane: Chicago, 1903; Descartes: Meditations , p. 5; Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, ‘On the impossibility of an ontological proof, etc.’ 43 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Since ‘ being ’ in the abstract, mere being, means nothing in particular, it is indistinguishable from ‘nothing’; and he seems dimly to think that this constitutes an identity between the two notions, of which some use may be made in getting from one to the other. Other still queerer attempts show well the rationalist temper. Mathematically you can deduce 1 from 0 by the following process: ^=jEi= 1. Or physically if all being has (as it seems to have) a ‘polar’ construction, so that every positive part of it has its negative, we get the simple equation: +1—1 = 0, plus and minus being the signs of polarity in physics. It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and con- temporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact. Whether the original nothing burst into God and vanished, as night vanishes in day, while God thereupon became the creative principle of all lesser beings; or whether all things have foisted or shaped themselves im- 44 THE PROBLEM OF BEING The same amount of existence must be begged by all perceptibly into existence, the same amount of existence has in the end to be assumed and begged by the philosopher. To comminute the difficulty is not to quench it. If you are a rationalist you beg a kilogram of being at once, we will say; if you are an empiricist you beg a thousand successive grams; but you beg the same amount in each case, and you are the same beggar whatever you may pretend. You leave the logical riddle untouched, of how the coming of whatever is, came it all at once, or came it piecemeal, can be intellectually under- stood . 1 If being gradually grew, its quantity was of course not always the same, and may not be Conser- th e same hereafter. To most phi- vation vs. creation losophers this view has seemed ab- surd, neither God, nor primordial matter, nor energy being supposed to admit of increase or decrease. The orthodox opinion is that the 1 In more technical language, one may say that fact or being is ‘contingent,’ or matter of ‘chance,’ so far as our intellect is concerned. The conditions of its appearance are uncertain, unforeseeable, when future, and when past, elusive. 45 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY quantity of reality must at all costs be con- served, and the waxing and waning of our phenomenal experiences must be treated as surface appearances which leave the deeps un- touched. Nevertheless, within experience, phenomena come and go. There are novelties; there are losses. The world seems, on the concrete and proximate level at least, really to grow. So the question recurs : How do our finite experiences come into being from moment to moment? By inertia? By perpetual creation? Do the new ones come at the call of the old ones? Why do not they all go out like a candle? Who can tell off-hand? The question of be- ing is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak dis- dainfully of another or give itself superior airs. For all of us alike, Fact forms a datum, gift, or V or gefundenes, which we cannot burrow under, explain or get behind. It makes itself some- how, and our business is far more with its What than with its Whence or Why. CHAPTER IV PERCEPT AND CONCEPT-THE IMPORT OF CONCEPTS The problem convenient to take up next in order will be that of the d ifference_ between t houg jd^and things. ‘ Things ’ are known to us by our senses, and are called ‘presentations’ by some authors, to distinguish them from the ideas or ‘ representations ’ which we may have when our senses are closed. I myself have grown accustomed to the words ‘percept’ and ‘ concept ’ in treating of the contrast, but con- cepts flow out of percepts and into them again, Their they are so interlaced, and our life difference res t s on them so interchangeably and undiscriminatingly, that it is often difficult to impart quickly to beginners a clear notion of the difference meant. Sensation and thought in man are mingled, but they vary independ- ently. In our quadrupedal relatives thought proper is at a minimum, but we have no reason to suppose that their immediate life of feeling is either less or more copious than ours. Feel- 47 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY mg must have been originally self-sufficing; and thought appears as a superadded function, adapting us to a wider environment than that of which brutes take account. Some parts of the stream of feeling must be more intense, em- phatic, and exciting than others in animals as well as in ourselves; but whereas lower animals simply react upon these more salient sensa- tions by appropriate movements, higher ani- mals remember them, and men react on them intellectually, by using nouns, adjectives, and verbs to identify them when they meet them elsewhere. The great difference between percepts and concepts 1 is that percepts are continuous and concepts are discrete. Not discrete in their being, for conception as an act is part of the flux of feeling, but discrete from each other in their several meanings. Each concept means 1 In what follows I shall freely use synonyms for these two terms. ‘Idea,’ ‘thought,’ and ‘intellection’ are synonymous with ‘concept.’ Instead of ‘ percept ’ I shall often speak of ‘ sensation,’ ‘ feeling,’ ‘ intui- tion,’ and sometimes of ‘ sensible experience ’ or of the ‘ immediate flow ’ of conscious life. Since Hegel’s time what is simply perceived has been called the ‘immediate,’ while the ‘mediated ’ is synonymous with what is conceived. 48 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT just what it singly means, and nothing else; and if the conceiver does not know whether he means this or means that, it shows that his concept is imperfectly formed. The perceptual flux as such, on the contrary, means nothing, and is but what it immediately is. No matter how small a tract of it be taken, it is always a much-at-once, and contains innumerable as- pects and characters which conception can pick out, isolate, and thereafter always intend. It shows duration, intensity, complexity or simplicity, interestingness, excitingness, pleas- antness or their opposites. Data from all our senses enter into it, merged in a general ex- tensiveness of which each occupies a big or little share. Yet all these parts leave its unity unbroken. Its boundaries are no more distinct than are those of the field of vision. Boundaries are things that intervene; but here nothing intervenes save parts of the perceptual flux itself, and these are overflowed by what they separate, so that whatever we distinguish and isolate conceptually is found perceptually to telescope and compenetrate and diffuse into SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY its neighbors. The cuts we make are purely ideal. If my reader can succeed in abstracting from all conceptual interpretation and lapse back into his immediate sensible life at this very moment, he will find it to be what some- one has called a big blooming buzzing confu- sion, as free from contradiction in its ‘much- at-onceness’ as it is all alive and evidently there . 1 Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness attention carves out objects, which conception The con- then names and identifies forever — ceptual order in the sky ‘constellations,’ on the earth ‘beach,’ ‘sea,’ ‘cliff,’ ‘bushes,’ ‘grass.’ Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights,’ ‘sum- mers’ and ‘winters.’ We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these ab- stracted whats are concepts . 2 1 Compare W. James: A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 282-288. Also Psychology , Briefer Course, pp. 157-166. 2 On the function of conception consult: Sir William Hamilton’s Lectures on Logic, 9, 10; H. L. Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, chap, i; A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will, etc., Supplements 6, 7 to book ii; W. James, Principles of Psychology, chap, xii; Briefer Course, chap. xiv. Also J.G. Romanes: Mental Evolution in Man, chaps, iii, iv; Th. Ribot: l' Evolution des Idies Generates, chap, vi; Th. Ruyssen, Essai sur V Evolu- tion psychologique duJugement, chap, vii; Laromigui&re, Leqons de Phil- 50 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. But before tracing the conse- quences of the substitution, I must say some- thing about the conceptual order itself . 1 Trains of concepts unmixed with percepts grow frequent in the adult mind; and parts of these conceptual trains arrest our attention just as parts of the perceptual flow did, giving rise to concepts of a higher order of abstract- ness. So subtile is the discernment of man, and so great the power of some men to single out osophie, part 2, lesson 12. The account I give directly contradicts that which Kant gave which has prevailed since Kant’s time. Kant always speaks of the aboriginal sensible flux as a ‘ manifold ’ of which he considers the essential character to be its disconnectedness. To get any togetherness at all into it requires, he thinks, the agency of the ‘transcendental ego of apperception,’ and to get any definite connec- tions requires the agency of the understanding, with its synthetizing concepts or ‘categories.’ ‘Die Verbindung (conjunctio) eines Man- nigfaltigen kann iiberhaupt niemals durch Sinne in uns kommen, und kann also auch nicht in der reinen Form der sinnlichen Anschauung zugleich mit enthalten sein; denn sie ist ein Actus der Spontaneitat der Einbildungskraft, und, da man diese, zum Unterschiede von der Sinnlichkeit, Verstand nennen muss, so ist alle Verbindung . . . eine Verstandeshandlung.’ K. d. r. V., 2te, Aufg., pp. 129-130. The reader must decide which account agrees best with his own actual experience. 1 The substitution was first described in these terms by S. H. Hodg* son in his Philosophy of Reflection, i, 288-310. 51 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the most fugitive elements of what passes before them, that these new formations have no limit. Aspect within aspect, quality after quality, relation upon relation, absences and negations as well as present features, end by being noted and their names added to the store of nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and prepositions by which the human mind inter- prets life. Every new book verbalizes some new concept, which becomes important in pro- portion to the use that can be made of it. Dif- ferent universes of thought thus arise, with specific sorts of relation among their ingredi- ents. The world of common-sense ‘things’; the w r orld of material tasks to be done; the mathe- matical world of pure forms; the world of ethical propositions; the worlds of logic, of music, etc., all abstracted and generalized from long forgotten perceptual instances, from which they have as it were flowered out, return and merge themselves again in the particulars of our present and future perception. By those whats we apperceive all our thises. Percepts and concepts interpenetrate and melt together, 52 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither, taken alone, knows reality in its completeness. We need them both, as we need both our legs to walk with. From Aristotle downwards philosophers have frankly admitted the indispensability, for complete knowledge of fact, of both the sensa- tional and the intellectual contribution . 1 For complete knowledge of fact, I say; but facts are particulars and connect themselves with practical necessities and the arts; and Greek philosophers soon formed the notion that a knowledge of so-called ‘universals,’ consisting of concepts of abstract forms, qualities, num- bers, and relations was the only knowledge worthy of the truly philosophic mind. Particu- lar facts decay and our perceptions of them vary. A concept never varies; and between such unvarying terms the relations must be constant and express eternal verities. Hence there arose a tendency, which has lasted all through philosophy, to contrast the know- 1 See, for example, book i, chap, ii, of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 53 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ledge of universals and intelligibles, as god- like, dignified, and honorable to the knower, with that of particulars and sensibles as some- thing relatively base which more allies us with the beasts . 1 1 Plato in numerous places, but chiefly in books 6 and 7 of the Re- public, contrasts perceptual knowledge as ‘opinion' with real know- ledge, to the latter’s glory. For an excellent historic sketch of this platonistic view see the first part of E. Laas’s Idealismus und Positivis- mus, 1879. For expressions of the ultra-intellectualistic view, read the passage from Plotinus on the Intellect in C. M. Bakewell’s Source-book in Ancient Philosophy, N. Y. 1907, pp. 353 f.; Bossuet, Traite de la Connaissance de Dieu, chap, iv, §§ v, vi; R. Cudworth, A Treatise con- cerning eternal amd immutable Morality, books iii, iv. - — ‘Plato,’ writes Prof. Santayana, ‘ thought that all the truth and meaning of earthly things was the reference they contained to a heavenly original. This heavenly original we remember to recognize even among the distor- tions, disappearances, and multiplications of its ephemeral copies. . . . The impressions themselves have no permanence, no intelligible es- sence, but are always either arising or ceasing to be. There must be, he tells us, an eternal and clearly definable object of which the visible appearances to us are the multiform semblance; now by one trait, now by another, the phantom before us reminds us of that half- forgotten celestial reality and makes us utter its name. . . . We and the whole universe exist only in the attempt to return to our perfec- tion, to lose ourselves again in God. That ineffable good is our natu- ral possession; and all we honor in this life is but a partial recovery of our birthright; every delightful thing is like a rift in the clouds, through which we catch a glimpse of our native heaven. And if that heaven seems so far away, and the idea of it so dim and unreal, it is because we are so far from perfect, so immersed in what is alien and destructive to the soul.’ (‘Platonic Love in some Italian Poets,’ in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1896.) This is the interpretation of Plato which has been current since 54 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT For rationalistic writers conceptual know- ledge was not only the more noble knowledge, Concept but it originated independently of ’ uai know- a H perceptual particulars. Such con- ledge— the rational- cepts as God, perfection, eternity, in- ist view • • • • « • finity, immutability, identity, abso- lute beauty, truth, justice, necessity, freedom, duty, worth, etc., and the part they play in our mind, are, it was supposed, impossible to explain as results of practical experience. The empiricist view, and probably the true view, is that they do result from practical experience . 1 But a more important question than that as to the origin of our concepts is that as to their Aristotle. It should be said that its profundity has been challenged by Prof. A. J. Stewart. (Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas, Oxford, 1909.) Aristotle found great fault with Plato’s treatment of ideas as heav- enly originals, but he agreed with him fully as to the superior excel- lence of the conceptual or theoretic life. In chapters vii and viii of book x of the Nicomachean Ethics he extols contemplation of universal rela- tions as alone yielding pure happiness. ‘ The life of God, in all its ex- ceeding blessedness, will consist in the exercise of philosophic thought; and of all human activities, that will be the happiest which is most akin to the divine.’ 1 John Locke, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, books i, ii, was the great popularizer of this doctrine. Condillac’s TraitS des Sensations, Helvetius’s work, De VHomme, and James Mill’s Analysis of the Human Mind, were more radical successors of Locke’s great book. 55 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY functional use and value; — is that tied down to perceptual experience, or out of all relation to it? Is conceptual knowledge self-sufficing and a revelation all by itself, quite apart from its uses in helping to a better understanding of the world of sense? Rationalists say, Yes. For, as we shall see in later places (page 68), the various conceptual universes referred to on page 52 can be con- sidered in complete abstraction from percept- ual reality, and when they are so considered, all sorts of fixed relations can be discovered among their parts. From these the a 'priori sciences of logic, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics (so far as the last two can be called sciences at all) result. Conceptual knowledge must thus be called a self-sufficing revelation; and by rationalistic writers it has always been treated as admitting us to a diviner world, the world of universal rather than that of perish- ing facts, of essential qualities, immutable rela- tions, eternal principles of truth and right. Emerson writes: ‘Generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind : hence the 56 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT thrill that attends it.’ And a disciple of Hegel, after exalting the knowledge of ‘the General, Unchangeable, and alone Valuable’ above that of ‘the Particular, Sensible and Transient,’ adds that if you reproach philosophy with being unable to make a single grass-blade grow, or even to know how it does grow, the reply is that since such a particular ‘how’ stands not above but below knowledge, strictly so-called, such an ignorance argues no defect. 1 To this ultra-rationalistic opinion the em- piricist contention that the significance of con- Concept- cepts consists always in their relation Tedge 1 — 1° perceptual particulars has been op- ^ e . posed. Made of percepts, or distilled view from parts of percepts, their essen- tial office, it has been said, is to coalesce with percepts again, bringing the mind back into the perceptual world with a better command of the situation there. Certainly whenever we can do this with our concepts, we do more with 1 Michelet, Hegel’s Werke, vii, 15, quoted by A. Gratry, De la Connaissance de I’Ame,' i, 231. Compare the similar claim for phi- losophy in W. Wallace’s Prolegomena to Hegel, 2d ed., 1894, pp. 28-29, and the long and radical statement of the same view in book iv of Ralph Cudworth’s Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality. 57 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY them than when we leave them flocking with their abstract and motionless companions. It is possible therefore, to join the rationalists in allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-suffic- ing, while at the same time one joins the em- piricists in maintaining that the full value of such knowledge is got only by combining it with perceptual reality again. This mediating attitude is that which this book must adopt. But to understand the nature of concepts better we must now go on to distinguish their function from their content. The concept ‘man,’ to take an example, is three things: 1, the word itself; 2, a vague picture of the human form which has The con- tent and its own value in the way of beauty or function . of con- not; and 3, an instrument tor sym- cepts bolizing certain objects from which we may expect human treatment when occa- sion arrives. Similarly of ‘triangle,’ ‘cosine,’ — they have their substantive value both as words and as images suggested, but they also have a functional value whenever they lead us else- where in discourse. 58 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT There are concepts, however, the image-part of which is so faint that their whole value seems to be functional. ‘God/ ‘cause/ ‘num- ber/ ‘substance,’ ‘soul,’ for example, suggest no definite picture; and their significance seems to consist entirely in their tendency, in the further turn which they may give to our action or our thought. 1 We cannot rest in the contemplation of their form, as we can in that of a ‘circle’ ora ‘man’; we must pass beyond. Now however beautiful or otherwise worthy of stationary contemplation the substantive part of a concept may be, the more important part of its significance may naturally be held to be the consequences to which it leads. These Theprag- ma y e ^^ er * n wa y m &king matic rule us think, or in the way of making us act. Whoever has a clear idea of these knows effectively what the concept practically signi- fies, whether its substantive content be inter- esting in its own right or not. This consideration has led to a method of 1 On this functional tendency compare H. Taine, On Intelligence,. book i, chap, ii (1870). 59 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY interpreting concepts to which I shall give the name of the Pragmatic Rule. 1 The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a concept may always be found, if not in some sensible particular which it directly designates, then in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make. Test every concept by the question ‘What sensible difference to anybody will its truth make?’ and you are in the best possible position for understanding what it means and for discussing its importance. If, questioning whether a certain concept be true or false, you can think of absolutely nothing that would practically differ in the two cases, you may as- sume that the alternative is meaningless and that your concept is no distinct idea. If two concepts lead you to infer the same particular consequence, then you may assume that they embody the. same meaning under different names. This rule applies to concepts of every order 1 Compare W. James, Pragmatism, chap, ii and passim; also Bald- win’s Dictionary of Philosophy, article ‘ Pragmatism,’ by C. S. Peirce. 60 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT of complexity, from simple terms to proposi- tions uniting many terms. So many disputes in philosophy hinge upon ill-defined words and ideas, each side claim- ing its own word or idea to be true, that any accepted method of making meanings clear must be of great utility. No method can be handier of application than our pragmatic rule. If you claim that any idea is true, assign at the same time some difference that its being true will make in some possible person’s his- tory, and we shall know not only just what you are really claiming but also how important an issue it is, and how to go to work to verify the claim. In obeying this rule we neglect the sub- stantive content of the concept, and follow its function only. This neglect might seem at first sight to need excuse, for the content often has a value of its own which might conceivably add lustre to reality, if it existed, apart from any modification wrought by it in the other parts of reality. Thus it is often supposed that ‘Idealism’ is a theory precious in itself, even though no definite change in the details of our 61 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY experience can be deduced from it. Later dis- cussion will show that this is a superficial view, and that particular consequences are the only criterion of a concept’s meaning, and the only test of its truth. Instances are hardly called for, they are so obvious. That A and B are ‘ equal,’ for example, Examples means either that ‘you will find no difference’ when you pass from one to the other, or that in substituting one for the other in certain operations ‘you will get the same result both times.’ ‘Substance’ means that ‘a definite group of sensations will recur.’ ‘In- commensurable’ means that ‘you are always confronted with a remainder.’ ‘Infinite’ means either that, or that ‘you can count as f many units in a part as you can in the whole.’ ‘More’ and ‘less’ mean certain sensations, varying according to the matter. ‘Freedom’ means ‘no feeling of sensible restraint.’ ‘Ne- cessity ’ means that ‘your way is blocked in all directions save one.’ ‘God ’means that ‘you can dismiss certain kinds of fear,’ ‘cause’ that ‘you may expect certain sequences,’ etc. etc. 62 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT We shall find plenty of examples in the rest of this book; so I go back now to the more general question of whether the whole import of the world of concepts lies in its relation to percep- tual experience, or whether it be also an inde- pendent revelation of reality. Great ambiguity is possible in answering this question, so we must mind our Ps and Qs. The first thing to notice is that in the earliest stages of human intelligence, so far as we can guess at them, thought proper must have had an exclusively practical use. Men classed their Origin of sensations, substituting concepts for concepts them, in order to ‘work them for utility what they were worth,’ and to pre- pare for what might lie ahead. Class-names suggest consequences that have attached themselves on other occasions to other mem- bers of the class — consequences which the present percept will also probably or certainly show . 1 The present percept in its immediacy may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign 1 For practical uses of conception compare W. James, Principles oj Psychology, chap, xxii; J. E. Miller, The Psychology of Thinking, 1909, passim, but especially chaps, xv, xvi, xvii. 63 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of the consequences which the substituted con- cept suggests. The substitution of concepts and their connections, of a whole conceptual order, in short, for the immediate perceptual flow, thus widens enormously our mental panorama. Had we no concepts we should live simply ‘ getting ’ each successive moment of experience, as the sessile sea-anemone on its rock receives what- ever nourishment the wash of the waves may bring. With concepts we go in quest of the ab- sent, meet the remote, actively turn this way or that, bend our experience, and make it tell us whither it is bound. We change its order, run it backwards, bring far bits together and sepa- rate near bits, jump about over its surface in- stead of plowing through its continuity, string its items on as many ideal diagrams as our mind can frame. All these are ways of handling the perceptual flux and meeting distant parts of it; and as far as this primary function of con- ception goes, we can only conclude it to be what I began by calling it, a faculty superadded to our barely perceptual consciousness for its 64 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT use in practically adapting us to a larger en- vironment than that of which brutes take ac- count . 1 We harness perceptual reality in con- cepts in order to drive it better to our ends. Does our conceptual translation of the per- ceptual flux enable us also to understand the The theo- latter better ? What do we mean pretation of the word, we see that the better we understand anything the more we are able to tell about it . Judged by this test, concepts do make us understand our percepts better: knowing what these are, we can tell all sorts of farther truths about them, based on the relation of those whats to other whats. The whole system of relations, spatial, temporal, and logical, of our fact, gets plotted out. An ancient philosophical opinion, inherited from Aristotle, is that we do not understand a thing until we know it by its causes. When the maid- servant says that ‘ the cat ’ broke the tea-cup, 1 Herbert Spencer in his Psychology, parts iii and iv, has at great length tried to show that such adaptation is the sole meaning of our intellect. retie use of con- cepts by making us ‘ understand ’ ? Apply- ing our pragmatic rule to the inter- 65 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY she would have us conceive the fracture in a causally explanatory way. No otherwise when Clerk-Maxwell asks us to conceive of gas-elec- tricity as due to molecular bombardment. An imaginary agent out of sight becomes in each case a part of the cosmic context in which we now place the percept to be explained ; and the explanation is valid in so far as the new causal that is itself conceived in a context that makes its existence probable, and with a nature agreeable to the effects it is imagined to pro- duce. All our scientific explanations would seem to conform to this simple type of the ‘ necessary cat.’ The conceived order of nature built round the perceived order and explain- ing it theoretically, as we say, is only a system of hypothetically imagined thats, the whats of which harmoniously connect themselves with the what of any that which we immediately perceive. The system is essentially a topographic sys- tem, a system of the distribution of things. It tells us what ’s what, and where ’s where. In so far forth it merely prolongs that opening up of 66 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT the perspective of practical consequences which we found to be the primordial utility of the conceiving faculty: it adapts us to an im- mense environment. Working by the causes of things we gain advantages which we never should have compassed had we worked by the things alone. But in order to reach such results the con- cepts in the explanatory system must, I said, in the a ‘harmoniously connect.’ What does priori sciences thi\t mean? Is this also only a prac- tical advantage, or is it sometning more? It seems something more, for it points to the fact that when concepts of various sorts are once abstracted or constructed, new relations are then found between them, connecting them in peculiarly intimate, ‘rational,’ and unchange- able ways. In another book 1 I have tried to show that these rational relations are all prod- ucts of our faculty of comparison and of our sense of ‘more.’ The sciences which exhibit these relations are the so-called a 'priori sciences of mathe- 1 Principles of Psychology, 1890, chap, xxviii. 67 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY matics and logic. 1 But these sciences express relations of comparison and identification ex- clusively. Geometry and algebra, for example, first define certain conceptual objects, and then establish equations between them, substituting equals for equals. Logic has been defined as the ‘ substitution of similars’; and in general one may say that the perception of likeness and unlikeness generates the whole of ‘ra- tional’ or ‘necessary’ truth. Nothing happens in the worlds of logic, mathematics or moral and aesthetic preference. The static nature of the relations in these worlds is what gives to the propositions that express them their ‘ eter- nal ’ character: The binomial theorem, e. g., expresses the value of any power of any sum of two terms, to the end of time. These vast unmoving systems of universal terms form the new worlds of thought of which I spoke on page 56. The terms are elements (or are framed of elements) abstracted from 1 The ‘ necessary ’ character of the abstract truths which these sciences exhibit is well explained by G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, Problem 1, chapters iv, xiii, especially p. 405 f. of the English edition (1874). 68 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT the perceptual flux; but in their abstract shape we note relations between them (and again be- tween these relations) which enable us to set up various schemes of fixed serial orders or of ‘more and more.’ The terms are indeed man- made, but the order, being established solely by comparison, is fixed by the nature of the terms on the one hand and by our power of per- ceiving relations on the other. Thus two ab- stract twos are always the same as an abstract four; what contains the container contains the contained of whatever material either be made; equals added to equals always give equal re- sults, in the world in which abstract equality is the only property the terms are supposed to possess; the more than the more is more than the less, no matter in what direction of more- ness we advance; if you dot off a term in one series every time you dot one off in another, the two series will either never end, or will come to an end together, or one will be exhausted first, etc. etc. ; the result being those skeletons of ‘rational’ or ‘necessary’ truth in which our logic- and mathematics-books (sometimes 69 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY our philosophy-books) arrange their universal terms. The ‘rationalization’ of any mass of per- ceptual fact consists in assimilating its con- And in crete terms, one by one, to so many physics terms of the conceptual series, and then in assuming that the relations intuitively found among the latter are what connect the former too. Thus we rationalize gas-pressure by identifying it with the blows of hypothetic molecules; then we see that the more closely the molecules are crowded the more frequent the blows upon the containing walls will be- come; then we discern the exact proportion- ality of the crowding with the number of blows; so that finally Mariotte’s empirical law gets rationally explained. All our transformations of the sense-order into a more rational equiva- lent are similar to this one. We interrogate the beautiful apparition, as Emerson calls it, which our senses ceaselessly raise upon our path, and the items there refer us to their interpretants in the shape of ideal construc- tions in some static arrangement which our 70 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT mind has already made out of its concepts alone. The interpretants are then substituted for the sensations, which thus get rationally conceived. To ‘explain’ means to coordinate, one to one, the thises of the perceptual flow with the whats of the ideal manifold, whichever it be . 1 We may well call this a theoretic conquest over the order in which nature originally comes. The conceptual order into which we translate our experience seems not only a means of prac- tical adaptation, but the revelation of a deeper level of reality in things. Being more constant, it is truer, less illusory than the perceptual order, and ought to command our attention more. There is still another reason why conception appears such an exalted function. Concepts Concepts no t only guide us over the map of bring new values life, but we revalue life by their use. Their relation to percepts is like that of sight to touch. Sight indeed helps us by preparing 1 Compare W. Ostwald: Vorlesungen iiber Naturpkilosophie, Sechste Vorlesung. 71 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY us for contacts while they are yet far off, but it endows us in addition with a new world of optical splendor, interesting enough all by itself to occupy a busy life. Just so do concepts bring their proper splendor. The mere pos- session of such vast and simple pictures is an inspiring good: they arouse new feelings of sublimity, power, and admiration, new inter- ests and motivations. Ideality often clings to things only when they are taken thus abstractly. “Causes, as anti-slavery, democracy, etc., dwindle when realized in their sordid particulars. Abstrac- tions will touch us when we are callous to the concrete instances in which they lie embodied. Loyal in our measure to particular ideals, we soon set up abstract loyalty as something of a superior order, to be infinitely loyal to; and truth at large becomes a ‘momentous issue’ compared with which truths in detail are ‘poor scraps, mere crumbling successes.’” 1 1 J. Royce: The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908, particularly Lecture vii, § 5. Emerson writes: ‘Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any 72 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT So strongly do objects that come as universal and eternal arouse our sensibilities, so greatly do life’s values deepen when we translate per- cepts into ideas! The translation appears as far more than the original’s equivalent. Concepts thus play three distinct parts in hu- Summary man life. 1. They steer us practically every day, and provide an immense map of relations among the elements of things, which, though not now, yet on some possible future occasion, may help to steer us practically; 2. They bring new values into our perceptual life, they reanimate our wills, and make our action turn upon new points of emphasis ; 3. The map which the mind frames out of man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunc- tions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point of view of the intellect, or as truth, but all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world — the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of Joy. Round it all the muses sing. But grief clings to names and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.’ ( Essay on Love.) 73 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY them is an object which possesses, when once it has been framed, an independent existence. It suffices all by itself for purposes of study. The ‘ eternal ’ truths it contains would have to be acknowledged even were the world of sense annihilated. We thus see clearly what is gained and what is lost when percepts are translated into con- cepts. Perception is solely of the here and now ; conception is of the like and unlike, of the future, of the past, and of the far away. But this map of what surrounds the present, like all maps, is only a surface; its features are but abstract signs and symbols of things that in themselves are concrete bits of sensible experi- ence. We have but to weigh extent against content, thickness against spread, and we see that for some purposes the one, for other pur- poses the other, has the higher value. Who can decide offhand which is absolutely better to live or to understand life? We must do both alternately, and a man can no more limit him- self to either than a pair of scissors can cut with a single one of its blades. CHAPTER V PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — THE ABUSE OF CONCEPTS 1 In spite of this obvious need of holding our percepts fast if our conceptual powers are to mean anything distinct, there has always been a tendency among philosophers to treat con- ception as the more essential thing in know- Thein- ledge . 2 The Platonizing persuasion tellectual- ist creed has ever been that the intelligible order ought to supersede the senses rather than interpret them. The senses, according to this opinion, are organs of wavering illusion that stand in the way of ‘knowledge,’ in the unal- terable sense of that term. They are an unfor- tunate complication on which philosophers may safely turn their backs. ‘Your sensational modalities,’ writes one of 1 [This chapter and the following chapter do not appear as separate chapters in the manuscript. Ed.] 3 The traditional rationalist view would have it that to understand life, without entering its turmoil, is the absolutely better part. Phi- losophy’s ‘special work,’ writes William Wallace, ‘is to comprehend the world, not try to make it better ’ ( Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, 2d edition, Oxford, 1894, p. 29). 75 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY these, ‘are but darkness, remember that. Mount higher, up to reason, and you will see light. Impose silence on your senses, your imagination, and your passions, and you will then hear the pure voice of interior truth, the clear and evident replies of our common mis- tress [reason]. Never confound that evidence which results from the comparison of ideas with the vivacity of those feelings which move and touch you. . . . We must follow reason despite the caresses, the threats and the in- sults of the body to which we are conjoined, despite the action of the objects that surround us. ... I exhort you to recognize the differ- ence there is between knowing and feeling, between our clear ideas, and our sensations always obscure and confused .’ 1 This is the traditional intellectualist creed. When Plato, its originator, first thought of concepts as forming an entirely separate world and treated this as the only object fit for the study of immortal minds, he lit up an entirely 1 Malebranche: Entretiens sur la Metaphysique, 3me. Entretien, viii, 9. 76 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT new sort of enthusiasm in the human breast. These objects were precious objects, concrete things were dross. Introduced by Dion, who had studied at Athens, to the corrupt and worldly court of the tyrant of Syracuse, Plato, as Plutarch tells us, ‘was received with won- derful kindness and respect. . . . The citizens began to entertain marvellous hopes of a speedy reformation when they observed the modesty which now ruled the banquets, and the general decorum which reigned in all the court, their tyrant also behaving himself with gentleness and humanity. . . . There was a general pas- sion for reasoning and philosophy, so much so that the very palace, it is reported, was filled with dust by the concourse of the students in mathematics who were working their problems there ’ in the sand. Some ‘ professed to be indignant that the Athenians, who formerly had come to Syracuse with a great fleet and numerous army, and perished miserably with- out being able to take the city, should now, by means of one sophister, overturn the sover- eignty of Dionysius ; inveigling him to cashier 77 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY his guard of 10,000 lances, dismiss a navy of 400 galleys, disband an army of 10,000 horse and many times over that number of foot, and go seek in the schools an unknown and imagin- ary bliss, and learn by the mathematics how to be happy.* Having now set forth the merits of the con- ceptual translation, I must proceed to show _ . x . its shortcomings. We extend our the con- view when we insert our percepts ceptual transia- into our conceptual map. We learn about them, and of some of them we transfigure the value; but the map remains superficial through the abstractness, and false through the discreteness of its elements; and the whole operation, so far from making things appear more rational, becomes the source of quite gratuitous unintelligibilities. Conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the fulness of the reality to be known. Reality consists of existential particulars as well as of essences and universals and class-names, and of exist- ential particulars we become aware only in the perceptual flux. The flux can never be 78 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT superseded. We must carry it with us to the bitter end of our cognitive business, keeping it in the midst of the translation even when the The insu- latter proves illuminating, and fall- “ ing back on it alone when the trans- 11011 lation gives out. ‘ The insuperability of sensation ’ would be a short expression of my thesis. To prove it, I must show: 1. That concepts are secondary formations, inadequate, and only ministerial; and 2. That they falsify as well as omit, and make the flux impossible to understand. 1. Conception is a secondary process, not indispensable to life. It presupposes percep- tion, which is self-sufficing, as all lower crea- tures, in whom conscious life goes on by reflex adaptations, show. To understand a concept you must know what it means. It means always some this, or some abstract portion of a this, with which we first made acquaintance in the perceptual world, or else some grouping of such abstract portions. All conceptual content is borrowed : 79 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY to know what the concept ‘ color ’ means you must have seen red or blue, or green. To know what ‘ resistance ’ means, you must have made some effort; to know what ‘motion ’ means, you must have had some experience, active or pas- sive, thereof. This applies as much to con- cepts of the most rarified order as to qualities like ‘bright’ and ‘loud.’ To know what the word ‘illation’ means one must once have sweated through some particular argument. To know what a ‘proportion’ means one must have compared ratios in some sensible case. You can create new concepts out of old ele- ments, but the elements must have been per- ceptually given; and the famous world of universals would disappear like a soap-bubble if the definite contents of feeling, the thises and thats, which its terms severally denote, could be at once withdrawn. Whether our concepts live by returning to the perceptual world or not, they live by having come from it. It is the nourishing ground from which their sap is drawn. 2. Conceptual treatment of perceptual real- 80 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT it y makes it seem paradoxical and incompre- hensible; and when radically and consistently carried out, it leads to the opinion that per- ceptual experience is not reality at all, but an appearance or illusion. - Briefly, this is a consequence of two facts: First, that when we substitute concepts for Why con- percepts, we substitute their rela- only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled. Secondly, the conceptual scheme, consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely. The one is no full measure of the other, essential features of the flux escaping whenever we put concepts in its place. This needs considerable explanation, for we have concepts not only of qualities and rela- tions, but of happenings and actions; and it might seem as if these could make the con- ceptual order active . 1 But this would be a false 1 Prof. Hibben, in an article in the Philosophic Review, vol. xix, pp. cepts are Inade- quate tions also. But since the relations of concepts are of static comparison 81 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY interpretation. The concepts themselves are fixed, even though they designate parts that move in the flux; they do not act, even though they designate activities; and when we substi- tute them and their order, we substitute a scheme the intrinsically stationary nature of which is not altered by the fact that some of its terms symbolize changing originals. The concept of ‘change,’ for example, is always that 125 ff. (1910), seeks to defend the conceptual order against attacks similar to those in the text, which, he thinks, come from misapprehen- sions of the true function of logic. ‘ The peculiar function of thought is to represent the continuous,’ he says, and he proves it by the exam- ple of the calculus. I reply that the calculus, in substituting for cer- tain perceptual continuities its peculiar symbols, lets us follow changes point by point, and is thus their practical, but not their sensible equiv- alent. It cannot reveal any change to one who never felt it, but it can lead him to where the change would lead him. It may practically re- place the change, but it cannot reproduce it. What I am contending for is that the non-reproducible part of reality is an essential part of the content of philosophy, whilst Hibben and the logicists seem to believe that conception, if only adequately attained to, might be all- sufficient. ‘It is the peculiar duty and privilege of philosophy,’ Mr. Hibben writes, ‘ to exalt the prerogatives of intellect.’ He claims that universals are able to deal adequately with particulars, and that con- cepts do not so exclude each other, as my text has accused them of doing. Of course ‘synthetic’ concepts abound, with subconcepts in- cluded in them, and the a priori world is full of them. But they are all designative; and I think that no careful reader of my text will ac- cuse me of identifying ‘ knowledge ’ with either perception or concep. tion absolutely or exclusively. Perception gives * intension,’ concep- tion gives ‘extension ’ to our knowledge. 82 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT fixed concept. If it changed, its original self would have to stay to mark what it had changed from; and even then the change would be a perceived continuous process, of which the translation into concepts could only consist in the judgment that later and earlier parts of it differed — such ‘ differences ’ being conceived as absolutely static relations. Whenever we conceive a thing we define it ; Origin of and jf we s till don’t understand, we intellect- uaiism define our definition. Thus I define a certain percept by saying ‘this is motion,’ or ‘ I am moving ’ ; and then I define motion by calling it the ‘being in new positions at new moments of time.’ This habit of telling what everything is becomes inveterate. The farther we pUsh it, the more we learn about our subject of discourse, and we end by thinking that knowing the latter always consists in getting farther and farther away from the perceptual type of experience. This uncriticized habit, added to the intrinsic charm of the conceptual form, is the source of ‘intellectualism’ in phi- losophy. 83 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY But intellectualism quickly breaks down. When we try to exhaust motion by conceiving uum given, you can make cuts and dots in it, ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will not give you your continuum back. The ra- tionalist mind admits this; but instead of see- ing that the fault is with the concepts, it blames the perceptual flux. This, Kant con- tends, has no reality in itself, being a mere apparitional birth-place for concepts, to be substituted indefinitely. When these them- selves are seen never to attain to a completed sum, reality is sought by such thinkers outside both of the perceptual flow and of the concept- ual scheme. Kant lodges it before the flow, in the shape of so-called ‘things in themselves ’; 1 others place it beyond perception, as an Abso- lute (Bradley), or represent it as a Mind whose 1 ‘ We must suppose Noumena,’ says Kant, ‘ in order to set bounds to the objective validity of sense-knowledge’ ( Krit . d. reinen Ver- nunft, 2d ed., p. 310). The old moral need of somehow rebuking ‘ Sinnlichkeit’! Inade- quacy of intellectu- alism it as a summation of parts, ad in- finitum, we find only insufficiency. Although, when you have a contin- 84 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT ways of thinking transcend ours (Green, the Cairds, Royce). In either case, both our per- cepts and our concepts are held by such phi- losophers to falsify reality; but the concepts less than the percepts, for they are static, and by all rationalist authors the ultimate reality is supposed to be static also, while perceptual life fairly boils over with activity and change. If we take a few examples, we can see how many of the troubles of philosophy come from Examples assuming that to be understood (or of puzzles intro- known in the only worthy sense of ceptuai cut j n |- 0 discrete bits and pinned Example 1. Activity and causation are in- comprehensible, for the conceptual scheme yields nothing like them. Nothing happens therein: concepts are ‘timeless,’ and can only be juxtaposed and compared. The concept ‘dog’ does not bite; the concept ‘cock’ does not crow. So Hume and Kant translate the fact of causation into the crude juxtaposition of two phenomena. Later authors, wishing to duced by con- the word) our flowing life must be transla- tion upon a fixed relational scheme. 85 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY mitigate the crudeness, resolve the adjacency, whenever they can, into identity: cause and effect must be the same reality in disguise, and our perception of difference in these successions thus becomes an illusion. Lotze elaborately establishes that the ‘influencing’ of one thing by another is inconceivable. ‘Influence’ is a concept, and, as such, a distinct third thing, to be identified neither with the agent nor the patient. What becomes of it on its way from the former to the latter? And when it finds the latter, how does it act upon it? By a second influence which it puts forth in turn? — But then again how? and so forth, and so forth till our whole intuition of activity gets branded as illusory because you cannot possibly reproduce its flowing substance by juxtaposing the dis- crete. Intellectualism draws the dynamic con- tinuity out of nature as you draw the thread out of a string of beads. Example 2. Knowledge is impossible ; for knower is one concept, and known is another. Discrete, separated by a chasm, they are mu- tually ‘transcendent’ things, so that how an 86 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT object can ever get into a subject, or a subject ever get at an object, has become the most unanswerable of philosophic riddles. An insin- cere riddle, too, for the most hardened ‘epis- temologist’ never really doubts that know- ledge somehow does come off. Example 3. Personal identity is conceptually impossible. ‘Ideas’ and ‘states of mind’ are discrete concepts, and a series of them in time means a plurality of disconnected terms. To such an atomistic plurality the associationists reduce our mental life. Shocked at the discon- tinuous character of their scheme, the spiritu- alists assume a ‘soul’ or ‘ego’ to melt the separate ideas into one collective consciousness. But this ego itself is but another discrete con- cept; and the only way not to pile up more puzzles is to endow it with an incomprehensi- ble power of producing that very character of manyness-in-oneness of which rationalists re- fuse the gift when offered in its immediate per- ceptual form. Example 4. Motion and change are impos- sible. Perception changes pulsewise, but the 87 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY pulses continue each other and melt their bounds. In conceptual translation, however, a continuum can only stand for elements with other elements between them ad infinitum, all separately conceived; and such an infinite series can never be exhausted by successive addition. From the time of Zeno the Eleatic, this intrinsic contradictoriness of continuous change has been one of the worst skulls at intellectualism’s banquet. Example 5. Resemblance, in the way in which we naively perceive it, is an illusion. Re- semblance must be defined; and when defined it reduces to a mixture of identity with other- ness. To know a likeness understandingly we must be able to abstract the identical point distinctly. If we fail of this, we remain in our perceptual limbo of ‘confusion.’ Example 6. Our immediate life is full of the sense of direction, but no concept of the direction of a process is possible until the process is com- pleted. Defined as it is by a beginning and an ending, a direction can never be prospectively but only retrospectively known. Our percept- 88 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT ual discernment beforehand of the way we are going, and all our dim foretastes of the future, have therefore to be treated as inexplicable or illusory features of experience. Example 7. No real thing can be in two rela- tions at once; the same moon, for example, can- not be seen both by you and by me. For the concept ‘seen by you’ is not the concept ‘seen by me’; and if, taking the moon as a gram- matical subject and, predicating one of these concepts of it, you then predicate the other also, you become guilty of the logical sin of saying that a thing can both be A and not-A at once. Learned trifling again; for clear though the conceptual contradictions be, no- body sincerely disbelieves that two men see the same thing. Example 8. No relation can be comprehended or held to be real in the form in which we inno- cently assume it. A relation is a distinct con- cept; and when you try to make two other con- cepts continuous by putting a relation between them, you only increase the discontinuity. You have now conceived three things instead 89 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY of two, and have two gaps instead of one to bridge over. Continuity is impossible in the conceptual world. Example 9. The very relation of subject to 'predicate in our judgments, the backbone of con- ceptual thinking itself, is unintelligible and self - contradictory. Predicates are ready-made uni- versal ideas by which we qualify perceptual singulars or other ideas. Sugar, for example, we say ‘ is ’ sweet. But if the sugar was already sweet, you have made no step in knowledge; whilst if not so already, you are identifying it with a concept, with which, in its universality, the particular sugar cannot be identical. Thus neither the sugar as described, nor your de- scription, is comprehensible. 1 1 I have cited in the text only such conceptual puzzles as have be- come classic in philosophy, but the concepts current in physical science have also developed mutual oppugnancies which (although not yet classic commonplaces in philosophy) are beginning to make physicists doubt whether such notions develop unconditional ‘truth.’ Many physicists now think that the concepts of ‘matter,’ ‘mass,’ ‘atom,’ ‘ether,’ ‘inertia,’ ‘force,’ etc. are not so much duplicates of hidden realities in nature as mental instruments to handle nature by after- eubstitution of their scheme. They are considered, like the kilogram or the imperial yard, ‘ artefacts,’ not revelations. The literature here is copious: J. B. Stallo’s Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1882); pp. 136-140 especially, are fundamental. Mach, Ostwald, Pearson 90 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT These profundities of inconceivability, and many others like them, arise from the vain Attitude attempt to reconvert the manifold losophers into which our conception has re- ‘diaiectic ’ s0 ^ ve ^ things, back into the con- difficulties tinuum out of which it came. The concept ‘many’ is not the concept ‘one’; therefore the manyness-in-oneness which per- ception offers is impossible to construe intel- lectually. Youthful readers will find such difficulties too whimsical to be taken seriously; but since the days of the Greek sophists these dialectic puzzles have lain beneath the surface of all our thinking like the shoals and snags in the Mississippi river; and the more intellectu- ally conscientious the thinkers have been, the less they have allowed themselves to disregard them. But most philosophers have noticed this or that puzzle only, and ignored the others* The pyrrhonian Sceptics first, then Hegel , 1 v then in our day Bradley and Bergson, are the only writers I know who have faced them col- Duhem, Milhaud, LeRoy, Wilbois, H. Poincare, are other critics of a similar sort. 1 I omit Herbart, perhaps wrongly. 91 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY lectively, and proposed a solution applicable to them all. The sceptics gave up the whole notion of truth light-heartedly, and advised their pupils The seep- not t Q care about it . 1 Hegel wrote so tics and Hegel abominably that I cannot under- stand him, and will say nothing about him here . 2 Bradley and Bergson write with beauti- ful clearness and their arguments continue all that I have said. Mr. Bradley agrees that immediate feeling possesses a native wholeness which conceptual Bradley treatment analyzes into a many, but ceptand cannot unite again. In every ‘ this ’ concept as mere ly f e Jt 5 Bradley says, we ‘en- counter’ reality, but we encounter it only as a fragment, see it, as it were, only ‘through a 1 See any history of philosophy, sub voce ‘ Pyrrho.’ 2 Hegel connects immediate perception with ideal truth by a ladder of intermediary concepts — at least, I suppose they are concepts. The best opinion among his interpreters seems to be that ideal truth does not abolish immediate perception, but preserves it as an indispensable * moment.’ Compare, e. g., H. W. Dresser: The Philosophy of the Spirit, 1908; Supplementary Essay: ‘On the Element of Irrationality in the Hegelian Dialectic.’ In other words Hegel does not pull up the ladder after him when he gets to the top, and may therefore be counted as a non-intellectualist, in spite of his desperately intellectualist tone. 92 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT hole .’ 1 Our sole practicable way of extending and completing this fragment is by using our intellect with its universal ideas. But with ideas, that harmonious compenetration of manyness- in-oneness which feeling originally gave is no longer possible. Concepts indeed extend our this , but lose the inner secret of its wholeness; when ideal ‘truth’ is substituted for ‘reality’ the very nature of ‘reality’ disappears. The fault being due entirely to the concep- tual form in which we have to think things, one might naturally expect that one who recognizes its inferiority to the perceptual form as clearly as Mr. Bradley does, would try to save both forms for philosophy, delimiting their scopes, and showing how, as our experience works, they supplement each other. This is M. Berg- son’s procedure ; but Bradley, though a traitor to orthodox intellectualism in holding fast to feeling as a revealer of the inner oneness of reality, has yet remained orthodox enough to refuse to admit immediate feeling into ‘philos- ophy’ at all. ‘For worse or for better,’ he 1 F. H. Bradley: The Principles of Logic, book i, chap, ii, pp. 29-32. 93 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY writes, 'the man who stays on particular feel- ing must remain outside philosophy.’ The philosopher’s business, according to Mr. Brad- ley, is to qualify the real ‘ideally ’ (i. e. by con- cepts), and never to look back. The ‘ideas’ meanwhile yield nothing but a patchwork, and show no unity like that which the living per- ception gave. What shall one do in these per- plexing circumstances? Unwilling to go back, Bradley only goes more desperately forward. He makes a flying leap ahead, and assumes, beyond the vanishing point of the whole con- ceptual perspective, an ‘absolute’ reality, in which the coherency of feeling and the com- pleteness of the intellectual ideal shall unite in some indescribable way. Such an absolute totality -in unity can be, it must be, it shall be, it is he says. Upon this incomprehensible metaphysical object the Bradleyan metaphysic establishes its domain . 1 The sincerity of Bradley’s criticisms has cleared the air of metaphysics and made havoc 1 Mr. Bradley has expressed himself most pregnantly in an article in volume xviii, N. S. of Mind, p. 489. See also his Appearance and Reality, passim, especially the Appendix to the second edition. 94 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT with old party lines. But, critical as he is, Mr. Bradley preserves one prejudice uncriti- Criticism cized. Perception ‘untransmuted,’ of Bradley jj e mus t not, cannot, shall not, enter into final ‘truth.’ Such loyalty to a blank direction in thought, no matter where it leads you, is pathetic : con- cepts disintegrate — no matter, their way must be pursued; percepts are integral — no matter, they must be left behind. When anti- sensationalism has become an obstinacy like this, one feels that it draws near its end. Since it is only the conceptual form which forces the dialectic contradictions upon the in- nocent sensible reality, the remedy would seem to be simple. Use concepts when they help, and drop them when they hinder understand- ing; and take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it comes. The aboriginal flow of feel- ing sins only by a quantitative defect. There is always much-at-once of it, but there is never enough, and we desiderate the rest. The only way to get the rest without wading through all 95 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY future time in the person of numberless per- ceivers, is to substitute our various conceptual systems which, monstrous abridgments though they be, are nevertheless each an equivalent, for some partial aspect of the full perceptual reality which we can never grasp. This, essentially, is Bergson’s view of the matter, and with it I think that we should rest content . 1 I will now sum up compendiously the result of what precedes. If the aim of philosophy Summary were the taking full possession of all reality by the mind, then nothing short of the whole of immediate perceptual experience could be the subject-matter of philosophy, for only in such experience is reality intimately and concretely found. But the philosopher, although he is unable as a finite being to com- pass more than a few passing moments of such experience, is yet able to extend his knowledge beyond such moments by the ideal symbol of 1 Bergson’s most compendious statement of his doctrine is in the ‘Introduction h. la Metaphysique,’ in the Revue de MStaphysique et de Morale, 1903, p. i. For a brief comparison between him and Bradley, see an essay by W. James, in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. vii, no. 2. 96 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT the other moments . 1 He thus commands vi- cariously innumerable perceptions that are out of range. But the concepts by which he does this, being thin extracts from perception, are always insufficient representatives thereof ; and, although they yield wider information, must never be treated after the rationalistic fashion, as if they gave a deeper quality of truth. The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience. Here alone do we ac- quaint ourselves with continuity, or the im- mersion of one thing in another, here alone with self, with substance, with qualities, with ac- tivity in its various modes, with time, with cause, with change, with novelty, with tend- ency, and with freedom. Against all such fea- tures of reality the method of conceptual trans- lation, when candidly and critically followed out, can only raise its non possumus, and brand them as unreal or absurd. 1 It would seem that in ‘ mystical ’ ways, he may extend his vision to an even wider perceptual panorama than that usually open to the sci- entific mind. I understand Bergson to favor some such idea as this , SeeW. James: ‘ ASuggestion about Mysticism,’ Journal of Philosophy, vii, 4. The subject of mystical knowledge, as yet very imperfectly un- derstood, has been neglected both by philosophers and scientific men. CHAPTER VI PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — SOME COROLLARIES The first corollary of the conclusions of the foregoing chapter is that the tendency lcnoivn in philosophy as empiricism, becomes confirmed. Empiricism proceeds from parts to wholes, treating the parts as fundamental both in the order of being and in the order of our know- ledge . 1 In human experience the parts are per- i. Novelty cepts, built out into wholes by our becomes possible conceptual additions. The percepts are singulars that change incessantly and never return exactly as they were before. This brings an element of concrete novelty into our experi- ence. This novelty finds no representation in - the conceptual method, for concepts are ab- stracted from experiences already seen or given, 1 Naturally this applies in the present place only to the greater whole which philosophy considers; the universe namely, and its parts, for there are plenty of minor wholes (animal and social organisms, for example) in which both the being of the parts and our understanding of the parts are founded. 98 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT and he who uses them to divine the new can never do so but in ready-made and ancient terms. Whatever actual novelty the future may contain (and the singularity and individu- ality of each moment makes it novel) escapes conceptual treatment altogether. Properly speaking, concepts are post-mortem prepara- tions, sufficient only for retrospective under- standing; and when we use them to define the universe prospectively we ought to realize that they can give only a bare abstract outline or approximate sketch, in the filling out of which perception must be invoked. Rationalistic philosophy has always aspired to a rounded-in view of the whole of things, a closed system of kinds, from which the notion of essential novelty being possible is ruled out in advance. For empiricism, on the other hand, reality cannot be thus confined by a conceptual ring-fence. It overflows, exceeds, and alters. It may turn into novelties, and can be known adequately only by following its singularities from moment to moment as our experience grows. Empiricist philosophy thus renounces 99 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the pretension to an all-inclusive vision. It ekes out the narrowness of personal experience by concepts which it finds useful but not sovereign; but it stays inside the flux of life expectantly, recording facts, not formulat- ing laws, and never pretending that man’s relation to the totality of things as a philoso- pher is essentially different from his relation to the parts of things as a daily patient or agent in the practical current of events. Phi- losophy, like life, must keep the doors and windows open. In the remainder of this book we shall hold fast to this empiricist view. We shall insist that, as reality is created temporally day by day, concepts, although a magnificent sketch- map for showing us our bearings, can never fitly supersede perception, and that the ‘eter- nal’ systems which they form should least of all be regarded as realms of being to know which is a kind of knowing that casts the know- ledge of particulars altogether into the shade. That rationalist assumption is quite beside the mark. Thus does philosophy prove again that 100 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT 2 . Con- ceptual systems are dis- tinct realms of reality essential identity with science which we argued for in our first chapter . 1 The last paragraph does not mean that con- cepts and the relations between them are not just as ‘ real ’ in their ‘ eternal ’ way as percepts are in their temporal way. What is it to be ‘real’? The best definition I know is that which the pragmatist rule gives; ‘anything is real of which we find ourselves obliged to take account in any way .’ 2 Concepts are thus as real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment without taking account of them. But the ‘eternal’ kind of being which they enjoy is in- ferior to the temporal kind, because it is so static and schematic and lacks so many charac- ters which temporal reality possesses. Philoso- phy must thus recognize many realms of reality 1 One way of stating the empiricist contention is to say that the ‘alogical ’ enters into philosophy on an equal footing with the ‘logical.’ Mr. Belfort Bax, in his book, The Roots of Reality (1907), formulates his empiricism (such as it is) in this way. (See particularly chap, iii.) Compare also E. D. Fawcett: The Individual and Reality, passim, but especially part ii, chaps, iv and v. 2 Prof. A. E. Taylor gives this pragmatist definition in his Elements of Metaphysics (1903), p. 51. On the nature of logical reality, cf. B. Russell: Principles of Mathematics. 101 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY which mutually interpenetrate. The concept- ual systems of mathematics, logic, aesthetics, ethics, are such realms, each strung upon some peculiar form of relation, and each differing from perceptual reality in that in no one of them is history or happening displayed. Per- ceptual reality involves and contains all these ideal systems, and vastly more besides. A concept, it was said above, means always the same thing : Change means always change, 3 The white always white, a circle always a self-same- circle. On this self-sameness of con- ness of ideal ceptual objects the static and ‘eter- nal ’ character of our systems of ideal truth is based; for a relation, once perceived to obtain, must obtain always, between terms that do not alter. But many persons find difficulty in admitting that a concept used in different contexts can be intrinsically the same. When we call both snow and paper ‘ white ’ it is supposed by these thinkers that there must be two predicates in the field. As James Mill says: 1 ‘Every colour is an individual colour, 1 Analysis of the Human Mind (1869), i, 249. 102 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT every size is an individual size, every shape is an individual shape. But things have no indi- vidual colour in common, no individual shape in common; no individual size in common; that is to say, they have neither shape, colour, nor size in common. What, then, is it which they have in common which the mind can take into view? Those who affirmed that it was some- thing, could by no means tell. They substi- tuted words for things; using vague and mys- tical phrases, which, when examined, meant nothing.’ The truth, according to this nominal- ist author, is that the only thing that can be pos- sessed in common by two objects is the same name. Black in the coat and black in the shoe are the same in so far forth as both shoe and coat are called black — the fact that on this view the name can never twice be the ‘ same ’ being quite overlooked. What now does the concept ‘same’ signify? Applying, as usual, the pragmatic rule, we find that when we call two objects the same we mean either (a) that -' Br no difference can be found between them when compared, or (b) that we can substitute the one ^ 103 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY for the other in certain operations without changing the result. If we are to discuss same- ness profitably we must bear these pragmatic meanings in mind. Do then the snow and the paper show no difference in color? And can we use them in- differently in operations? They may certainly replace each other for reflecting light, or be used indifferently as backgrounds to set off anything dark, or serve as equally good samples of what the word ‘white’ signifies. But the snow may be dirty, and the paper pinkish or yellowish without ceasing to be called ‘white or both snow and paper in one light may differ from their own selves in another and still be ‘ white,’ — so the no-difference criterion seems to be at fault. This physical difficulty (which all house painters know) of matching two tints so exactly as to show no difference seems to be the sort of fact that nominalists have in mind when they say that our ideal meanings are never twice the same. Must we therefore ad- mit that such a concept as ‘ white ’ can never keep exactly the same meaning? 104 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT It would be absurd to say so, for we know that under all the modifications wrought by changing light, dirt, impurity in pigment, etc., there is an element of color-quality, different from other color-qualities, which we mean that our word shall inalterably signify. The impossi- bility of isolating and fixing this quality physi- cally is irrelevant, so long as we can isolate «and fix it mentally, and decide that whenever we say ‘white,’ that identical quality, whether applied rightly or wrongly, is what we shall be held to mean. Our meanings can be the same as often as we intend to have them so, quite irre- spective of whether what is meant be a physi- cal possibility or not. Half the ideas we make use of are of impossible or problematic things, — zeros, infinites, fourth dimensions, limits of ideal perfection, forces, relations sundered from their terms, or terms defined only con- ceptually, by their relations to other terms which may be equally fictitious. ‘White’ means a color quality of which the mind ap- points the standard, and which it can decree to be there under all physical disguises. That 105 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY white is always the same white. What sense can there be in insisting that although we our- selves have fixed it as the same, it cannot be the same twice over? It works perfectly for us on the supposition that it is there self- identieally; so the nominalist doctrine is false of things of that conceptual sort, and true only of things in the perceptual flux. What I am affirming here is the platonic doctrine that concepts are singulars, that con- cept-stuff is inalterable, and that physical realities are constituted by the various con- cept-stuff s of which they ‘partake.’ It is known as ‘ logical realism ’ in the history of philosophy; and has usually been more favored by rational- istic than by empiricist minds. For rational- ism, concept-stuff is primordial and perceptual things are secondary in nature. The present book, which treats concrete percepts as pri- ‘‘ mordial and concepts as of secondary origin, may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with an otherwise empiricist mode of thought . 1 1 For additional remarks in favor of the sameness of conceptual ob- 106 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT I mean by this that they are made of the same kind of stuff, and melt into each other 4. Con- when we handle them together. How percepts could it be otherwise when the con- are con- ce pts are like evaporations out of the tial bosom of perception, into which they condense again whenever practical service summons them? No one can tell, of the things he now holds in his hand and reads, how much comes in through his eyes and fingers, and how much, from his apperceiving intellect, unites with that and makes of it this particular ‘book’? The universal and the particular parts of the experience are literally immersed in each other, and both are indispensable. Conception is not like a painted hook, on which no real chain can be hung; for we hang concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon concepts interchangeably and indefinitely; and the relation of the two is much more like what we find in those cylindrical ‘ panoramas ’ jects, see W. James in Mind, vol. iv, 1879, pp. 331-335; F. H. Bradley: Ethical Studies (1876), pp. 151-154, and Principles of Logic (1883), pp. 260 ff., 282 ff. The nominalist view is presented by James Mill, as above, and by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, Sth ed. i, 77. 107 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY in which a painted background continues a real foreground so cunningly that one fails to de- tect the joint. The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible, except by theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the con- tributions of intellect from those of sense. They are wrapt and rolled together as a gunshot in the mountains is wrapt and rolled in fold on fold of echo and reverberative clamor. Even so do intellectual reverberations enlarge and prolong the perceptual experience which they envelop, associating it with remoter parts of existence. And the ideas of these in turn work like those resonators that pick out partial tones in complex sounds. They help us to decompose our percept into parts and to ab- stract and isolate its elements. The two mental functions thus play into each other’s hands. Perception prompts our thought, and thought in turn enriches our per- ception. The more we see, the more we think; while the more we think, the more we see in our immediate experiences, and the greater grows the detail and the more significant the 108 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT articulateness of our perception . 1 Later, when we come to treat of causal activity, we shall see how practically momentous is this enlargement of the span of our knowledge through the wrap- ping of our percepts in ideas. It is the whole coil and compound of both by which effects are determined, and they may then be different effects from those to which the perceptual nucleus would by itself give rise. But the point is a difficult one and at the present stage of our argument this brief mention of it must suffice. Readers who by this time agree that our con- ceptual systems are secondary and on the 5. An ob- whole imperfect and ministerial forms jection replied to of being, will now feel able to return and embrace the flux of their hourly experience with a hearty feeling that, however little of it at a time be given, what is given is absolutely 1 Cf. F. C. S. Schiller: ‘ Thought and Immediacy,’ in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., iii, 234. The interpretation goes so deep that we may even act as if experience consisted of nothing but the different kinds of concept-stuff into which we analyze it. Such concept-stuff may often be treated, for purposes of action and even of discussion, as if it were a full equivalent for reality. But it is needless to repeat, after what precedes, that no amount of it can ever be a full equivalent, and that in point of genesis it remains a secondary formation. 109 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY real. Rationalistic thought, with its exclusive interest in the unchanging and the general, has always de-realized the passing pulses of our life. It is no small service on empiricism’s part to have exorcised rationalism’s veto, and reflectively justified our instinctive feeling about immediate experience. ‘Other world?’ says Emerson, ‘there is no other world,’ — than this one, namely, in which our several biographies are founded. ‘Natur hat weder Kern noch Scbale; Alles ist sie mit einem male. Dich priife du nur allermeist, Ob du Kern oder Seliale seist.’ The belief in the genuineness of each particular moment in which we feel the squeeze of this world’s life, as we actually do work here, or work is done upon us, is an Eden from which rationalists seek in vain to expel us, now that we have criticized their state of mind. But they still make one last attempt, and charge us with self-stultification. ‘Your belief in the particular moments,’ they insist, ‘so far as it is based on reflective argu- 110 PERCEPT AND CONCEPT ment (and is not a mere omission to doubt, like that of cows and horses) is grounded in abstrac- tion and conception. Only by using concepts have you established percepts in reality. The concepts are the vital things, then, and the percepts are dependent on them for the char- acter of “reality” with wdiich your reasoning endows them. You stand self -contradicted : concepts appear as the sole triumphant instru- ments of truth, for you have to employ their proper authority, even when seeking to install perception in authority above them.’ The objection is specious; but it disappears the moment one recollects that in the last resort a concept can only be designative; and that the concept ‘reality,’ which we restore to immediate perception, is no new conceptual creation, but only a kind of practical relation to our Will, perceptively experienced , 1 * Ill which reasoning had temporarily interfered with, but which, when the reasoning was neutralized by still further reasoning, reverted to its 1 Compare W. James: Principles of Psychology, chap, xxi, “The Perception of Reality.’ Ill SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY original seat as if nothing had happened. That concepts can neutralize other concepts is one of their great practical functions. This an- swers also the charge that it is self-contradic- tory to use concepts to undermine the credit of conception in general. The best way to show that a knife will not cut is to try to cut with it. Rationalism itself it is that has so fatally un- dermined conception, by finding that, when worked beyond a certain point, it only piles up dialectic contradictions . 1 1 Compare further, as to this objection, a note in W. James: A Plu- ralistic Universe, pp. 339-343. CHAPTER VII c THE ONE AND THE MANY The full nature, as distinguished from the full amount, of reality, we now believe to be given only in the perceptual flux. But, though the flux is continuous from next to next, non- ad jacent portions of it are separated by parts that intervene, and such separation seems in a variety of cases to work a positive disconnec- tion. The latter part, e. g., may contain no element surviving from the earlier part, may be unlike it, may forget it, may be shut off from it by physical barriers, or whatnot. Thus Pluralism when we use our intellect for cutting vs. mon- ism up the flux and individualizing its members, we have (provisionally and prac- tically at any rate) to treat an enormous num- ber of these as if they were unrelated or related only remotely, to one another. We handle them piecemeal or distributively, and look at the entire flux as if it were their sum or collec- tion. This encourages the empiricist notion, 113 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY that the parts are distinct and that the whole is a resultant. This doctrine rationalism opposes, contend- ing that the whole is fundamental, that the parts derive from it and all belong with one- another, that the separations we uncritically accept are illusory, and that the entire uni- verse, instead of being a sum, is the only gen- uine unit in existence, constituting (in the words often quoted from d’Alembert) * un seul fait et une grande verite .’ The alternative here is known as that be- tween pluralism and monism. It is the most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy, although it is only in our time that it has been articulated distinctly. Does reality exist dis- tributive^? or collectively? — in the shape of eaches, every s, anys, eithers? or only in the shape of an all or whole ? An identical content is compatible with either form obtaining, the Latin omnes, or cuncti, or the German alle or sammtliche expressing the alternatives famil- iarly. Pluralism stands for the distributive, monism for the collective form of being. 114 THE ONE AND THE MANY Please note that pluralism need not be sup- posed at the outset to stand for any particular kind or amount of disconnection between the many things which it assumes. It only has the negative significance of contradicting mon- ism’s thesis that there is absolutely no discon- nection. The irreducible outness of anything, however infinitesimal, from anything else, in any respect, would be enough, if it were solidly established, to ruin the monistic doctrine. I hope that the reader begins to be pained here by the extreme vagueness of the terms I am using. To say that there is ‘no disconnec- tion,’ is on the face of it simply silly, for we find practical disconnections without number. My pocket is disconnected with Mr. Morgan’s bank-account, and King Edward VII’s mind is disconnected with this book. Monism must mean that all such apparent disconnections are bridged over by some deeper absolute union in which it believes, and this union must in some way be more real than the practical separations that appear upon the surface. ) In point of historical fact monism has gen- SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY erally kept itself vague and mystical as regards the ultimate principle of unity. To be One is Kinds of more wonderful than to be many, so momsm the principle of things must be One, but of that One no exact account is given. Plotinus simply calls it the One. ‘The One is all things and yet no one of them. ... For the very reason that none of them was in the One, are all derived from it. Furthermore, in order that they may be real existences, the One Mystical is not an existence, but the father momsm G j? ex j s t enceSt And the generation of existence is as it were the first act of gener- ation. Being perfect by reason of neither seeking nor possessing nor needing anything, the One overflows, as it were, and what over- flows forms another hypostasis. . . . How should the most perfect and primal good stay shut up in itself as if it were envious or impotent? . . . Necessarily then something comes from it .’ 1 This is like the Hindoo doctrine of the Brah- 1 Compare the passages in C. M. Bakewell’s Source-Book in Ancient Philosophy, pp. 363-370, or the first four books of the Vth Ennead generally, in F. Bouillier’s translation. 116 THE ONE AND THE MANY A __ man, or of the Atman. In the Bhagavat-gita the holy Krishna speaking for the One, says: ‘I am the immolation. I am the sacrificial rite. I am the libation offered to ancestors. I am the drug. I am the incantation. I am the sacrificial butter also. I am the fire. I am the incense. I am the father, the mother, the sustainer, the grandfather of the univers'e — the mystic doc- trine, the purification, the syllable “Om” . . . the path, the supporter, the master, the wit- ness, the habitation, the refuge, the friend, the origin, the dissolution, the place, the receptacle, the inexhaustible seed. I heat (the world) I withhold and pour out the rain. I am ambrosia and death, the existing and the non-existing. . . . I am the. same to all beings. I have neither foe nor friend. . . . Place thy heart on me, wor- shipping me, sacrificing to me, saluting me .’ 1 I call this sort of monism mystical, for it not only revels in formulas that defy understand- ing , 2 but it accredits itself by appealing to states of illumination not vouchsafed to com- 1 J. C. Thomson’s translation, chap. iv. ' 2 Al-Ghazzali, the Mohammedan philosopher and mystic, gives a more theistic version of essentially the same idea: ‘Allah is the guider 117 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY mon men. Thus Porphyry, in his life of Plo- tinus, after saying that he himself once had such an insight, when 68 years old, adds that whilst he lived with Plotinus, the latter four times had the happiness of approaching the su- preme God and consciously uniting with him in a real and ineffable act. The regular mystical way of attaining the vision of the One is by ascetic training, funda- mentally the same in all religious systems. But this ineffable kind of Oneness is not strictly philosophical, for philosophy is essentially talkative and explicit, so I must pass it by. The usual philosophic way of reaching deeper oneness has been by the conception of sub- stance. First used by the Greeks, this notion aright and the leader astray ; he does what he wills and decides what he wishes; there is no opposer of his decision and no repeller of his decree. He created the Garden, and created for it a people, then used them in obedience. And he created the Fire, and created for it a people, theD used them in rebellion. . . . Then he said, as has been handed down from the Prophet: “These arein the Garden, and I carenot; and these are in the Fire, and I care not.’’ So he is Allah, the Most High, the King, the Reality. He is not asked concerning what he does; but they are asked.’ (D. B. MacDonald’s translation, in Hartford Seminary Re- cord, January, 1910.) Compare for other quotations, W. James: The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 415-422. 118 THE ONE AND THE MANY was elaborated with great care during the Middle Ages. Defined as any being that exists Monism per se so that it needs no further sub- of sub- stance ject in which to inhere ( Ens ita per se existens , ut non indigeat alio tamquam sub- jecto,cui inhaereat, ad existendum) a ‘substance * was first distinguished from all ‘accidents 5 (which do require such a subject of inhesion — cujus esse est inesse). It was then identified with the ‘ principle of individuality 5 in things, and with their ‘essence , 5 and divided into va- rious types, for example into first and second, simple and compound, complete and incom- plete, specific and individual, material and spiritual substances. God, on this view, is a substance, for he exists per se, as well as a se; but of secondary beings, he is the creator, not the substance, for once created, they also exist per se though not a se. Thus, for scholasticism, the notion of substance is only a partial unifier, and in its totality, the universe forms a plural- ism from the substance-point-of-view . 1 1 Consult the word ‘substance ’ in the index of any scholastic man- ual, such as J. Rickaby: General Metaphysics; A. Stockl: Lehrbuch d. Phil.; or P. M. Liberatore: Compendium Logics et Metaphysicce. 119 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Spinoza broke away from the scholastic doc- trine. He began his ‘ Ethics ’ by demonstrating that only one substance is possible, and that that substance can only be the infinite and necessary God . 1 This heresy brought reproba- 1 Spinoza has expressed his doctrine briefly in part i of the Appendix to his Ethics: ‘I have now explained,’ he says, ‘the nature of God, and his properties; such as that he exists necessarily; that he is unique; that what he is and does flows from the sole necessity of his nature; that he is the free cause of all things whatever; that all things are in God and depend on him in such wise that they can neither be nor be conceived without him; and finally, that all things have been predeter- mined by God, not indeed by the freedom of his will, or according to his good pleasure, but in virtue of his absolute nature or his infinite potentiality.’ — Spinoza goes on to refute the vulgar notion of final causes. God pursues no ends — if he did he would lack something. He acts out of the logical necessity of the fulness of his nature. — I find another good monistic statement in a book of the spinozistic type: — *. . . The existence of every compound object in manifestation does not lie in the object itself, but lies in the universal existence which is an absolute unit, containing in itself all that is manifested. All the particularized beings, therefore, . . . are incessantly changing one into the other, coming and going, forming and dissolving through the one universal cause of the potential universe, which is the absolute unit of universal existence, depending on the one general law, the one math- ematical bond, which is the absolute being, and it changes not in all eternity. Thus, ... it is the universe as a whole, in its potential being, from which the physical universe is individualized; and its being is a mathematical inference from a mathematical or an intellectual universe which was and ever is previously formed by an intellect standing and existing by itself. This mathematical or intellectual uni- verse I call Absolute Intellectuality, the God of the Universe.’ (Solomon J. Silberstein: The Disclosures of the Universal Mysteries, New York, 1900, pp. 12-13.) 120 THE ONE AND THE MANY tion on Spinoza, but it has been favored by philosophers and poets ever since. The panthe- istic spinozistic unity was too sublime a pros- pect not to captivate the mind. It was not till Locke, Berkeley, and Hume began to put in their ‘critical’ work that the suspicion began to gain currency that the notion of substance might be only a word masquerading in the shape of an idea . 1 Locke believed in substances, yet confessed that ‘we have no such clear idea at all, but only Critique an uncertain supposition of we know of sub- stance not what, which we take to be the substratum, or support of those ideas we do not know .’ 2 He criticized the notion of per- sonal substance as the principles of self-same- 1 No one believes that such words as ‘winter,’ ‘army,’ ‘house,’ de- note substances. They designate collective facts, of which the parts are held together by means that can be experimentally traced. Even when we can’t define what groups the effects together, as in ‘poison,’ ‘sickness,’ ‘strength,’ we don’t assume a substance, but are willing that the word should designate some phenomenal agency yet to be found out. Nominalists treat all substances after this analogy, and consider ‘matter,’ ‘gold,’ ‘soul,’ as but the names of so many grouped properties, of which the bond of union must be, not some unknowable substance corresponding to the name, but rather some hidden portion of the whole phenomenal fact. 2 Essay concerning Human Understanding, book i, chap, iv, § 18. 121 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ness in our different minds. Experientially, our personal identity consists, he said, in nothing more than the functional and perceptible fact that our later states of mind continue and re- member our earlier ones . 1 Berkeley applied the same sort of criticism to the notion of bodily substance. ‘When I consider,’ he says, ‘the two parts (“being” in general, and “supporting accidents”) which make the signification of the words “material substance,” I am convinced there is no distinct meaning annexed to them. . . . Suppose an intelligence without the help of external bodies to be affected with the same train of sensations that you are, imprinted in the same order, and with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether that intelligence hath not all the reason to be- lieve the existence of corporeal substances,' represented by his ideas, and exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for be- lieving the same thing .’ 2 Certain grouped sensa- tions , in short, are all that corporeal sub- 1 Ibid., book ii, chap, xxvii, §§ 9-27. 2 Principles oj Human Knowledge, part i, §§ 17, 20. 122 THE ONE AND THE MANY stances are Jcnoum-as, therefore the only mean- ing which the word ‘ matter ’ can claim is that it denotes such sensations and their groupings. They are the only verifiable aspect of the word. The reader will recognize that in these criti- cisms our own pragmatic rule is used. What 1 difference in practical experience is it supposed to make that we have each a personal substan- tial principle? This difference, that we can re- member and appropriate our past, calling it ‘ mine.’ What difference that in this book there is a substantial principle? This, that certain optical and tactile sensations cling permanently together in a cluster. The fact that certain perceptual experiences do seem to belong to- gether is thus all that the word substance means,; Hume carries the criticism to the last degree of clearness. ‘We have no idea of substance,’ he says, ‘distinct from that of a collection of par- ticular qualities, nor have we any other mean- ing when we either talk or reason concerning it. The idea of a substance ... is nothing but a collection of simple ideas that are united by the imagination and have a particular name 123 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY assigned them by which we are able to recall that collection .’ 1 Kant’s treatment of sub- stance agrees with Hume’s in denying all posi- tive content to the notion. It differs in insist- ing that, by attaching shifting percepts to the permanent name, the category of substance unites them necessarily together, and thus makes nature intelligible . 2 It is impossible to assent to this. The grouping of qualities be- comes no more intelligible when you call sub- stance a ‘category’ than when you call it a bare word. Let us now turn our backs upon ineffable or unintelligible ways of accounting for the Pragmatic world’s oneness, and inquire whether, analysis of oneness instead of being a principle, the ‘ one- ness’ affirmed may not merely be a name like ‘substance,’ descriptive of th giac t that, certain specific and verifiable connections are found among the parts of the experiential flux. This 1 Treatise on Human Nature, part 1, § 6. 2 Critique of Pure Reason : First Analogy of Experience. For further criticism of the substance-concept see J. S. Mill: A System of Logic, book i, chap, iii, §§ 6-9; B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, part 1, chap. i. Bowne uses the words being and substance as synonymous. 124 THE ONE AND THE MANY brings us back to our pragmatic rule : Suppose there is a oneness in things, what may it be known-as? What differences to you and me will it make? Our question thus turns upside down, and sets us on a much more promising inquiry. We can easily conceive of things that shall have no connection whatever with each other. We may assume them to inhabit different times and spaces, as the dreams of different persons do even now. They may be so unlike and in- commensurable, and so inert towards one an- other, as never to jostle or interfere. Even now there may actually be whole universes so dis- parate from ours that we who know ours have no means of perceiving that they exist. We con- ceive their diversity, however; and by that fact the whole lot of them form what is known in logic as one ‘universe of discourse.’ To form a universe of discourse argues, as this example shows, no further kind of connection. The im- portance attached by certain monistic writers to the fact that any chaos may become a uni- verse by being merely named, is to me incom- 125 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY prehensible. We must seek something better in the way of oneness than this susceptibility of being mentally considered together, and named by a collective noun. What connections may be perceived con- cretely or in point of fact, among the parts of the collection abstractly designated as our ‘world ’? There are innumerable modes of union among its parts, some obtaining or^a larger, some on a smaller scale. Not all the parts of our world are united mechanically, for some can move without the others moving. They all seem united by gravitation, however, so far as Kinds of they are material things. Some again oneness Q f these are united chemically, while others are not; and the like is true of thermic, optical, electrical, and other 'physical connec- tions. These connections are specifications of w r hat we mean by the word oneness when we apply it to our world. We should not call it one unless its parts were connected in these and other ways. But then it is clear that by the same logic we ought to call it ‘many.’ so far as 126 THE ONE AND THE MANY its parts are disconnected in these same ways, chemically inert towards one another or non- conductors to electricity, light and heat. In all these modes of union, some parts of the world prove to be conjoined with other parts, so that if you choose your line of influence and your items rightly, you may travel from pole to pole without an interruption. If, how- ever, you choose them wrongly, you meet with obstacles and non-conductors from the outset, and cannot travel at all. There is thus neither absolute oneness nor absolute manyness from the physical point of view, but a mixture of well-definable modes of both. Moreover, neither the oneness nor the manyness seems the more essential attribute, they are co-ordinate features of the natural world. There are plenty of other practical differ- ences meant by calling a thing One. Our world, being strung along in time and space, has tem- poral and spatial unity. But time and space relate things by determinately sundering them, so it is hard to say whether the world ought SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY more to be called ‘ one ’ or ‘ many ’ in this spatial or temporal regard. The like is true of the generic oneness which comes from so many of the world’s parts being similar. When two things are similar you can make inferences from the one which will hold good of the other, so that this kind of union among things, so far as it obtains, is inexpres- sibly precious from the logical point of view. But an infinite heterogeneity among things exists alongside of whatever likeness of kind we discover; and our world appears no more distinctly or essentially as a One than as a Many, from this generic point of view. We have touched on the noetic unity pre- dicable of the world in consequence of our being able to mean the whole of it at once. Widely different from unification by an ab- stract designation, would be the concrete noetic union wrought by an all-knower of perceptual type who should be acquainted at one stroke with every part of what exists. In such an ab- solute all-knower idealists believe. Kant, they say, virtually replaced the notion of Substance, 128 THE ONE AND THE MANY by the more intelligible notion of Subject. The T am conscious of it,’ which on some witness’s part must accompany every possible experi- ence, means in the last resort, we are told, one individual witness of the total frame of things, world without end, amen. You may call his undivided act of omniscience instantaneous or eternal, whichever you like, for time is its ob- ject just as everything else is, and itself is not in time. We shall find reasons later for treating noetic monism as an unverified hypothesis. Over Unity by against it there stands the noetic concate- nation pluralism which we verify every moment when we seek information from our friends. According to this, everything in the world might be known by somebody, yet not everything by the same knower, or in one single cognitive act, — much as all mankind is knit in one network of acquaintance, A knowing B, B knowing C, — Y knowing Z, and Z possibly knowing A again, without the possibility of anyone knowing everybody at once. This ‘concatenated’ knowing, going from next to 129 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY next, is altogether different from the * consoli- dated’ knowing supposed to be exercised by the absolute mind. It makes a coherent type of universe in which the widest knower that exists may yet remain ignorant of much that is known to others. There are other systems of concatenation besides the noetic concatenation. We ourselves are constantly adding to the connections of things, organizing labor-unions, establishing postal, consular, mercantile, railroad, tele- graph, colonial, and other systems that bind us and things together in ever wider reticula- tions. Some of these systems involve others, some do not. You cannot have a telephone system without air and copper connections, but you can have air and copper connections without telephones. You cannot have love without acquaintance, but you can have ac- quaintance without love, etc. The same thing, moreover, can belong to many systems, as when a man is connected with other objects by heat, by gravitation, by love, and by know- ledge. 130 THE ONE AND THE MANY From the point of view of these partial sys - 4 terns, the world hangs together from next to next in a variety of ways, so that when you are off of one thing you can always be on to something else, without ever dropping out of your world. Gravitation is the only positively known sort of connection among things that reminds us of the consolidated or monistic form of union. If a ‘mass’ should change any- where, the mutual gravitation of all things would instantaneously alter. Teleological and aesthetic unions are other forms of systematic union. The world is full Unity of 0 f partial purposes, of partial stories. purpose, meaning That they all form chapters of one supreme purpose and inclusive story is the monistic conjecture. They seem, meanwhile, simply to run alongside of each other — either irrelevantly, or, where they interfere, leading to mutual frustrations, — so the appearance of things is invincibly pluralistic from this purposive point of view. It is a common belief that all particular be- ings have one origin and source, either in God, 131 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY or in atoms all equally old. There is no real novelty, it is believed, in the universe, Unity of the new things that appear having ongm either been eternally prefigured in the absolute, or being results of the same pri- mordia rerum, atoms, or monads, getting into new mixtures. But the question of being is so obscure anyhow, that whether realities have burst into existence all at once, by a single ‘bang,’ as it were; or whether they came piece- meal, and have different ages (so that real novelties may be leaking into our universe all the time), may here be left an open question, though it is undoubtedly intellectually eco- nomical to suppose that all things are equally old, and that no novelties leak in. These results are what the Oneness of the Universe is hnown-as. They are the oneness, Summary pragmatically considered. A world coherent in any of these ways would be no chaos, but a universe of such or such a grade. (The grades might differ, however. The parts, e. g., might have space-relations, but nothing more; or they might also gravitate; or 132 THE ONE AND THE MANY exchange heat; or know, or love one another, etc.) Such is the cash-value of the world’s unity, empirically realized. Its total unity is the sumo of all the partial unities. It consists of them and follows upon them. Such an idea, however, outrages rationalistic minds, which habitually despise all this practical small-change. Such minds insist on a deeper, more through-and- through union of all things in the absolute, ‘each in all and all in each,’ as the prior con- dition of these empirically ascertained connec- tions. But this may be only a case of the usual worship of abstractions, like calling ‘bad weather’ the cause of to-day’s rain, etc., or accounting for a man’s features by his ‘face,’ when really the rain is the bad weather, is what you mean by ‘bad weather,’ just as the features are what you mean by the face. To sum up, the world is ‘one’ in some re- spects, and ‘many’ in others. But the respects must be distinctly specified, if either statement is to be more than the emptiest abstraction. Once we are committed to this soberer view, 133 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the question of the One or the Many may well cease to appear important. The amount either \ of unity or of plurality is in short only a matter | for observation to ascertain and write down, ^ in statements which will have to be compli- J cated, in spite of every effort to be concise. / CHAPTER VIII * 1 THE ONE AND THE MANY (continued) — VALUES AND DEFECTS We might dismiss the subject with the pre- ceding chapter 2 were it not for the fact that further consequences follow from the rival hypotheses, and make of the alternative of monism or pluralism what I called it on page 114, the most ‘pregnant’ of all the dilemmas of metaphysics. To begin with, : the attribute ‘one’ seems for many persons to confer a value, an ineffable The illustriousness and dignity upon the monistic theory world, with which the conception of it as an irreducible ‘many’ is believed to clash. Secondly, a through - and - through noetic connection of everything with absolutely ev- erything else is in some quarters held to be indispensable to the world’s rationality. Only then might we believe that all things really do 1 [This chapter was not indicated as a separate chapter in the manu- script. Ed.] 2 For an amplification of what precedes, the lecture on ‘The One and the Many ’ in W. James: Pragmatism (1907), may be referred to. 135 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY belong together, instead of being connected by the bare conjunctions ‘with’ or ‘and.’ The notion that this latter pluralistic arrangement may obtain is deemed ‘irrational’; and of course it does make the world partly alogical or non-rational from a purely intellectual point of view. Monism thus holds the oneness to be the more vital and essential element. The entire The value cosmos must be a consolidated unit. and from which the slightest incipiency of in- dependence anywhere is ruled out. With Spin- oza, monism likes to believe that all things follow from the essence of God as necessarily as from the nature of a triangle it follows that the angles are equal to two right angles. The whole is what yields the parts, not the parts the whole. The universe is tight , monism claims, not loose; and you must take the irreducible whole of it just as it is offered, or have no part or lot in it at all. The only alternative allowed by monistic writers is to confess the of abso- lute one- ness within which each member is deter- mined by the whole to be just that. 136 THE ONE AND THE MANY world’s non-rationality — and no philosopher can permit himself to do that. The form of monism regnant at the present day in phi- losophic circles is absolute idealism. For this way of thinking, the world exists no otherwise than as the object of one infinitely knowing mind. The analogy that suggests the hypothe- sis here is that of our own finite fields of con- sciousness, which at every moment envisage a much-at-once composed of parts related va- riously, and in which both the conjunctions and the disjunctions that appear are there only in so far as we are there as their witnesses, so that they are both ‘noetically’ and monisti- cally based. We may well admit the sublimity of this noetic monism and of its vague vision of an underlying connection among all phenomena without exception . 1 It shows itself also able to confer religious stability and peace, and it in- vokes the authority of mysticism in its favor. Yet, on the other hand, like many another con- 1 In its essential features, Spinoza was its first prophet, Fichte and Hegel were its middle exponents, and Josiah Royce is its best contem- porary representative. 137 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY cept unconditionally carried out, it introduces its defects into philosophy puzzles peculiar to itself, as follows: — 1. It does not account for our finite con- sciousness. If nothing exists but as the Abso- lute Mind knows it, how can anything exist otherwise than as that Mind knows it? That Mind knows each thing in one act of know- ledge, along with every other thing. Finite minds know things without other things, and this ignorance is the source of most of their woes. We are thus not simply objects to an all- knowing subject: we are subjects on our own account and know differently from its knowing. 2. It creates a problem of evil. Evil, for plu- ralism, presents only the practical problem of how to get rid of it. For monism the puzzle is theoretical : How — if Perfection be the source, should there be Imperfection? If the world as known to the Absolute be perfect, why should it be known otherwise, in myriads of inferior finite editions also? The perfect edi- tion surely was enough. How do the breakage and dispersion and ignorance get in? 138 THE ONE AND THE MANY 3. It contradicts the character of reality as perceptually experienced. Of our world, change seems an essential ingredient. There is history. There are novelties, struggles, losses, gains. But the world of the Absolute is represented as unchanging, eternal, or ‘out of time,’ and is foreign to our powers either of apprehension or of appreciation. Monism usually treats the sense-world as a mirage or illusion. 4. It is fatalistic. Possibility, as distin- guished from necessity on the one hand and from impossibility on the other, is an essential category of human thinking. For monism, it is a pure illusion; for whatever is is necessary, and aught else is impossible, if the world be such a unit of fact as monists pretend. Our sense of ‘freedom’ supposes that some things at least are decided here and now, that the passing moment may contain some nov- elty, be an original starting-point of events, and not merely transmit a push from elsewhere. We imagine that in some respects at least the future may not be co-implicated with the past, but may be really addable to it, and indeed 139 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY addable in one shape or another, so that the next turn in events can at any given moment genuinely be ambiguous, i. e., possibly this, but also possibly that. Monism rules out this whole conception of possibles, so native to our common-sense. The future and the past are linked, she is obliged to say; there can be no genuine novelty any- where, for to suppose that the universe has a constitution simply additive, with nothing to link things together save what the words ‘plus,’ ‘with,’ or ‘and’ stand for, is repugnant to our reason. Pluralism, on the other hand, taking per- ceptual experience at its face-value, is free from all these difficulties. It protests against work- ing our ideas in a vacuum made of conceptual abstractions. Some parts of our world, it ad- mits, cannot exist out of their wholes; but The pin- others, it says, can. To some extent ralistic theory the world seems genuinely additive: it may really be so. We cannot explain con- ceptually how genuine novelties can come ; but if one did come we could experience that it came. 140 THE ONE AND THE MANY We do, in fact, experience perceptual novelties all the while. Our perceptual experience over- laps our conceptual reason : the that transcends the why. So the common-sense view of life, as something really dramatic, with work done, and things decided here and now, is acceptable to pluralism. ‘Free will’ means nothing but real novelty; so pluralism accepts the notion of free will. But pluralism, accepting a universe unfin- ished, with doors and windows open to possi- bilities uncontrollable in advance, gives us less religious certainty than monism, with its abso- lutely closed-in world. It is true that monism’s religious certainty is not rationally based, but is only a faith that ‘sees the All-Good in the All-Real.’ In point of fact, however, monism is usually willing to exert this optimistic faith : its world is certain to be saved, yes, is saved already, unconditionally and from eternity, in spite of all the phenomenal appearances of risk . 1 1 For an eloquent expression of the monistic position, from the re- ligious point of view, read J. Royce: The World, and the Individual, vol. ii, lectures 8, 9, 10. 141 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Its de- fects A world working out an uncertain destiny, as the phenomenal world appears to be doing, is an intolerable idea to the rationalistic mind. Pluralism, on the other hand, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but melioristic, rather. The world, it thinks, may be saved, on condition that its parts shall do their best. But shipwreck in detail, or even on the whole, is among the open possibilities. There is thus a practical lack of balance about pluralism, which contrasts with mon- ism’s peace of mind. The one is a more moral, the other a more religious view; and different men usually let this sort of consideration deter- mine their belief. 1 So far I have sought only to show the respect- ive implications of the rival doctrines without its ad- dogmatically deciding which is the vantages more true. It is obvious that plural- ism has three great advantages: — 1. It is more ‘scientific,’ in that it insists 1 See, as to this religious difference, the closing lecture in W. James’s Pragmatism. 142 THE ONE AND THE MANY that when oneness is predicated, it shall mean definitely ascertainable conjunctive forms. With these the disjunctions ascertainable among things are exactly on a par. The two are co-ordinate aspects of reality. To make the conjunctions more vital and primordial than the separations, monism has to abandon verifiable experience and proclaim a unity that is indescribable. 2. It agrees more with the moral and dra- matic expressiveness of life. 3. It is not obliged to stand for any particu- lar amount of plurality, for it triumphs over monism if the smallest morsel of disconnected- ness is once found undeniably to exist. ‘Ever not quite’ is all it says to monism; while mon- ism is obliged to prove that what pluralism asserts can in no amount whatever possibly be true — an infinitely harder task. The advantages of monism, in turn, are its natural affinity with a certain kind of reli- gious faith, and the peculiar emotional value of the conception that the world is a unitary fact. 143 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY So far lias our use of the pragmatic rule brought us towards understanding this di- lemma. The reader will by this time feel for himself the essential practical difference which it involves. The word ‘absence’ seems to in- dicate it. The monistic principle implies that nothing that is can in any way whatever be absent from anything else that is. The plural- istic principle, on the other hand, is quite com- patible with some things being absent from operations in which other things find them- selves singly or collectively engaged. Which things are absent from which other things, and when, — these of course are questions which a pluralistic philosophy can settle only by an exact study of details. The past, the present, and the future in perception, for example, are absent from one another, while in imagination they are present or absent as the case may be. If the time-content of the world be not one monistic block of being, if some part, at least, of the future, is added to the past without be- ing virtually one therewith, or implicitly con- tained therein, then it is absent really as well THE ONE AND THE MANY as phenomenally and may be called an abso- lute novelty in the world’s history in so far forth. Towards this issue, of the reality or unreal- ity of the novelty that appears, the pr agmatic Monism, difference between monism and plu- andnov™’ ralism seems to converge. That we elty ourselves may be authors of genuine novelty is the thesis of the doctrine of free-will. That genuine novelties can occur means that from the point of view of what is already given, what comes may have to be treated as a matter of chance. We are led thus to ask the question : In what manner does new being come? Is it through and through the consequence of older being or is it matter of chance so far as older being goes? — which is the same thing as asking: Is it original, in the strict sense of the word? We connect again here with what was said at the end of Chapter III. We there agreed that being is a datum or gift and has to be begged by the philosopher; but we left the question open as to whether he must beg it all 145 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY at once or beg it bit by bit or in instalments. The latter is the more consistently empiricist view, and I shall begin to defend it in the chap- ter that follows. CHAPTER IX THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY The impotence to explain being which we have attributed to all philosophers is, it will be recollected, a conceptual impotence. It is when thinking abstractly of the whole of being at once, as it confronts us ready-made, that we feel our powerlessness so acutely. Possibly, if we followed the empiricist method, consider- ing the parts rather than the whole, and im- agining ourselves inside of them perceptually, the subject might defy us less provokingly. We are thus brought back to the problem with which Chapter VII left off. When perceptible amounts of new phenomenal being come to birth, must we hold them to be in all points predetermined and necessary outgrowths of the being already there, or shall we rather admit the possibility that originality may thus instil itself into reality? If we take concrete perceptual experience, the question can be answered in only one way. ‘The same returns not, save to bring the dif- 147 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ferent.’ Time keeps budding into new mo- ments, every one of which presents a content Percept- which in its individuality never was ual nov- elty before and will never be again. Of no concrete bit of experience was an exact du- plicate ever framed. ‘My youth,’ writes Del- boeuf, ‘has it not taken flight, carrying away with it love, illusion, poetry, and freedom from care, and leaving with me instead science, aus- tere always, often sad and morose, which some- times I would willingly forget, which repeats to me hour by hour its grave lessons, or chills me by its threats? Will time, which untiringly piles deaths on births, and births on deaths, ever re- make an Aristotle or an Archimedes, a Newton or a Descartes? Can our earth ever cover itself again with those gigantic ferns, those immense equisetaceans, in the midst of which the same antediluvian monsters will crawl and wallow as they did of yore? ... No, what has been will not, cannot, be again. Time moves on with an unfaltering tread, and never strikes twice an identical hour. The instants of which the existence of the world is composed are all 148 THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY dissimilar, — and whatever may be done, some- thing remains that can never be reversed .’ 1 The everlasting coming of concrete novelty into being is so obvious that the rationalizing intellect, bent ever on explaining what is by what was, and having no logical principle but identity to explain by, treats the perceptual flux as a phenomenal illusion, resulting from the unceasing re-combination in new forms of mix- ture, of unalterable elements, coeval with the Science world. These elements are supposed and novelty to be the only real beings; and, for the intellect once grasped by the vision of them, there can be nothing genuinely new under the sun. The world’s history, according to molecu- lar science, signifies only the ‘redistribution’ of the unchanged atoms of the primal firemist, parting and meeting so as to appear to us spec- tators in the infinitely diversified configura- tions which we name as processes and things . 2 1 J. Delbceuf: Revue Pkilosophique, vol. ix, p. 138 (1880). On the infinite variety of reality, compare also W. T. Marvin: An Introduction to Systematic Philosophy, New York, 1903, pp. 22-30. 2 The Atomistic philosophy, which has proved so potent a scientific instrument of explanation, was first formulated by Democritus, who 149 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY So far as physical nature goes few of us ex- perience any temptation to postulate real novelty. The notion of eternal elements and their mixture serves us in so many ways, that we adopt unhesitatingly the theory that pri- mordial being is inalterable in its attributes as well as in its quantity, and that the laws by which we describe its habits are uniform in the strictest mathematical sense. These are the absolute conceptual foundations, we think, died 370 b. c. His life overlapped that of Aristotle, who took what on the whole may be called a biological view of the world, and for whom ‘ forms ’ were as real as elements. The conflict of the two modes of ex- planation has lasted to our day, for some chemists still defend the Aristotelian tradition which the authority of Descartes had inter- rupted for so long, and deny our right to say that ‘ water ’ is not a simple entity, or that oxygen and hydrogen atoms persist in it un- changed. Compare W. Ostwald: Die XJeberwindung des wissensckaft- licheii Materialismus (1895), p. 12: ‘The atomistic view assumes that when in iron-oxide, for example, all the sensible properties both of iron and oxygen have vanished, iron and oxygen are nevertheless there but now manifest other properties. We are so used to this as- sumption that it is hard for us to feel its oddity, nay, even its ab- surdity. When, however, we reflect that all we know of a given kind of matter is its properties, we realize that the assertion that the matter is still there, but without any of those properties, is not far removed from nonsense.’ Compare the same author’s Principles of Inorganic Chemistry, English translation, 2d ed. (1904), p. 149 f. Also P. Duhem: ‘La Notion de Mixte,’ in the Revue de Philosophic, vol. i, p. 452 ff. (1901). — The whole notion of the eternal fixity of elements is melting away before the new discoveries about radiant matter. See for radical statements G. Le Bon: L' Evolution de la Matiere. 150 THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY spread beneath the surface of perceptual vari- ety. It is when we come to human lives, that Personal our point of view changes. It is hard experience ^ j ma gj ne ‘really’ our own. novelty subjective experiences are only mo- lecular arrangements, even though the mole- cules be conceived as beings of a psychic kind. A material fact may indeed be different from what we feel it to be, but what sense is there in saying that a feeling, which has no other na- ture than to be felt, is not as it is felt? Psycho- logically considered, our experiences resist con- ceptual reduction, and our fields of conscious- ness, taken simply as such, remain just what they appear, even though facts of a molecular order should prove to be the signals of the appearance. Biography is the concrete form in which all that is is immediately given; the perceptual flux is the authentic stuff of each of our biographies, and yields a perfect efferves- cence of novelty all the time. New men and women, books, accidents, events, inventions, enterprises, burst unceasingly upon the world. It is vain to resolve these into ancient ele- 151 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ments, or to say that they belong to ancient kinds, so long as no one of them in its full indi- viduality ever was here before or will ever come again. Men of science and philosophy, the moment they forget their theoretic abstrac- tions, live in their biographies as much as any one else, and believe as naively that fact even now is making, and that they themselves, by doing ‘original work,’ help to determine what the future shall become. I have already compared the live or percept- ual order with the conceptual order from this point of view. Conception knows no way of explaining save by deducing the identical from the identical, so if the world is to be concept- ually rationalized no novelty can really come. This is one of the traits in that general bank- ruptcy of conceptualism, which I enumerated in Chapter V — conceptualism can name change and growth, but can translate them into no terms of its own, and is forced to con- tradict the indestructible sense of life within us by denying that reality grows. It may seem to the youthful student a rather 152 THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY ‘far cry’ from the question of the possibility of novelty to the ‘problem of the infinite,’ but in the history of speculation, the two problems have been connected. Novelty seems to vio- late continuity; continuity seems to involve Novelty ‘infinitely’ shaded gradation; infin- and the infinite ity connects with number; and num- ber with fact in general — for facts have to be numbered. It has thus come to pass that the nonexistence of an infinite number has been held to necessitate the finite character of the constitution of fact ; and along with this its discontinuous genesis, or, in other words, its coming into being by discrete increments of novelty however small. Thus we find the problem of the infinite already lying across our path. It will be better at this point to interrupt our discussion of the more enveloping question of novelty at large, and to get the minor problem out of our way first. I turn then to the problem of the infinite. CHAPTER X NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE CONCEPTUAL VIEW 1 The problem is as to which is the more rational supposition, that of continuous or that of dis- continuous additions to whatever amount or kind of reality already exists. On the discontinuity-theory, time, change, etc., would grow by finite buds or drops, either nothing coming at all, or certain units of The dis- amount bursting into being ‘ at a continuity- theory stroke.’ Every feature of the uni- verse would on this view have a finite numer- ical constitution. Just as atoms, not half- or quarter-atoms are the minimum of matter that can be, and every finite amount of matter con- tains a finite number of atoms, so any amounts of time, space, change, etc., which we might assume would be composed of a finite number of minimal amounts of time, space, and change. Such a discrete composition is what actually 1 [in the author’s manuscript this chapter and the succeeding chap- ters were labelled ‘sub-problems,’ and this chapter was entitled ‘The Continuum and the Infinite.’ Ed.] 154 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE obtains in our perceptual experience. We either perceive nothing, or something already there in sensible amount. This fact is what in psychology is known as the law of the ‘threshold.’ Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaint- ance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on re- flection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all. If, however, we take time and space as con- cepts, not as perceptual data, we don’t well see how they can have this atomistic constitu- tion. For if the drops or atoms are themselves without duration or extension it is inconceiv- able that by adding any number of them to- The con- gether times or spaces should accrue, tinuity theory If, on the other hand, they are mi- nute durations or extensions, it is impossible to treat them as real minima. Each temporal drop must have a later and an earlier half, each spatial unit a right and a left half, and these 155 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY halves must themselves have halves, and so on ad infinitum, so that with the notion that the constitution of things is continuous and not discrete, that of a divisibility ad infinitum is inseparably bound up. This infinite divisibil- ity of some facts, coupled with the infinite expansibility of others (space, time, and num- ber) has given rise to one of the most obstinate of philosophy’s dialectic problems. Let me take up, in as simple a way as I am able to, the 'problem of the infinite. There is a pseudo-problem, ‘How can the finite know the infinite?’ which has troubled some English heads . 1 But one might as well make a problem of ‘ How can the fat know the lean?’ When we come to treat of knowledge, such problems will vanish. The real problem of the infinite began with the famous argu- ments against motion, of Zeno the Eleatic. The school of Pythagoras was pluralistic. ‘Things are numbers,’ the master had said, meaning apparently that reality was made of 1 In H. Calderwood’s Philosophy of the Infinite one will find the subordinate difficulties discussed, with almost no consciousness shown of the important ones. 156 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE points which one might number . 1 Zeno’s argu- ments were meant to show, not that motion could not really take place, but that it could not truly be conceived as taking place by the successive occupancy of points. If a flying Zeno , s arrow occupies at each point of time paradoxes a determinate point of space, its motion becomes nothing but a sum of rests, for it exists not, out of any point; and in the point it does n’t move. Motion cannot truly occur as thus discretely constituted. Still better known than the ‘arrow’ is the ‘Achilles’ paradox. Suppose Achilles to race with a tortoise, and to move twice as fast as his rival, to whom he gives an inch of head- start. By the time he has completed that inch, or in other words advanced to the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise is half an inch ahead of him. While Achilles is traversing that half inch, the tortoise is traversing a quarter of an inch, etc. So that the successive points occupied by the runners simultane- 1 I follow here J. Burnet: Early Greek Philosophers (the chapter on the Pythagoreans), and Paul Tannery: ‘Le concept scientifique du continu ’ in the Revue Philosophique, xx, 385. 157 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ously form a convergent series of distances from the starting point of Achilles. Measured in inches, these distances would run as follows : 1 . i . l , J. ,i JL 1 + 2 +1 +¥+ 16 • • • • +5 • • • • co Zeno now assumes that space must be infinitely divisible. But if so, then the number of points to be occupied cannot all be enumerated in succession, for the series begun above is inter- minable. Each time that Achilles gets to the tortoise’s last point it is but to find that the tortoise has already moved to a further point; and although the interval between the points quickly grows infinitesimal, it is mathematic- ally impossible that the two racers should reach any one point at the same moment. If Achilles could overtake the tortoise, it would be at the end of two inches; and if his speed were two inches a second, it would be at the end of the first second ; 1 but the argument shows that he simply cannot overtake the ani- mal. To do so would oblige him to exhaust, 1 This shows how shallow is that common ‘exposure’ of Zeno’s ‘sophism,’ which charges it with trying to prove that to overtake the tortoise, Achilles would require an infinitely long time. 158 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE by traversing one by one, the whole of them, a series of points which the law of their forma- tion obliges to come never to an end. Zeno’s various arguments were meant to establish the ‘Eleatic’ doctrine of real being, which was monistic. The ‘minima sensibilia’ of which space, time, motion, and change con- sist for our perception are not real ‘beings/ for they subdivide themselves ad infinitum. The nature of real being is to be entire or con- tinuous. Our perception, being of a hopeless ‘many/ thus is false. Our own mathematicians have meanwhile constructed what they regard as an adequate continuum, composed of points or numbers. When I speak again of that I shall have occa- sion to return to the Achilles-fallacy, so called. At present I will pass without transition to the next great historic attack upon the problem of the infinite, which is the section on the ‘An- tinomies’ in Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Kant’s views need a few points of prepara- tion, as follows:' — 1. That real or objective existence must be 159 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY determinate existence may be regarded as an axiom in ontology. We may be dim as to just regarding them; but seeing and belief are subjective affections, and the stars by them- selves, we are sure, exist in definite numbers. ‘Even the hairs of our head are numbered,’ we feel certain, though no man shall ever count them. 1 Any existent reality, taken in itself, must therefore be countable, and to any group of such realities some definite number must be applicable. 2. Kant defines infinity as ‘that which can never be completely measured by the succes- sive addition of units ’ — in other words, as that which defies complete enumeration. 3. Kant lays it down as axiomatic that if anything is ‘given,’ as an existent reality, the whole sum of the ‘conditions’ required to ac- count for it must similarly be given, or have been given. Thus if a cubic yard of space be 1 Of the origin in our experience of this singularly solid postulate, I will say nothing here. Kant’s antino- mies how many stars we see in the Pleiades, or doubtful whose count to believe 160 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE ‘given,’ all its parts must equally be given. If a certain date in past time be real, then the previous dates must also have been real. If an effect be given, the whole series of its causes must have been given, etc., etc. But the ‘conditions’ in these cases defy enumeration: the parts of space are less and less ad infinitum, times and causes form series that are infinitely regressive for our counting, and of no such infinite series can a ‘whole’ be formed. Any such series has a variable value, for the number of its terms is indefinite; where- as the conditions under consideration ought, if the ‘whole sum of them’ be really given, to exist (by the principle, 1, above) in fixed numer- ical amount. 1 1 The contradiction between the infinity in the form of the condi- tions, and the numerical determinateness implied in the fact of them, was ascribed by Kant to the ‘ antinomic ’ form of our experience. His solution of the puzzle was by the way of ‘idealism,’ and is one of the prettiest strokes in his philosophy. Since the conditions cannot exist in the shape of a totalized amount, it must be, he says, that they do not exist independently or an sick, but only as phenomena, or for us. Indefiniteness of amount is not incompatible with merely phenomenal existence. Actual phenomena, whether conditioned or conditioning, are there for us only in finite amount, as given to perception at any given moment; and the infinite form of them means only that we can go on perceiving, conceiving or imagining more and more about them, 161 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Such was the form of the puzzle of the in- finite, as Kant propounded it. The reader will observe a bad ambiguity in the statement. When he speaks of the ‘ absolute totality of the synthesis ’ of the conditions, the words suggest that a completed collection of them must exist or have existed. When we hear that ‘the whole sum of them must be given,’ we interpret it to mean that they must be given in the form of a whole sum, whereas all that the logical situa- tion requires is that no one of them should he lacking , an entirely different demand, and one that can be gratified as well in an infinitely growing as in a terminated series. The same Ambigu- things can always be taken either Kant’s collectively or distributively, can be statement talked of either as ‘all,’ or as ‘each,’ of the problem or as ‘any.’ Either statement can be applied equally well to what exists in finite world without end. It does not mean that what we go on thus to re- present shall have been there already by itself, apart from our acts of representation. Experience, for idealism, thus falls into two parts, a phenomenal given part which is finite, and a conditioning infinite part which is not given, but only possible to experience hereafter. Kant distinguishes this second part, as only aufgegeben (or set to us as a task), from the first part as gegeben (or already extant). 162 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE number; and ‘all that is there’ will be covered both times. But things which appear under the form of endless series can be talked of only distributively, if we wish to leave none of them out. When we say that ‘ any,’ ‘ each,’ or ‘ every ’ one of Kant’s conditions must be fulfilled, we are therefore on impeccable ground, even though the conditions should form a series as endless as that of the whole numbers, to which we are forever able to add one. But if we say that ‘all’ must be fulfilled, and imagine ‘all’ to signify a sum harvested and gathered-in, and represented by a number, we not only make a requirement utterly uncalled for by the logic of the situation, but we create puzzles and incomprehensibilities that otherwise would not exist, and that may require, to get rid of them again, hypotheses as violent as Kant’s ideal- ism. In the works of Charles Renouvier, the strongest philosopher of France during the second half of the nineteenth century, the problem of the infinite again played a pivotal part. Starting from the principle of the nu- 163 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY merical determinateness of reality (supra, page 160) — the ‘principe du nombre,’ as he called it — and recognizing that the series of num- bers 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . etc., leads to no final ‘in- finite’ number, he concluded that such reali- soiution and causes, steps of change and parts of matter, must needs exist in limited amount. This made of him a radical pluralist. Better, he said, admit that being gives itself to us ab- ruptly, that there are first beginnings, abso- lute numbers, and definite cessations, however intellectually opaque to us they may seem to be, than try to rationalize all this arbitrariness of fact by working-in explanatory conditions which would involve in every case the self- contradiction of things being paid-in and com- pleted, although they are infinite in formal composition. With these principles, Renouvier could be- lieve in absolute novelties, unmeditated be- noveity acts of faith. Fact, for him, over- lapped ; conceptual explanation fell short ; real- 164 Renou- vier’s ties as present beings, past events His solu- tion favors ginnings, gifts, chance, freedom, and NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE ity must in the end be begged piecemeal, not everlastingly deduced from other reality. This, the empiricist, as distinguished from the ra- tionalist view, is the hypothesis set forth at the end of our last chapter . 1 1 I think that Renouvier made mistakes, and I find his whole philo- sophic manner and apparatus too scholastic. But he was one of the greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism, I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up. The present volume, in short, might never have been written. This is why, feeling endlessly thankful as I do, I dedicate this text-book to the great Renouvier’s memory. Renouvier’s works make a very long list. The fundamental one is the Essais de Critique GbiSrale (first edition, 1854-1864, is in four, second edition, 1875, in six vol- umes). Of his latest opinions Le Personnalisme (1903) gives perhaps the most manageable account; while the last chapter of his Esquisse d’une Classification des Systemes (entitled ‘Comment je suis arrive a ces conclusions’) is an autobiographic sketch of his dealings with the problem of the infinite. Derniers entretiens, dictated while dying, at the age of eighty-eight, is a most impressive document, coming as if from a man out of Plutarch. CHAPTER XI 1 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE PERCEPTUAL VIEW Kant’s and Renouvier’s dealings with the in- finite are fine examples of the way in which philosophers have always been wont to infer matters of fact from conceptual considerations. Real novelty would be a matter of fact ; and so would be the idealistic constitution of experi- ence ; 2 but Kant and Renouvier deduce these facts from the purely logical impossibility of an infinite number of conditions getting com- pleted. It seems a very short cut to truth; but if the logic holds firm, it may be a fair cut , 3 and the possibility obliges us to scrutinize the situation with increasing care. Proceeding so 1 [This chapter was not indicated as a separate chapter in the manu- script. Ed.] 2 For an account of idealism the reader is referred to chapter below. [Never written. Ed.] 3 Let me now say that we shall ourselves conclude that change completed by steps infinite in number is inadmissible. This is hardly inferring fact from conceptual considerations, it is only concluding that a certain conceptual hypothesis regarding the fact of change will not work satisfactorily. The field is thus open for any other hypothesis; and the one which we shall adopt is simply that which the face of per- ceptual experience suggests. 166 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE to do, we immediately find that in the class of infinitely conditioned things, we must distin- guish two sub-classes, as follows: — 1. Things conceived as standing, like space, past time, existing beings. 2. Things conceived as growing, like motion, change, activity. In the standing class there seems to be no valid objection to admitting both real exist- The stand- ence, and a numerical copiousness de- manding infinity for its description. If, for instance, we consider the stars, and assume the number of them to be infinite, we need only suppose that to each several term of the endless series 1, 2, 3, 4, ... n ... , there cor- responds one star. The numbers, growing end- lessly, would then never exceed the stars stand- ing there to receive them. Each number would find its own star waiting from eternity to be numbered; and this in infinitum, some star that ever was, matching each number that shall be used. As there is no ‘ all ’ to the numbers so there need be none to the stars. One cannot well see how the existence of each star should 167 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY oblige the whole class ‘ star ’ to be of one num- ber rather than of another, or require it to be of any terminated number. What I say here of stars applies to the component parts of space and matter, and to those of past time . 1 So long as we keep taking such facts piece- meal, and talk of them distributively as ‘any’ itsprag- or ‘each,’ the existence of them in matte definition infinite form offers no logical diffi- culty. But there is a psychological tendency to slip from the distributive to the collective way of talking, and this produces a sort of mental flicker and dazzle out of which the dialectic difficulties emerge. ‘If each condition be there,’ — we say, ‘ then all are there, for there cannot 1 Past time may offer difficulty to the student as it has to better men! It has terminated in the present moment, paid itself out and made an ‘amount.’ But this amount can be counted in both directions; and in both, one may think it ought to give the same result. If, when counted forward, it came to an end in the present, then when counted backward, it must, we are told, come to a like end in the past. It must have had a beginning, therefore, and its amount must be finite. The sophism here is gross, and amounts to saying that what has one bound must have two. The ‘end ’ of the forward counting is the ‘beginning ’ of the backward counting, and is the only beginning logically implied. The ending of a series in no way prejudices the question whether it were beginningless or not; and this applies as well to tracts of time as to the abstract regression which ‘ negative ’ numbers form. 168 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE be eaches that do not make an all.’ Rightly taken, the phrase ‘all are there,’ means only that ‘not one is absent.’ But in the mouths of most people, it surreptitiously foists in the wholly irrelevant notion of a bounded total. There are other similar confusions. ‘How,’ it may be asked, in Locke’s words, can a ‘growing measure’ fail to overtake a ‘standing bulk ’? And standing existence must some time be overtaken by a growing number-series, must be finished or finite in its numerical determination. But this again foists in the notion of a bound. What is given as ‘standing’ in the cases under review is not a ‘bulk,’ but each star, atom, past date or what not; and to call these eaches a ‘bulk,’ is to beg the very point at issue. But probably the real reason why we object to a standing infinity is the reason that made Hegel speak of it as the ‘ false ’ infinite. It is that the vertiginous chase after ever more space, ever more past time, ever more subdivision, seems endlessly stupid. What need is there, what use is there, for so much? Not that any amount of anything is 169 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY absolutely too big to be ; but that some amounts are too big for our imagination to wish to ca- ress them. So we fall back with a feeling of relief on some form or other of the finitist hy- pothesis . 1 If now we turn from static to growing forms of being, we find ourselves confronted by much more serious difficulties. Zeno’s and Kant’s dialectic holds good wherever, before an end The grow- can foe reached, a succession of terms, ing in- finite endless by definition, must needs have been successively counted out. This is the case with every process of change, however small; with every event which we conceive as unrolling itself continuously. What is contin- uous must be divisible ad infinitum ; and from division to division here you cannot proceed by addition (or by what Kant calls the succes- 1 The reader will note how emphatically in all this discussion, I am insisting on the distributive or piecemeal point of view. The distrib- utive is identical with the pluralistic, as the collective is with the monistic conception. We shall, I think, perceive more and more clearly as this book proceeds, that piecem eal existence is independent of complete collectibility, and that some facts, at any rate, exist only distributively, or in form of a set of eaches which (even if in infinite number) need not in any intelligible sense either experience themselves, or get experi- enced by anything else, as members of an All. 170 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE sive synthesis of units) and touch a farther limit. You can indeed define what the limit ought to be, but you cannot reach it by this process. That Achilles should occupy in suc- cession ‘all’ the points in a single continuous inch of space, is as inadmissible a conception as that he should count the series of whole num- bers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., to infinity and reach an end. The terms are not ‘enumerable’ in that order; and the order it is that makes the whole diffi- culty. An infinite ‘regression’ like the rear- ward perspective of time offers no such con- tradiction, for it comes not in that order. Its ‘end’ is what we start with; and each succes- sive note ‘ more ’ which our imagination has to add, ad infinitum, is thought of as already hav- ing been paid in and not as having yet to be paid before the end can be attained. Starting with our end, we have to wait for nothing. The infinity here is of the ‘ standing ’ variety. It is, in the word of Kant’s pun, gegeben, not auf- gegeben: in the other case, of a continuous pro- cess to be traversed, it is on the contrary auf- gegeben: it is a task — not only for our philo- SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY sophic imagination, but for any real agent who might try physically to compass the entire performance. Such an agent is bound by logic to find always a remainder, something ever yet to be paid, like the balance due on a debt with even the interest of which we do not catch up. ‘ Infinitum in actu pertransiri nequit,’ said scholasticism; and every continuous quantum The grow- to gradually traversed is conceived as such an infinite. The quickest way to avoid the contradiction would seem to be to give up that concep- tion, and to treat real processes of change no longer as being continuous, but as taking place by finite not infinitesimal steps, like the successive drops by which a cask of water is filled, when whole drops fall into it at once or nothing. This is the radically pluralist, empiricist, or perceptualist position, which I characterized in speaking of Renouvier (above, pages 164-165). We shall have to end by adopt- ing it in principle ourselves, qualifying it so as to fit it closely to perceptual experience. 172 ing infin- ite must be treated as dis- continu- ous NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE Meanwhile we are challenged by a certain school of critics who think that what in mathe- Objec- matics is called ‘the new infinite’ has quashed the old antinomies, and who treat anyone whom the notion of a com- pleted infinite in any form still bothers, as a very naif person. Naif though I am in mathe- matics, I must, notwithstanding the dryness of the subject, add a word in rebuttal of these criticisms, some of which, as repeated by nov- ices, tend decidedly towards mystification. The ‘new infinite’ and the ‘number-con- tinuum’ are outgrowths of a general attempt (i) The to accomplish what has been called number- continuum the ‘ arithmetization ’ (apifyios mean- ing number) of all quantity. Certain quanta (grades of intensity or other difference, amounts of space) have until recently been supposed to be immediate data of perceptive sensibility or ‘intuition’; but philosophical mathematicians have now succeeded in getting a conceptual equivalent for them in the shape of collections of numbers created by interpolation between one another indefinitely. We can halve any 173 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY line in space, and halve its halves and so on. But between the cuts thus made and numbered, room is left for infinite others created by using 3 as a divisor, for infinite others still by using 5, 7, etc., until all possible ‘rational’ divisions of the line shall have been made. Between these it is now shown that interpolation of cuts numbered ‘irrationally’ is still possible ad infinitum, and that with these the line at last gets filled full, its continuity now being wholly translated into these numbered cuts, and their number being infinite. ‘Of the celebrated for- mula that continuity means “ unity in multi- plicity,” the multiplicity alone subsists, the unity disappears,’ 1 — as indeed it does in all conceptual translations — and the original in- tuition of the line’s extent gets treated, from the mathematical point of view, as a ‘mass of uncriticized prejudice’ by Russell, or sneered at by Cantor as a ‘ kind of religious dogma.’ 2 So much for the number-continuum. As for ‘the new infinite’: that means only a new defi- 1 H. Poincare: La science et Vhypothese, p. 30. 1 B. Russell: The Philosophy of Mathematics, i, 260, 287. 174 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE nition of infinity. If we compare the indefi- nitely-growing number-series, 1, 2, 3, 4, n, in its entirety, with any component part of ( 2 ) The it, like 4 even ’ numbers ‘prime 5 num- ‘ new infinite’ bers, or ‘square’ numbers, we are confronted with a paradox. No one of the parts, thus named, of the number-series, is equal to the whole collectively taken; yet any one of them is ‘ similar ’ to the whole, in the sense that you can set up a one-to-one relation between each of its elements and each element of the whole, so that part and whole prove to be of what logicians call the same ‘class,’ numeri- cally. Thus, in spite of the fact that even num- bers, prime numbers, and square numbers are much fewer and rarer than numbers in general, and only form a part of numbers uberliau'pt they appear to be equally copious for purposes of counting. The terms of each such partial series can be numbered by using the natural integers in succession. There is, for instance, a first prime, a second prime, etc., ad infinitum; and queerer-sounding still, since every integer, odd or even, can be doubled, it would seem that 175 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY the even numbers thus produced cannot in the nature of things be less multitudinous than that series of both odd and even numbers of which the whole natural series consists. These paradoxical consequences result, as one sees immediately, from the fact that the The new infinity of the number-series is of the paradoxi- growing variety (above, page 170). They were long treated as a reductio ad absurdum of the notion that such a variable series spells infinity in act, or can ever be translated into standing or collective form. 1 But contemporary mathematicians have taken the bull by the horns. Instead of treating such paradoxical properties of indefinitely growing series as reductiones ad absurdum , they have turned them into the proper definition of in- finite classes of things. Any class is now called 1 The fact that, taken distributively, or paired each to each, the terms in one endlessly growing series should be made a match for those in another (or ‘similar’ to them) is quite compatible with the two series being collectively of vastly unequal amounts. You need only make the steps of difference, or distances, between the terms much longer in one series than in the other, to get numerically similar multi- tudes, with greatly unequal magnitudes of content. Moreover the moment either series should stop growing, the ‘similarity ’ would cease to exist. 176 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE infinite if its parts are numerically similar to itself. If its parts are numerically dissimilar, it is finite.. This definition now separates the conception of the class of finite from that of infinite objects. Next, certain concepts, called ‘transfinite numbers,’ are now created by definition. They ‘ Trans- are decreed to belong to the infinite finite numbers* class, and yet not to be formed by adding one to one ad infinitum, but rather to be postulated outright as coming after each and all of the numbers formed by such addition . 1 Cantor gives the name of ‘Omega’ to the low- est of these possible transfinite numbers. It would, for instance, be the number of the point at which Achilles overtakes the tortoise — if he does overtake him — by exhausting all the intervening points successively. Or it would be the number of the stars, in case their count- 1 The class of all numbers that ‘ come before the first transfinite ’ is a definitely limited conception, provided we take the numbers as eaches or anys, for then any one and every of them will have by definition to come before the transfinite number comes — even though they form no whole and there be no last one of them, and though the transfinite have no immediate predecessor. The transfinite is, in a word, not an ordinal conception, at least it does not continue the order of entire numbers. 177 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ing could not terminate. Or again it would be the number of miles away at which parallel lines meet — if they do meet. It is, in short, a ‘ limit ’ to the whole class of numbers that grow one by one, and like other limits, it proves a useful conceptual bridge for passing us from one range of facts to another. The first sort of fact we pass to with its help is the number of the number-continuum Their uses or point-continuum described above and de- . . fects (page 173) as generated by infinitely repeated subdivision. The making of the subdi- visions is an infinitely growing process ; but the number of subdivisions that can be made has for its limit the transfinite number Omega just imagined and defined ; thus is a growing assimi- lated to a standing multitude; thus is a number that is variable practically equated (by the process of passing to the limit) with one that is fixed; thus do we circumvent the law of in- definite addition, or division which previously was the only way in which infinity was con- structable, and reach a constant infinite at a bound. This infinite number may now be sub- 178 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE stituted for any continuous finite quantum, however small the latter may perceptually ap- pear to be. When I spoke of my ‘mystification,’ just now, I had partly in mind the contemptuous way in which some enthusiasts for the ‘new infinite ’ treat those who still cling to the super- stition that ‘the whole is greater than the part.’ Because any point whatever in an im- aginary inch is now conceivable as being matched by some point in a quarter-inch or half-inch, this numerical ‘similarity’ of the different quanta, taken point-wise, is treated as if it signified that half-inches, quarter-inches, and inches are mathematically identical things anyhow, and that their differences are facts which we may scientifically neglect. I may misunderstand the newest expounders of Zeno’s famous ‘sophism,’ but what they say seems to me virtually to be equivalent to this. Mr. Bertrand Russell (whom I do not accuse of mystification, for Heaven knows he tries to make things clear !) treats the Achilles-puzzle as if the difficulty lay only in seeing how the 179 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY paths traversed by the two runners (measured after the race is run, and assumed then to con- Russeii’s sist of nothing but points of position solution • • i . , of Zeno’s coincident with points upon a com- paradox mon scale of time) should have the by their ' means same time-measure if they be not themselves of the same length. But the two paths are of different lengths ; for owing to the tortoise’s head-start, the tortoise’s path is only a part of the path of Achilles. How, then, if time-points are to be the medium of measure- ment, can the longer path not take the longer time? The remedy, for Mr. Russell, if I rightly understand him, lies in noting that the sets of points in question are conceived as being in- finitely numerous in both paths, and that where infinite multitudes are in question, to say that the whole is greater than the part is false. For each and every point traversed by the tortoise there is one point traversed by Achilles, at the corresponding point of time; and the exact correspondence, point by point, of either one of the three sets of points with 180 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE both the others, makes of them similar and equally copious sets from the numerical point of view. There is thus no recurrent ‘remainder ’ of the tortoise’s head-start with which Achilles cannot catch up, which he can reduce indefin- itely, but cannot annul. The books balance to the end. The last point in Achilles’s path, the last point in the tortoise’s, and the last time- instant in the race are terms which mathe- matically coincide. With this, which seems to be Mr. Russell’s way of analyzing the situa- tion, the puzzle is supposed to disappear . 1 It seems to me however that Mr. Russell’s statements dodge the real difficulty, which The s °- concerns the ‘growing’ variety of lution criticized infinity exclusively, and not the ‘standing’ variety, which is all that he envis- ages when he assumes the race already to have been run and thinks that the only problem that remains is that of numerically equating the paths. The real difficulty may almost be 1 Mr. Russell’s own statements of the puzzle as well as of the remedy are too technical to be followed verbatim in a book like this. As he finds it necessary to paraphrase the puzzle, so I find it convenient to paraphrase him, sincerely hoping that no injustice has been done. 181 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY called physical, for it attends the process of formation of the paths. Moreover, two paths are not needed — that of either runner alone, or even the lapse of empty time, involves the difficulty, which is that of touching a goal when an interval needing to be traversed first keeps permanently reproducing itself and get- ting in your way. Of course the same quantum can be produced in various manners. This page which I am now painfully writing, letter after letter, will be printed at a single stroke. God, as the orthodox believe, created the space- continuum, with its infinite parts already standing in it, by an instantaneous fiat. Past time now stands in infinite perspective, and may conceivably have been created so, as Kant imagined, for our retrospection only, and all at once. ‘ Omega ’ was created by a single decree, a single act of definition in Prof. Can- tor’s mind. But whoso actually traverses a con- tinuum, can do so by no process continuous in the mathematical sense. Be it short or long, each point must be occupied in its due order of succession; and if the points are necessarily 182 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE infinite, their end cannot be reached, for the ‘remainder,’ in this kind of process, is just what one cannot ‘neglect.’ ‘Enumeration’ is, in short, the sole possible method of occupa- tion of the series of positions implied in the famous race; and when Mr. Russell solves the puzzle by saying as he does, that ‘the defini- tion of whole and part without enumeration is the key to the whole mystery ,’ 1 he seems to me deliberately to throw away his case . 2 1 The Philosophy of Mathematics, i, 361. — Mr. Russell gives a Tristram Shandy paradox as a counterpart to the Achilles. Since it took T. S. (according to Sterne) two years to write the history of the first two days of his life, common sense would conclude that at that rate the life never could be written. But Mr. Russell proves the contrary; for, as days and years have no last term, and the nth day is written in the nth year, any assigned day will be written about, and no part of the life remain unwritten. But Mr. Russell’s proof cannot be applied to the real world without the physical hypothesis which he expresses by saying: ‘If Tristram Shandy lives forever, and does not weary of his task.’ In all real cases of continuous change a similarly absurd hypothe- sis must be made: the agent of the change must live forever, in the sense of outliving an endless set of points of time, and ‘ not wearying ’ of his impossible task. 2 Being almost blind mathematically and logically, I feel considera- ble shyness in differing from such superior minds, yet what can one do but follow one’s own dim light? The literature of the new infinite is so technical that it is impossible to cite details of it in a non-mathemati- cal work like this. Students who are interested should consult the tables of contents of B. Russell’s Philosophy of Mathematics, of L. Couturat’s Infini Mathematique, or his Principes des Mathematiques. 183 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY After this disagreeable polemic, I conclude that the new infinite need no longer block the Conciu- way the empiricist opinion which we reached provisionally on page 172. Irrelevant though they be to facts the ‘ conditions ’ of which are of the ‘ standing ’ sort, the criticisms of Leibnitz, Kant, Cauchy, Renouvier, Evellin and others, apply legiti- mately to all cases of supposedly continuous growth or change. The ‘ conditions ’ here have to be fulfilled seriatim; and if the series which they form were endless, its limit, if ‘ successive synthesis ’ were the only way of reaching it, could simply not be reached. Either we must A still more rigorous exposition may be found in E. V. Huntington, The Continuum as a Type of Order, in the Annals of Mathematics, xoh. vi and vii (reprint for sale at publication-office. Harvard University). Compare also C. S. Peirce’s paper in the Monist, ii, 537-546, as well as the presidential address of E. W. Hobson in the Proceedings of the Lon- don Mathematical Society, x ol. xxxv. For more popular discussions see J. Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. i, Supplementary Essay; Keyser: Journal of Philosophy, etc., i, 29, and Hibbert Journal, vii, 380- 390; S. Waterton in Aristotelian Soc. Proceedings, 1910; Leighton: Philosophical Review, xiii, 497; and finally the tables of contents of H. Poincare’s three recent little books. La science et I’hypothese, Paris ; The Value of Science (authorized translation by G. B. Halsted), New York, 1907 ; Science et Methode, Paris, 1908. The liveliest short at- tack which I know upon infinites completed by successive synthesis, is that in G. M. Fullerton’s System of Metaphysics, chapter xi. 184 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE stomach logical contradiction, therefore, in these cases ; or we must admit that the limit is reached in these successive cases by finite and perceptible units of approach — drops, buds, steps, or what- ever we please to term them, of change, coming wholly when they do come, or coming not at all. Such seems to be the nature of concrete experi- ence, which changes always by sensible amounts, or stays unchanged. The infinite character we find in it is woven into it by our later concep- tion indefinitely repeating the act of subdividing any given amount supposed. The facts do not resist the subsequent conceptual treatment ; but we need not believe that the treatment necessa- rily reproduces the operation by which they were originally brought into existence. The antinomy of mathematically continuous i. Con- ceptual transform- ation of percept- ual experi- ence turns the infinite into a problem growth is thus but one more of those many ways in which our conceptual transformation of perceptual experi- ence makes it less comprehensible than ever. That being should im- mediately and by finite quantities add itself to being, may indeed be something 185 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY which an onlooking intellect fails to under- stand; but that being should be identified with the consummation of an endless chain of units (such as ‘points’), no one of which contains any amount whatever of the being (such as ‘space’) expected to result, this is something which our intellect not only fails to understand, but which it finds absurd. The substitution of ‘ arithmetization ’ for intuition thus seems, if taken as a description of reality, to be only a partial success. Better accept, as Renouvier says, the opaquely given data of perception, than concepts inwardly absurd . 1 1 The point-continuum illustrates beautifully my complaint that the intellectualist method turns the flowing into the static and discrete. The buds or steps of process which perception accepts as primal gifts of being, correspond logically to the ‘ infinitesimals ’ (minutest quanta of notion, change or what not) of which the latest mathematics is sup- posed to have got rid. Mr. Russell accordingly finds himself obliged, just like Zeno, to treat motion as an unreality: ‘ Weierstrass,’ he says, ‘ by strictly banishing all infinitesimals has at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, at every moment of its flight, is truly at rest ’ (op. cit., p. 347). ‘We must entirely reject the notion of a state of motion,’ he says elsewhere; ‘motion consists merely in the occupation of different places at different times. . . . There is no transition from place to place, no consecutive moment, or consecutive position, no such thing as velocity except in the sense of a real number which is the limit of a certain set of quotients’ (p. 473). The mathematical ‘continuum,’ so called, becomes thus an absolute discontinuum in any physical or experiential sense. Ex- 186 NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE So much for the ‘problem of the infinite,’ and for the interpretation of continuous change by the new definition of infinity. We find that the picture of a reality changing by steps finite in number and discrete, remains quite as ac- ceptable to our understanding and as congenial to our imagination as before; so, after these dry and barren chapters, we take up our main topic of inquiry just where we had laid it down. Does reality grow by abrupt increments of 2 it leaves nove ^y> or not? The contrast be- thepro- tween discontinuity and continuity blem of novelty now confronts us in another form, where it was rp^ e mathematical definition of con- tinuous quantity as ‘that between any two elements or terms of which there is another term ’ is directly opposed to the more empirical or perceptual notion that anything is continu- ous when its parts appear as immediate next neighbors, with absolutely nothing between. tremes meet; and although Russell and Zeno agree in denying per- ceptual motion, for the one a pure unity, for the other a pure multi- plicity takes its place. It is probable that Russell’s denial of change, etc. is meant to apply only to the mathematical world. It would be unfair to charge him with writing metaphysics in these passages, although he gives no warning that this may not be the case. 187 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Our business lies hereafter with the perceptual account, but before we settle definitively to its discussion, another classic problem of philoso- phy had better be got out of the way. This is the ‘problem of causation.’ CHAPTER XII 1 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE CONCEPTUAL VIEW If reality changes by finite sensible steps, the question whether the bits of it that come are radically new, remains unsettled still. Remem- ber our situation at the end of Chapter III. Be- ing uberhaupt or at large, we there found to be undeduceable. For our intellect it remains a casual and contingent quantum that is simply found or begged. May it be begged bit by bit, as it adds itself? Or must we beg it only once, by assuming it either to be eternal or to have come in an instant that co-implicated all the The * prin- re st of time? Did or did not ‘the ciple of causality’ first morning of creation write what the last dawn of reckoning shall read’? With these questions monism and pluralism stand face to face again. The classic obstacle to plu- ralism has always been what is known as the ‘principle of causality.’ This principle has been 1 [In the author’s manuscript this chapter bore the heading — ‘ Second Sub-problem — Cause and Effect.’ Ed.] 189 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY taken to mean that the effect in some way al- ready exists in the cause. If this be so, the effect cannot be absolutely novel, and in no radical sense can pluralism be true. We must therefore review the facts of causa- tion. I take them in conceptual translation before considering them in perceptual form. The first definite inquiry into causes was made by Aristotle . 1 The £ why ’ of anything, he said, is furnished by four principles: the material cause of it (as Aristotle when bronze makes a statue); the on causa- tion formal cause (as when the ratio of two to one makes an octave); the efficient cause (as when a father makes a child) and the final cause (as when one exercises for the sake of health). Christian philosophy adopted the four causes; but what one generally means by the cause of anything is its ‘efficient’ cause, and in what immediately follows I shall speak of that alone. An efficient cause is scholastically defined as 1 Book 2, or book 5, chap, ii of his Metaphysics, or chap, iii of his Physics, give what is essential in his views. 190 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION ‘that which produces something else by a real activity proceeding from itself.’ This is unques- Schoiasti- tionably the view of common sense; efficient and scholasticism is only common cause sense grown quite articulate. Passing over the many classes of efficient cause which scholastic philosophy specifies, I will enumer- ate three important sub-principles it is sup- posed to follow from the above definition. Thus: 1. No effect can come into being with- out a cause. This may be verbally taken; but if, avoiding the word effect, it be taken in the sense that nothing can happen without a cause, it is the famous ‘principle of causality’ which, when combined with the next two prin- ciples, is supposed to establish the block-uni- verse, and to render the pluralistic hypothesis absurd. 2. The effect is always proportionate to the cause, and the cause to the effect. 3. Whatever is in the effect must in some way, whether formally, virtually, or eminently, have been also in the cause. (‘Formally’ here means that the cause resembles the effect, as 191 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY when one motion causes another motion; vir- tually means that the cause somehow involves that effect, without resembling it, as when an artist causes a statue but possesses not himself its beauty; ‘eminently’ means that the cause, though unlike the effect, is superior to it in perfection, as when a man overcomes a lion’s strength by greater cunning.) Nemo dat quod non habet is the real principle from which the causal philosophy flows; and the proposition causa cequat ejfectum practi- cally sums up the whole of it . 1 It is plain that each moment of the universe must contain all the causes of which the next moment contains effects, or to put it with ex- treme concision, it is plain that each moment in its totality causes the next moment . 2 But 1 Read for a concise statement of the school-doctrine of causation the account in J. Rickaby: General Metaphysics, book 2, chap. iii. I omit from my text various subordinate maxims which have played a great part in causal philosophy, as ‘ The cause of a cause is the cause of its effects’; ‘The same causes produce the same effects’; ‘Causes act only when present ’; ‘ A cause must exist before it can act,’ etc. 2 This notion follows also from the consideration of conditioning cir- cumstances being at bottom as indispensable as causes for producing effects. ‘The cause, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions positive and negative,’ says J. S. Mill {Logic, 8th edition, i, 192 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION if the maxim holds firm that quidquid est in effectu debet esse prius aliquo modo in causa, it follows that the next moment can contain nothing genuinely original, and that the nov- elty that appears to leak into our lives so un- remittingly, must be an illusion, ascribable to the shallowness of the perceptual point of view. Scholasticism always respected common sense, and in this case escaped the frank denial of all genuine novelty by the vague qualifica- tion ‘aliquo modo.’ This allowed the effect also to differ, aliquo modo, from its cause. But conceptual necessities have ruled the situation and have ended, as usual, by driving nature and perception to the wall. A cause and its effect are two numerically discrete concepts, and yet in some inscrutable way the former must ‘produce’ the latter. How can it intel- ligibly do so, save by already hiding the latter in itself? Numerically two, cause and effect 383). This is equivalent to the entire state of the universe at the mo- ment that precedes the effect. But neither is the ‘effect ’ in that case the one fragmentary event which our attention first abstracted under that name. It is that fragment, along with all its concomitants — or in other words it is the entire state of the universe at the second mo- ment desired. 193 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY must be generically one, in spite of the per- ceptual appearances; and causation changes thus from a concretely experienced relation between differents into one between similars abstractly thought of as more real . 1 The overthrow of perception by conception took a long time to complete itself in this field. Occasion- The first step was the theory of ‘oc- ahsm casionalism,’ to which Descartes led the way by his doctrine that mental and phys- ical substance, the one consisting purely of thought, the other purely of extension, were absolutely dissimilar. If this were so, any such causal intercourse as we instinctively perceive between mind and body ceased to be rational. 1 Sir William Hamilton expresses this very compactly: ‘What is the law of Causality? Simply this, — that when an object is presented phenomenally as commencing, we cannot but suppose that the com- plement (i. e. the amount) of existence, which it now contains, has previously been; — in other words, that all that we at present know as an effect must previously have existed in its causes; though what these causes are we may perhaps be altogether unable to surmise.’ (End of Lecture 39 of the Metaphysics.) The cause becomes a reason, the effect a consequence; and since logical consequence follows only from the same to the same, the older vaguer causation-philosophy develops into the sharp rationalistic dogma that cause and effect are two names for one persistent being, and that if the successive moments of the uni- verse be causally connected, no genuine novelty leaks in. 194 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION For thinkers of that age, ‘ God ’ was the great solvent of absurdities. He could get over every contradiction. Consequently Descartes’ disciples Regis and Cordemoy, and especially Geulincx, denied the fact of psychological in- teraction altogether. God, according to them, immediately caused the changes in our mind of which events in our body, and those in our body of which events in our mind, appear to be the causes, but of which they are in reality only the signals or occasions. Leibnitz took the next step forward in quenching the claim to truth of our percep- Leibnitz tions. He freed God from the duty of lending all this hourly assistance, by sup- posing Him to have decreed on the day of crea- tion that the changes in our several minds should coincide with those in our several bodies, after the manner in which clocks, wound up on the same day, thereafter keep time with one another. With this ‘pre-established harmony’ so-called, the conceptual translation of the immediate given, with its never failing result of negating both activity and continuity, is 195 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY complete. Instead of the dramatic flux of per- sonal life, a bare ‘one to one correspondence’ between the terms of two causally uncon- nected series is set up. God is the sole cause of anything, and the cause of everything at once. The theory is as monistic as the rationalist heart can desire, and of course novelty would be impossible if it were true. David Hume made the next step in discredit- ing common-sense causation. In the chapters on ‘the idea of necessary connection’ both in his ‘Treatise on Human Nature,’ and in his ‘Essays,’ he sought for a positive picture of the ‘efficacy of the power’ which causes are Hume assumed to exert, and failed to find it. He shows that neither in the physical nor in the mental world can we abstract or isolate the ‘ energy ’ transmitted from causes to effects. This is as true of perception as it is of imagina- tion. ‘All ideas are derived from and represent impressions. We never have any impression that contains any power or efficacy. We never therefore have any idea of power.’ ‘We never can by our utmost scrutiny discover anything 196 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION but one event following another; without being able to comprehend any force or power, by which the cause operates, or any connection between it and its supposed effect. . . . The necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connection or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any mean- ing, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or in common life.’ ‘Nothing is more evident than that the mind cannot form such an idea of two objects as to conceive any connection between them, or comprehend dis- tinctly that power or efficacy by which they are united.’ The pseudo-idea of a connection which we have, Hume then goes on to show, is nothing but the misinterpretation of a mental custom. When we have often experienced the same sequence of events, ‘we are carried by habit, upon the appearance of the first one, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. . . . This customary transition of the imagination is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or neces- 197 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY sary connection. Nothing farther is in the case. 5 ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the idea of the other.’ Nothing could be more essentially plural- istic than the elements of Hume’s philosophy. He makes events rattle against their neighbors as drily as if they were dice in a box. He might with perfect consistency have believed in real novelties, and upheld freewill. But I said awhile ago that most empiricists had been half- hearted; and Hume was perhaps the most half-hearted of the lot. In his essay ‘on liberty and necessity,’ he insists that the sequences which we experience, though between events absolutely disconnected, are yet absolutely uniform, and that nothing genuinely new can flower out of our lives. The reader will recognize in Hume’s famous pages a fresh example of the way in which con- Criticism ceptual translations always maltreat of Hume f ac t. Perceptually or concretely (as we shall notice in more detail later) causation names the manner in which some fields of con- 198 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION sciousness introduce other fields. It is but one of the forms in which experience appears as a continuous flow. Our names show how suc- cessfully we can discriminate within the flow. But the conceptualist rule is to suppose that where there is a separate name there ought to be a fact as separate; and Hume, following this rule, and finding no such fact corresponding to the word ‘power,’ concludes that the word is meaningless. By this rule every conjunction and preposition in human speech is meaning- less — in, on, of, with, but, and, if, are as meaningless as for, and because. The truth is that neither the elements of fact nor the mean- ings of our words are separable as the words are. The original form in which fact comes is the perceptual durcheinander, holding terms as well as relations in solution, or interfused and cemented. Our reflective mind abstracts divers aspects in the muchness, as a man by looking through a tube may limit his attention to one part after another of a landscape. But abstrac- tion is not insulation; and it no more breaks reality than the tube breaks the landscape. 199 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY Concepts are notes, views taken on reality , 1 not pieces of it, as bricks are of a house. Causal activity, in short, may play its part in growing fact, even though no substantive ‘impression’ of it should stand out by itself. Hume’s as- sumption that any factor of reality must be separable, leads to his preposterous view, that no relation can be real. ‘All events,’ he writes, ‘seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected.’ Nothing, in short, belongs with anything else. Thus does the intellectual- ist method pulverize perception and triumph over life. Kant and his successors all espoused Hume’s opinion that the immediately given is a disconnected ‘manifold.’ But unwilling sim- ply to accept the manifold, as Hume did, they invoked a superior agent in the shape of what Kant called the ‘transcendental ego of apper- ception ’ to patch its bits together by synthetic ‘categories.’ Among these categories Kant in- scribes that of ‘causality,’ and in many quar- 1 These expressions are Bergson’s. 200 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION ters he passes for a repairer of the havoc that Hume made. His chapter on Cause 1 is the most confusedly written part of his famous Critique, and its meaning is often hard to catch. As I under- stand his text, he leaves things just where Hume did, save that where Hume says ‘habit’ Kant he says ‘rule.’ They both cancel the notion that phenomena called causal ever ex- ert ‘power,’ or that a single case would ever have suggested cause and effect. In other words Kant contradicts common sense as much as Hume does and, like Hume, translates caus- ation into mere time-succession ; only, whereas the order in time was essentially ‘loose’ for Hume and only subjectively uniform, Kant calls its uniformity ‘ objective as obtaining in conformity to a law, which our Sinnlichkeit receives from our Ver stand.' Non-causal se- quences can be reversed; causal ones follow in conformity to rule . 2 1 Entitled ‘The Second Analogy of Experience,’ it begins on page 232 of the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. 2 Kant’s whole notion of a ‘ rule ’ is inconstruable by me. What or whom does the rule bind? If it binds the phenomenon that follows 201 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY The word Verstand in Kant’s account must not be taken as if the rule it is supposed to set to sensation made us understand things any better. It is a brute rule of sequence which reveals no ‘tie.’ The non-rationality of such a ‘category’ leaves it worthless for purposes of insight. It removes dynamic causation and substitutes no other explanation for the se- quences found. It yields external descriptions only, and assimilates all cases to those where we discover no reason for the law ascertained. Our ‘ laws of nature ’ do indeed in large part enumerate bare coexistences and successions. Yellowness and malleability coexist in gold; redness succeeds on boiling in lobsters; coagu- (the ‘ effect ’) we fall back into the popular dynamic view, and any single case would exhibit causal action, even were there no other cases in the world. — Or does it bind the observer of the single case? But his own sensations of sequence are what bind him. Be a sequence causal or non-causal, if it is sensible, he cannot turn it backwards as he can his ideas. Or does the rule bind future sequences and determine them to follow in the same order which the first sequence observed? Since it obviously does not do this when the observer judges wrongly that the first sequence is causal, all we can say is that it is a rule where- by his expectations of uniformity follow his causal judgments, be these latter true or false. But wherein would this differ from the humean po- sition? Kant, in short, flounders, and in no truthful sense can one keep repeating that he has ‘refuted Hume.’ 202 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION lation in eggs ; and to him who asks for the Why of these uniformities, science only replies: Positivism ‘Not yet’! Meanwhile the laws are potent for prediction, and many writers on science tell us that this is all we can demand. To explain, according to the way of thinking called positivistic, is only to substitute wider or more familiar, for narrower or less familiar laws, and the laws at their widest only express uniformities empirically found. Why does the pump suck up water? Because the air keeps pressing it into the tube. Why does the air press in? Because the earth attracts it. Why does the earth attract it? Because it attracts everything — such attraction being in the end only a more universal sort of fact. Laws, ac- cording to their view, only generalize facts, they do not connect them in any intimate sense . 1 Against this purely inductive way of treat- ing causal sequences, a more deductive inter- 1 For expressions of this view the student may consult J. S. Mill’s Logic, book 3, chap, xii; W. S. Jevons’s Principles of Science, book 6; J. Venn’s Empirical Logic, chap, xxi, and K. Pearson’s Grammar of Science, chap. iii. 203 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY pretation has recently been urged. If the later member of a succession could be deduced Deductive By logic from the earlier member, theories of causation in the particular sequence the ‘tie’ would be unmistakable. But logical ties carry us only from sames to sanies; so this last phase of scientific method is at bottom only the scholastic principle of Causa cequat efectum , brought into sharper focus and illustrated more concretely. It is thoroughly monistic in its aims, and if it could be worked out in detail it would turn the real world into the procession of an eternal identity, with the appearances, of which we are perceptually conscious, oc- curring as a sort of by-product to which no ‘scientific’ importance should be attached . 1 In any case no real growth and no real novelty could effect an entrance into life . 2 1 ‘ Consciousness,’ writes M. Couturat, to cite a handy expression of this mode of thought, ‘is properly speaking, the realm of the unreal. . . . What remains in our subjective consciousness, after all objective facts have been projected and located in space and time, is the rubbish and residuum of the construction of the universe, the formless mass of images that were unable to enter into the system of nature and put on the garment of reality ’ ( Revue de Metaphysique, etc., v, 244). 2 I avoid amplifying this conception of cause and effect. An immense number of causal facts can indeed be explained satisfactorily by as- 204 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION This negation of real novelty seems to be the upshot of the conceptualist philosophy of causation. This is why I called it on page 189 Summary the classic obstacle to the acceptance and con- clusion of pluralism’s additive world. The principle of causality begins as a hybrid be- tween common sense and intellectualism : — what actively produces an effect, it says, must ‘in some way ’ contain the ‘power ’ of it already. suming that the effect is only a later position of the cause; and for the remainder we can fall back on the aliquo modo which gave such com- fort in the past. Such an interpretation of nature would, of course, relegate variety, activity, and novelty to the limbo of illusions, as fast as it succeeded in making its static concepts cancel living facts. It is hard to be sincere, however, in following the conceptual method ruth- lessly ; and of the writers who think that in science causality must mean identity, some willingly allow that all such scientific explanation is more or less artificial, that identical ‘ molecules ’ and ‘ atoms ’ are like identical ‘pounds ’ and ‘yards,’ only pegs in a conceptual arrangement for hanging percepts on in ‘one to one relations,’ so as to predict facts in ‘ elegant’ or expeditious ways. This is the view of the conceptual universe which our own discussion has insisted on ; and, taking scientific logic in this way, no harm is done. Almost no one is radical in using scientific logic metaphysically. Readers wishing for more discussion of the monistic view of cause, may consult G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, problem 5, chap, iii ; A. Riehl : Der philosophische Kriticismus (1879), 2ter Absn., Kap 2 ; G. Heymans: Die Gesetze u. Elemente d, wissenschaftlichen Denlcens, par. 83-85. Compare also B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, revised edition, part i, chap. iv. Perhaps the most instruc- tive general discussion of causation is that in C. Sigwart: Logic, 2d edition, par. 73. Chap, v of book 3 in J. S. Mill’s Logic may be called classical. 205 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY But as nothing corresponding to the concept of power can be insulated, the activity-feature of the sequence erelong gets suppressed, and the vague latency, supposed to exist aliquo modo in the causal phenomenon, of the effect about to be produced, is developed into a sta- tic relation of identity between two concepts which the mind substitutes for the percepts between which the causal tie originally was found . 1 The resultant state of ‘ enlightened opinion ’ about cause, is, as I have called it before, con- fused and unsatisfactory. Few philosophers hold radically to the identity view. The view of the logicians of science is easier to believe 1 I omit saying anything in my text about ‘energetics.’ Popular writers often appear to think that ‘science’ has demonstrated a monis- tic principle called ‘energy,’ which they connect with activity on the one hand and with quantity on the other. So far as I understand this difficult subject, ‘energy ’ is not a principle at all, still less an active one. It is only a collective name for certain amounts of immediate perceptual reality, when such reality is measured in definite ways that allow its changes to be written so as to get constant sums. It is not an ontological theory at all, but a magnificent economic schematic device for keeping account of the functional variations of the surface phe- nomena. It is evidently a case of ‘nonfingo hypotheses,’ and since it tolerates perceptual reality, it ought to be regarded as neutral in our causal debate. 206 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION but not easier to believe metaphysically, for it violates instinct almost as strongly. Mathema- ticians make use, to connect the various inter- dependencies of quantities, of the general con- cept of function. That A is a function of B (A equals B) means that with every alteration in the value of A, an alteration in that of B is always connected. If we generalize so as also to include qualitative dependencies, we can conceive the universe as consisting of nothing but elements with functional relations between them; and science has then for its sole task the listing of the elements and the describing in the simplest possible terms the functional ‘re- lations.’ 1 Changes, in short, occur, and ring throughout phenomena, but neither reasons, nor activities in the sense of agencies, have any place in this world of scientific logic, which compared with the world of common sense, is so abstract as to be quite spectral, and merits the appellation (so often quoted from Mr. Bradley) of ‘an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’ 1 W. Jerusalem: Einleitung in die Philosophic, 4te Aufl., 145. CHAPTER XIII NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE PERCEPTUAL VIEW Most persons remain quite incredulous when they are told that the rational principle of causality has exploded our native belief in naif activity as something real, and our assumption that genuinely new fact can be created by work done. ‘Le sens de la vie qui s’indigne de tant de discours,’ awakens in them and snaps its fingers at the ‘ critical ’ view. The present writer has also just called the critical view an incomplete abstraction. But its ‘functional laws’ and schematisms are splendid^ useful, and its negations are true oftener than is com- monly supposed. We feel as if our ‘will’ im- mediately moved our members, and we ignore the brain-cells whose activity that will must first arouse; we think we cause the bell-ring, but we only close a contact and the battery in the cellar rings the bell; we think a certain star’s light is the cause of our now seeing it, but ether-waves are the causes, and the star 208 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION may have been extinguished long ago. We call the ‘draft/ the cause of our ‘cold’; but without co-operant microbes the draft could do no harm. Defects of Mill says that causes must be un- the percept- conditional antecedents, and Venn ual view do not warrant that they must be ‘close’ ones. In scepticism nature s numerous successions so many links are hidden, that we seldom know exactly which antecedent is unconditional or which is close. Often the cause which we name only fits some other cause for producing the phenomenon ; and things, as Mill says, are fre- quently then most active when we assume them to be acted upon. This vast amount of error in our instinctive perceptions of causal activity encourages the conceptualist view. A step farther, and we sus- pect that to suppose causal activity anywhere may be a blunder, and that only consecutions and juxtapositions can be real. Such sweep- ing scepticism is, however, quite uncalled for. Other parts of experience expose us to error, yet we do not say that in them is no truth. We see trains moving at stations, when they are 209 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY really standing still, or falsely we feel ourselves to be moving, when we are giddy, without such errors leading us to deny that motion anywhere exists. It exists elsewhere; and the problem is to place it rightly. It is the same with all other illusions of sense. There is doubtless somewhere an original perceptual experience of the kind of thing we mean by causation, and that kind of thing we locate in various other places, rightly or wrongly as the case may be. Where now is the typical experience originally got? Evidently it is got in our own personal activ- ity-situations. In all of these what we feel is that a previous field of ‘consciousness’ con- taining (in the midst of its complexity) the The per idea a resu ^’ develops gradually ceptuai into another field in which that re- experience of causa- suit either appears as accomplished, or else is prevented by obstacles against which we still feel ourselves to press. As I now write, I am in one of these activity situations. I ‘ strive ’ after words, which I only half prefigure, but which, when they shall have 210 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION come, must satisfactorily complete the nascent sense I have of what they ought to be. The words are to run out of my pen, which I find that my hand actuates so obediently to desire that I am hardly conscious either of resistance or of effort. Some of the words come wrong, and then I do feel a resistance, not muscular but mental, which instigates a new instalment of my activity, accompanied by more or less feeling of exertion. If the resistance were to my muscles, the exertion would contain an ele- ment of strain or squeeze which is less present where the resistance is only mental. If it proves considerable in either kind I may leave off try- ing to overcome it; or, on the other hand, I may sustain my effort till I have succeeded in my aim. It seems to me that in such a continuously developing experiential series our concrete perception of causality is found in operation. If the word have any meaning at all it must mean what there we live through. What ‘effi- cacy’ and ‘activity’ are known-as is what these appear. 211 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY The experiencer of such a situation feels the push, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he feels the time, the space, the swiftness of intens- ity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or what- ever remaining characters the situation may involve. He goes through all that can ever be imagined where activity is supposed. The word ‘activity’ has no content save these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of the life given us to be known. No matter what in it ‘efficacies’ there may really be in * final * and ‘ ef- this extraordinary universe it is im- ficient ’ possible to conceive of any one of coincide them being either lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome. What ‘sustaining’ means here is clear to anyone who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as ‘loud,’ ‘red,’ ‘sweet,’ mean something only to NOVELTY AND CAUSATION beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The per- dpi in these originals of experience is the esse; the curtain is the picture. If there is anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called causal agency, but should get itself an- other name. The way in which we feel that our successive fields continue each other in these cases is evi- dently what the orthodox doctrine means when it vaguely says that ‘in some way’ the cause ‘contains’ the effect. It contains it by propos- ing it as the end pursued. Since the desire of that end is the efficient cause, we see that in the total fact of personal activity final and efficient causes coalesce. Yet the effect is often- est contained aliquo modo only, and seldom explicitly foreseen. The activity sets up more effects than it proposes literally. The end is defined beforehand in most cases only as a And novel- general direction, along which all ties anse sor t s of novelties and surprises lie in wait. These words I write even now surprise me ; yet I adopt them as effects of my scripto- rial causality. Their being ‘contained’ means 213 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY only their harmony and continuity with my general aim. They ‘fill the bill’ and I accept them, but the exact shape of them seems deter- mined by something outside of my explicit will. If we look at the general mass of things in the midst of which the life of men is passed, and ask ‘How came they here?’ the only broad answer is that man’s desires preceded and pro- duced them. If not all-sufficient causes, desire and will were at any rate what John Mill calls unconditional causes, indispensable causes namely, without which the effects could not have come at all. Human causal activity is the only known unconditional antecedent of the works of civilization; so we find, as Edward Carpenter says , 1 something like a law of na- ture, the law that a movement from feeling to thought and thence to action, from the world of dreams to the world of things, is everywhere going on. Since at each phase of this move- ment novelties turn up, we may fairly ask, with Carpenter, whether we are not here witnessing in our own personal experience what is really 1 The Art of Creation, 1894, chap. i. 214 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION the essential process of creation. Is not the world really growing in these activities of ours? And where we predicate activities elsewhere, have we a right to suppose aught different in kind from this? To some such vague vision are we brought by taking our perceptual experience of action at its face-value, and following the analogies which it suggests. I say vague vision, for even if our desires be an unconditional causal factor in the only part Perceptual of the universe where we are inti- sets a * 1011 mately acquainted with the way problem creative work is done, desire is any- thing but a close factor, even there. The part of the world to which our desires lie closest is, by the consent of physiologists, the cortex of the brain. If they act causally, their first effect is there, and only through innumerable neural, muscular, and instrumental intermediaries is that last effect which they consciously aimed at brought to birth. Our trust in the face-value of perception was apparently misleading. There is no such continuity between cause-and- 215 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY effect as in our activity-experiences was made to appear. There is disruption rather; and what we naively assume to be continuous is separated by causal successions of which per- ception is wholly unaware. The logical conclusion would seem to be that even if the kind of thing that causation is, were revealed to us in our own activity, we should be mistaken on the very threshold if we sup- posed that the fact of it is there. In other words we seem in this line of experience to start with an illusion of place. It is as if a baby were born at a kinetoscope-show and his first experi- ences were of the illusions of movement that reigned in the place. The nature of movement would indeed be revealed to him, but the real facts of movement he would have to seek out- side. Even so our will-acts may reveal the na- ture of causation, but just where the facts of causation are located may be a further pro- blem . 1 With this further problem, philosophy 1 With this cause-and-effect are in what is called a transitive rela- tion : as ‘ more than more is more than less,’ so ‘ cause of cause is cause of effect.’ In a chain of causes, intermediaries can drop out and (logi- cally at least) the relation still hold between the extreme terms, the 216 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION leaves off comparing conceptual with percept- ual experience, and begins enquiring into physical and psychological facts. Perception has given us a positive idea of causal agency but it remains to be ascertained whether what first appears as such, This is the problem of is really such ; whether aught else is the relation of mind to really such; or finally, whether no- thing really such exists. Since with this we are led immediately into the mind- brain relation, and since that is such a compli- cated topic, we had better interrupt our study of causation provisionally at the present point, meaning to complete it when the problem of the mind’s relation to the body comes up for review. Our outcome so far seems therefore to be only this, that the attempt to treat ‘cause,’ Conclusion for conceptual purposes, as a sepa- rable link, has failed historically, and has led to the denial of efficient causation, and to the wider causal span enveloping, without altering the ‘ closer * one. This consideration may provisionally mitigate the impression of falsehood which psychophysical criticism finds in our consciousness of activity. The subject will come up later in more detail. 217 SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY substitution for it of tlie bare descriptive no- tion of uniform sequence among events. Thus intellectualist philosophy once more has had to butcher our perceptual life in order to make it ‘comprehensible.’ Meanwhile the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly com- prehensible instances of causal agency. The transitive causation in them does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix upon. Rather does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality -at-work flavors the entire concrete sequence as salt flavors the water in which it is dissolved. If we took these experiences as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to as- cribe to cases of causation outside of our own life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experi- ential nature. In other words we should have to espouse a so-called ‘ pan-psychic ’ philosophy. This complication, and the fact that hidden 218 NOVELTY AND CAUSATION brain-events appear to be ‘closer’ effects than those which consciousness directly aims at, lead us to interrupt the subject here provisionally. Our main result, up to this point, has been the contrast between the perceptual and the intel- lectualist treatment of it . 1 1 Almost no philosopher has admitted that perception can give us relations immediately. Relations have invariably been called the work of ‘ thought,’ so cause must be a ‘category.’ The result is well shown in such a treatment of the subject as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson’s, in his elaborate work the Metaphysic of Experience. ‘ What we call conscious activity is not a consciousness of activity in the sense of an immediate perception of it. Try to perceive activity or effort immediately, and you will fail; you will find nothing there to perceive ’ ( i, 180). As there is nothing there to conceive either, in the discrete manner which Mr. Hodgson desiderates, he has to conclude that ‘Causality per se (why need it be per se?) has no scientific or philosophic justifica- tion. . . . All cases of common-sense causality resolve themselves, on analysis, into cases of post hoc, cum illo, evenit istud. Hence we say that the search for causes is given up in science and philosophy, and re- placed by the search for real conditions (i. e., phenomenal antecedents merely) and the laws of real conditioning.’ It must also be recognized that realities answering to the terms cause and causality per se are impossible and non-existent’ (ii, 374-378). The author whose discussion most resembles my own (apart from Bergson’s, of which more later) is Prof. James Ward in his Naturalism and Agnosticism (see the words ‘activity’ and ‘causality’ in the in- dex). Consult also the chapter on ‘Mental Activity ’ in G. F. Stout’s Analytic Psychology, vol. i. W. James’s Pluralistic Universe, Appendix B, may also be consulted. Some authors seem to think that we do have an ideal conception of genuine activity which none of our experiences, least of all personal ones, match, Hence, and not because activity is a spurious idea altogether, are all the activities we imagine false. Mr. F. H. Bradley seems to occupy some such position, but I am not sure. APPENDIX FAITH AND THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 1 Intellectualism ’ is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given. Among intellectualists two parties may be dis- tinguished. Rationalizing intellectualists lay stress on deductive and ‘dialectic’ arguments, making large use of abstract concepts and pure logic (Hegel, Bradley, Taylor, Royce). Empiricist intellectual- ists are more ‘scientific,’ and think that the char- acter of the world must be sought in our sensible experiences, and found in hypotheses based exclu- sively thereon (Clifford, Pearson). Both sides insist that in our conclusions personal preferences should play no part, and that no argu- ment from what ought to be to what is, is valid. ‘Faith,’ being the greeting of our whole nature to a kind of world conceived as well adapted to that nature, is forbidden, until purely intellectual evi- 1 [The following pages, part of a syllabus printed for the use of students in an introductory course in philosophy, were found with the MS. of this book, with the words, ‘To be printed as part of the In- troduction to Philosophy,’ noted thereon in the author’s handwrit- ing. Ed.] 221 APPENDIX dence that such is the actual world has come in. Even if evidence should eventually prove a faith true, the truth, says Clifford, would have been ‘stolen,’ if assumed and acted on too soon. Refusal to believe anything concerning which ‘evidence’ has not yet come in, would thus be the rule of intellectualism. Obviously it postulates cer- tain conditions, which for aught we can see need not necessarily apply to all the dealings of our minds with the Universe to which they belong. 1. It postulates that to escape error is our para- mount duty. Faith may grasp truth; but also it may not. By resisting it always, we are sure of escaping error; and if by the same act we renounce our chance at truth, that loss is the lesser evil, and should be incurred. 2. It postulates that in every respect the uni- verse is finished in advance of our dealings with it; That the knowledge of what it thus is, is best gained by a passively receptive mind, with no native sense of probability, or good-will towards any special result; That ‘evidence’ not only needs no good-will for its reception; but is able, if patiently waited for, to neutralize ill-will; Finally, that our beliefs and our acts based there- upon, although they are parts of the world, and 222 APPENDIX although the world without them is unfinished, are yet such mere externalities as not to alter in any way the significance of the rest of the world when they are added to it. In our dealings with many details of fact these postulates work well. Such details exist in advance of our opinion; truth concerning them is often of no pressing importance; and by believing nothing, we escape error while we wait. But even here we often cannot wait but must act, somehow; so we act on the most 'probable hypothesis, trusting that the event may prove us wise. Moreover, not to act on one belief, is often equivalent to acting as if the opposite belief were true, so inaction would not always be as ‘passive’ as the intellectualists as- sume. It is one attitude of will. Again, Philosophy and Religion have to interpret the total character of the world, and it is by no means clear that here the intellectualist postulates obtain. It may be true all the while (even though the evidence be still imperfect) that, as Paulsen says, ‘the natural order is at bottom a moral order.’ It may be true that work is still doing in the world- process, and that in that work we are called to bear our share. The character of the world’s results may in part depend upon our acts. Our acts may depend on our religion, — on our not-resisting our faith- l 223 APPENDIX tendencies, or on our sustaining them in spite of ‘evidence’ being incomplete. These faith-tenden- cies in turn are but expressions of our good-will towards certain forms of result. Such faith-tendencies are extremely active psy- chological forces, constantly outstripping evidence. The following steps may be called the ‘ f aith-ladder ’ : 1 . There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true, nothing self-contradictory ; 2. It might have been true under certain condi- tions; 3. It may be true, even now; 4. It is fit to be true; 5. It ought to be true; 6. It must be true; 7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me. Obviously this is no intellectual chain of infer- ences, like the sorites of the logic-books. Yet it is a slope of good-will on which in the larger questions of life men habitually live. Intellectualism’s proclamation that our’good-will, our ‘will to believe,’ is a pure disturber of truth, is itself an act of faith of the most arbitrary kind. It implies the will to insist on a universe of intellectu- alist constitution, and the willingness to stand in the way of a pluralistic universe’s success, such success requiring the good-will and active faith, 224 APPENDIX theoretical as well as practical, of all concerned, to make it ‘come true.’ Intellectualism thus contradicts itself. It is a sufficient objection to it, that if a ‘pluralistically’ organized, or ‘ co-operative ’ universe or the ‘ melio- ristic’ universe above, were really here, the veto of intellectualism on letting our good-will ever have any vote would debar us from ever admitting that universe to be true. Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birth- rights of our mind. Of course it must remain a practical, and not a dogmatic attitude. It must go with toleration of other faiths, with the search for the most probable, and with the full consciousness of responsibilities and risks. It may be regarded as a formative factor in the universe, if we be integral parts thereof, and co- determinants, by our behavior, of what its total character may be. How we Act on Probabilities In most emergencies we have to act on probabil- ity, and incur the risk of error. ‘Probability’ and ‘possibility’ are terms ap- plied to things of the conditions of whose coming we are (to some degree at least) ignorant. If we are entirely ignorant of the conditions that 225 APPENDIX make a thing come, we call it a ‘bare’ possibility. If we know that some of the conditions already exist, it is for us in so far forth a ‘grounded’ pos- sibility. It is in that case probable just in propor- tion as the said conditions are numerous, and few hindering conditions are in sight. When the conditions are so numerous and con- fused that we can hardly follow them, we treat a thing as probable in proportion to the frequency with which things of that kind occur. Such fre- quency being a fraction, the probability is expressed by a fraction. Thus, if one death in 10,000 is by suicide, the antecedent probability of my death being a suicide is 1-10, 000th. If one house in 5000 burns down annually, the probability that my house will burn is l-5000th, etc. Statistics show that in most kinds of thing the frequency is pretty regular. Insurance companies bank on this regularity, undertaking to pay (say) 5000 dollars to each man whose house burns, pro- vided he and the other house-owners each pay enough to give the company that sum, plus some- thing more for profits and expenses. The company, hedging on the large number of cases it deals with, and working by the long run, need run no risk of loss by the single fires. The individual householder deals with his own 226 APPENDIX single case exclusively. The probability of his house burning is only 1-5000, but if that lot befall he will lose everything. He has no Tong run ’ to go by, if his house takes fire, and he can’t hedge as the company does, by taxing his more fortunate neigh- bors. But in this particular kind of risk, the com- pany helps him out. It translates his one chance in 5000 of a big loss, into a certain loss 5000 times smaller, and the bargain is a fair one on both sides. It is clearly better for the man to lose certainly, but fractionally, than to trust to his 4999 chances of no loss, and then have the improbable chance befall. But for most of our emergencies there is no insur- ance company at hand, and fractional solutions are impossible. Seldom can we act fractionally. If the probability that a friend is waiting for you in Bos- tion is 1-2, how should you act on that probability? By going as far as the bridge? Better stay at home ! Or if the probability is 1-2 that your partner is a villain, how should you act on that probability? By treating him as a villain one day, and confiding your money and your secrets to him the next? That would be the worst of all solutions. In all such cases we must act wholly for one or the other horn of the dilemma. We must go in for the more probable alternative as if the other one did not exist, and suffer the full penalty if the event belie our faith. 227 APPENDIX Now the metaphysical and religious alternatives are largely of this kind. We have but this one life in which to take up our attitude towards them, no insurance company is there to cover us, and if we are wrong, our error, even though it be not as great as the old hell-fire theology pretended, may yet be momentous. In such questions as that of the char- acter of the world, of life being moral in its essential meaning, of our playing a vital part therein, etc., it would seem as if a certain wholeness in’ our faith were necessary. To calculate the probabilities and act fractionally, and treat life one day as a farce, and another day as a very serious business, would be to make the worst possible mess of it. Inaction also often counts as action. In many issues the inertia of one member will impede the success of the whole as much as his opposition will. To refuse, e. g., to testify against villainy, is practically to help it to prevail . 1 The Pluralistic or Melioristic Universe Finally, if the ‘melioristic’ universe were really here, it would require the active good-will of all of us, in the way of belief as well as of our other ac- tivities, to bring it to a prosperous issue. The melioristic universe is conceived after a 1 Cf. Wm. James: The Will to Believe, etc., pp. 1-31, and 90-110. 228 APPENDIX social analogy, as a pluralism of independent pow- f ers. It will succeed just in proportion as more of these work for its success. If none work, it will fail. If each does his best, it will not fail. Its destiny thus hangs on an if, or on a lot of ifs — which amounts to saying (in the technical language of logic) that, the world being as yet unfinished, its total character can be expressed only by hypotheti- cal and not by categorical propositions. (Empiricism, believing in possibilities, is willing to formulate its universe in hypothetical proposi- tions. Rationalism, believing only in impossibili- ties and necessities, insists on the contrary on their being categorical.) As individual members of a pluralistic universe, we must recognize that, even though we do our best, the other factors also will have a voice in the result. If they refuse to conspire, our good-will and labor may be thrown away. No insurance company can here cover us or save us from the risks we run in being part of such a world. We must take one of four attitudes in regard to the other powers : either 1. Follow intellectualist advice: wait for evi- dence; and while waiting, do nothing; or 2. Mistrust the other powers and, sure that the universe will fail, let it fail; or 229 APPENDIX 3. Trust them; and at any rate do our best, in spite of the if; or, finally, 4. Flounder , spending one day in one attitude, another day in another. This 4th way is no systematic solution. The 2d way spells faith in failure. The 1st way may in practice be indistinguishable from the 2d way. The 3d way seems the only wise way. ‘ If we do our best, and the other powers do their best, the world will be perfected ’ — this proposi- tion expresses no actual fact, but only the com- plexion of a fact thought of as eventually possible. As it stands, no conclusion can be positively de- duced from it. A conclusion would require another ; premise of fact, which only we can supply. The origi- nal proposition per se has no pragmatic value whatso- ever, apart from its power to challenge our will to produce the premise of fact required. Then indeed the perfected world emerges as a logical conclusion. We can create the conclusion, then. We can and we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards a world of which we trust the other parts to meet our jump — and only so can the making of a perfected world of the pluralis- tic pattern ever take place. Only through our pre- cursive trust in it can it come into being. There is no inconsistency anywhere in this, and 230 APPENDIX no ‘vicious circle’ unless a circle of poles holding themselves upright by leaning on one another, or a circle of dancers revolving by holding each other’s hands, be ‘vicious.’ The faith circle is so congruous with human nature that the only explanation of the veto that intellectualists pass upon it must be sought in the offensive character to them of the faiths of certain concrete persons. Such possibilities of offense have, however, to be put up with on empiricist principles. The long run of experience may weed out the more foolish faiths. Those who held them will then have failed: but without the wiser faiths of the others the world could never be perfected. (Compare G. Lowes Dickinson: “Religion, a Criticism and a Forecast,” N. Y. 1905, Introduc- tion; and chaps, iii, iv.) INDEX Absolute idealism, 137 ; defects of, 138. Activity, intellectually incompre- hensible, 85. Alembert, d’, 114. Al-Ghazzali, 117 note . Anaxagoras, 11. Anselm, St., 43 note. Antinomies, Kant’s, 160. Aquinas, St. Thomas, 11, 12, 43. Archimedes, 148. Aristotle, 7, 11, 12, 24, 34, 36, 38, 53, 55 note, 65, 148, 150 note, 190. Bakewell, C. M., 54 note, 116 note. Baldwin, J. M., 6 note. Bax, Belfort, 101 note. Being, problem of, 38; various treatments of problem of, 40; rationalist and empiricist treat- ments, 42 ; Hegel's mediation of with non-being, 44 ; same amount of must be begged by all, 45; conservation vs. crea- tion of, 45. Bergson, 37, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97 note, 200 note, 219 note. Berkeley, 37, 121, 122. Bossuet, 54 note. Bouillier, F., 116 note. Bowne, B. P., 124 note, 205 note. Boyle, 20, 21. Bradley, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 107 note, 207, 219 note, 221. Burnet, J., 157 note. Cantor, 174, 177, 182. Carpenter, E., 214. Cauchy, 184. Causation, 85; Aristotle on, 190; scholasticism on efficient, 191; occasionalistic theory of, 194; Leibnitzon, 195; Hume on, 196; criticism of Hume on, 198; Kant on, 200; positivism on, 203; de- ductive theories of, 204; con- ceptual view of negates novelty, 205; defects of perceptual view of do not warrant scepticism, 209; nature of perceptual expe- rience of, 210; ‘ final ’ and ‘ efficient ’ mingle in perceptual experience, 212; perceptual, sets a problem, 215. Change, conceptually impossible, 87. Clerk-Maxwell, 66. Clifford, 221, 222. Coleridge, 34. Comte, A., 16. Concatenation, unity by, 129. Conception, a secondary process, 79; and novelty, 154. Concepts, distinguished from per- cept, 48; discreteness of , 48 ; in- terpenetrate with percepts, 52; dignity of knowledge of, 54 ; con- tent and function of, 58; origin- ate in utility, 63; theoretic use of, 65 ; in the a priori sciences, 67; in physics, 70; bring new values, 71 ; role of in human life, 73; secondary formations, 79; inadequate, 81; static, 85; Brad- ley on, 92; self-sameness of , 102; Cairds, the, 85. Calderwood, H., 156 note. 233 INDEX consubstantial with percepts, 107 ; designative only. 111. Conceptual knowledge, rational- ist view of, 55; empiricist view of, 57. Conceptual order, the, 50; unlim- ited, 52; a topographic system, 66 . Conceptual systems, distinct realms of reality, 101. Conceptual translation, defects of, 78; examples of puzzles intro- duced by, 85. Conservation vs. creation, 45. Continuity theory, the, 155. Cordemoy, 195. Couturat, L., 183 note, 204 note. Creed, the intellectualist, 75. Cudworth, R., 54 note, 57 note. Dalton, 20. Delboeuf, 148, 149 note. Democritus, 11, 34, 35, 149 note. Descartes, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 36, 43 note, 148, 150 note, 194, 195. Dewey, J., 6, 37. Dickinson, G. Lowes, 231. Direction, concept of, impossible till process completed, 88. Discontinuity theory, the, 154. Dresser, H. W., 92 note. Duhem, 91 note, 150 note. Emerson, 56, 70, 72 note. Empedocles, 11. Empiricism, confirmed by de- fects of concepts, 98; willing to use hypotheticals, 229. Empiricists, contrasted with ra- tionalists, 35. Energetics, 206 note. Evellin, 184. Evil, problem of, 138. Faith, vs. evidence, 221 ; — ten- dencies, 224; a practical atti- tude, 225. Fawcett, E. D., 101 note. Fichte, 137 note. Frazer, J. G., 18 note. Freedom, 139; opposed by mon- ism, 140. Fullerton, G. M., 184 note. Galileo, 20, 21, 22. Green, 85. Geulincx, 195. Habits of thought, origins of, 16. Hamilton, Sir W., 50 note, 194 note. Harper, T. J., 12 note. Harvey, 20. Hegel, 36, 43, 48 note, 57, 91, 92, 137 note, 169, 223. Helvetius, 55 note. Heracleitus, 11. Heymans, G., 205 note. Hibben, 81 note, 82 note. Hobson, E. W., 184 note. Hodgson, S. H., 51 note, 219 note. Hume, 14, 37, 85, 121, 123, 124, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 note. Huntington, E. V., 184 note. Huygens, 20. Huxley, 20. Infinite, the standing, 167 ; prag- matic definition of, 168; the growing, 170; must be treated as discontinuous, 172; ‘the new,’ 23 4 INDEX 174, 175; is paradoxical, 176; is turned into problem by con- ceptual transformation of per- ceptual experience, 185, Infinity, 33; Kant’s definition of, 160; ambiguity of his statement of problem of, 162; Renouvier’s solution of, 164. ‘Insuperability of sensation,’ 79. Intellectualism, origin of, 83; in- adequacy of, 84; rule of, 222; self-contradictory, 225. James, W., 37 note, 50 note, 60 note, 63 note, 96 note, 97 note, 107 note. 111 note, 112 note, 118 note, 135 note, 142 note, 219 note, 228 note. Janet, P., 34 note. Jastrow, J., 18 note. Jerusalem, W., 207 note . Jevons, F. B., 18 note. Kant, 14, 31, 36, 37, 43 note, 51 note, 84, 85, 124, 128, 159, 161 note, 162, 163, 166, 170, 171, 182, 184, 200, 201, 202. Kepler, 20. Keyser, J. C., 184 note. Knowledge, impossible on intel- lectualistic basis, 86. Laas, E., 54 note. Lange, T. A., 37. Laromiguiere, 50 note. Le Bon, G., 150 note. Leibnitz, 14, 36, 184, 195. LeRoy, 91 note. Lewes, G. H., 16 note, 19 note, 68 note, 205 note. Liberatore, P. M., 119 note. Locke, 13, 37, 55 note, 121, 169, Lotze, 37, 86. Lovejoy, A. O., 18 note. MacDonald, D. B., 118 note. Mach, 90 note. Malebranche, 76 note. Mana, 17. Mansel, H. L., 50 note. Mariotte, 70. Marett, R. R., 18 note. Marvin, 149 note. Melioristic universe, the, 228. Metaphysical problems, exam- ples of, 27 ; nature of, 32. Metaphysics, defined, 31; ration- alism and empiricism in, 34. Michelet, 57 note. Milhaud, 91 note. Mill, 37, 107 note, 124 note, 192 note, 203 note, 205 note, 209, 214. Mill, James, 55 note, 102, 107 note. Miller, J. E., 63 note. Monism, vs. pluralism, 113 , mean- ing of, 115; kinds of, 116; mysti- cal, 116; of substance, 119; as absolute idealism, 137; defects of, 138; advantage of, 143; and novelty, 145. Motion, conceptually impossible, 87. Mulford, Prentice, 18 note. Novelty, possibility of, 98 ; monisn i and pluralism and, 145; pro- blem of,147;perceptual,148; and science, 149; and personal expe- rience, 151; and conception, 152; and the infinite, 153; fa- vored by Renouvier’s solution of problem of infinite, 164; problem of unaffected by new 235 INDEX definitions of infinite, 187; and causation, 189; negated by con- ceptual view of causation, 205; arises in perceptual experience of causation, 213. Number-continuum, the, 173. Objection, an, replied to, 109. Occasionalism, 194. ‘ Omega,’ 177; its value, 178. Oneness, pragmatic analysis of, 124;kindsof,12G; concatenated, 129; value of absolute, 136. Ostwald, W., 71 note, 90 note, 150 note. Paradoxes, Zeno’s, 157; Russell’s solution of, 180; criticism of Russell’s solution of, 181. Parmenides, 11, 41. Pascal, 20, 21. Paulsen, F., 15 note, 223. Pearson, 90 note, 203 note, 221. Peirce, C. S., 184 note. Percepts, distinguished from con- cept, 48; complexity of, 49; in- terpenetrate with concepts, 52; Bradley on, 92; consubstantial with concepts, 107. Personal identity, conceptually impossible, 87. Philosophers, attitude of, to dia- lectical difficulties, 91. Philosophy, defined, 4,5; its value, 6; its enemies, 8; first objection to, 9;as man thinking, 15; ‘ posi- tive,’ 16; as sympathetic magic, 17; and science, 21; as residuum of unanswered scientific pro- blems, 23; second objection to, 24; third, 26; as metaphysics, 27. Plato, 7, 11, 35, 36, 54 note, 76, 77. Plotinus, 118. Pluralism, vs. monism, 113; mean- ing of, 114, 140; defects of, 142; advantages of, 142; and novel- ty, 145. Plutarch, 77. Poincare, H., 91 note, 174 note, 184 note. Porphyry, 118. Positivism, 203. Pragmatic Rule, the, 60; examples of application of, 62; used in critique of substance, 121. ‘Principe du nombre,’ 164. ‘Principle of Causality,’ the, 189, 191. Principles, meaning of, 31. Probabilities, how acted on, 225. Protagoras, 34, 35. Pyrrho, 92 note. Pythagoras, 11, 156. Rationalists, contrasted with em- piricists, 35. Reality, 78; conceptual systems distinct realms of, 101. Regis, 197. Relations, multiplicity of, of real things, 89; unreality of appear- ance of, 89; of subject and predi- cate, unintelligible, 70. Renouvier, C., 163; solution of problem of infinite by, 164, 165 note, 166, 172, 184, 186. Resemblance, an illusion, 88. Rickaby, J., 12, 119 note, 192 note. Riehl, A., 205 note. Romanes, J. G., 50 note. Royce, 37, 72 note, 85, 137 note, 141 note, 184 note, 221. 236 INDEX Russell, B., 174, 179, 180, 181, 183, 186 note. Ruyssen, Th., 50 note. ‘ Same,’ meaning of, 103. Santayana, G., 54 note. Sceptics, pyrrhonian, 91. Schiller, F. C. S., 37, 109 note. Schopenhauer, 26; on the origin of the problem of being, 38, 50 note. Science, history of, 20; as special- ized philosophy, 21; and nov- elty, 149. Self-sameness of ideal objects, 102. Sigwart, C., 205 note. Silberstein, S. J., 120 note. Socrates, 37. Spencer, Herbert, 13, 27, 33, 42, 65 note. Spinoza, 36, 42, 120 note, 121, 136, 137 note. Stallo, J. B., 90 note. Stevenson, 39. Stewart, Prof. A. J., 55 note. Stockl, A., 119 note. Stout. G. F., 219 note. Suarez, 12. Substance, monism of, 119; cri- tique of, 121. Sympathetic magic, the primitive philosophy, 17. Taine, H., 59 note. Tannery, Paul, 157 note. Taylor, A. E., 101 note, 223. Thales, 11. Thomson, J. C., 117 note. Torricelli, 20. ‘Transfinite numbers,’ 177. Unity, by concatenation, 129; of purpose, 131; of origin, 132; cash value of, 133; value of, 136 Values, of philosophy, 6; new, brought by concepts, 71. Voltaire, 20, 26. Wallace, W., 57 note, 75 note. Ward, J., 24 note, 219 note. Waterton, S., 184 note. Whewell, W., 19. Wilbois, 91 note. Wolff, C., 14, 31. Zeno, 41, 88, 156, 157, 158, 159, 170, 179, 186 note. @be BiUcrsibe prestf CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A c uuc Ju\ - c - J h Duke University Libraries D00482229 TOANS/FRQMPL .1963 1 . '-Am - 05,135 191.9 J29S